02F4C: The True Content Gourmet

Story Time: When we were living in the US, we caught the TV special Happy Birthday, Garfield!, which was in honor of his 10th birthday. For some reason, we also recorded this on VHS and brought that tape back to the Philippines with us. Part of the show was this comic translated into an animated sequence:

For some reason, I memorized the panel about a true gourmet, and I used to quote it here and there. This backfired on me one day when I refused to eat something I found strange, and my grandmother challenged, "I thought you were a true gourmet?" In hindsight, this was rather ridiculous since I never claimed to be Garfield or was attributing the statement to me, her calling me Garfield? In any case, I tried whatever it was (pretty sure it was a vegetable), and I enjoyed it. At that point, I sort of committed to trying things at least once.

As part of my effort to read shallower Christmas-themed gay romances to help with my overall book count for the year, I just finished reading the double feature Up to Snow Good (Amazon affiliate link) - which consists of What Happens at Christmas (Amazon affiliate link) and Snowed In with Benefits (Amazon affiliate link). I was expecting some silly Christmas-themed hijinks. I was not prepared for content warnings about spanking being part of both stories. And I'm not against kinks in my shallow queer fiction - but the quality of the writing was pretty lacking. We're talking only a few steps up a newbie submission to one of those erotica websites. It's a good thing I never pay more than $2 for these things.

I rarely DNF books - Did Not Finish, for those not in quasi-competitive reading circles, or for you, more normal racing enthusiasts. Even when the book is pretty bad, I do my best to power through and still try to get to the end. I don't know if this is an offshoot of the whole "true gourmet" mindset that has me trying to get through the writing of any author at least once. And after that...I'm free not to read any more books by the same writer in the future. And I think we largely do the same for TV shows and movies. When things do get quite bad, though, I avoid subjecting Tobie to the rest of the bad content when possible.

I'm now reading Recipe for Trouble (Amazon affiliate link), which is proving to be a much better book. It's quite light on the Christmas elements, but I do appreciate a good grumpy-sunshine romance here and there. I hope you're all enjoying whatever you're reading or watching around this time.