I figured I'm not going to make my reading goal of 100 books this year anyway, so I might as well start this absolutely enormous fantasy tome that I've owned for 3 years and have heard such good things about.

Well that's a definitive nope on this book by a white author falsely claiming Indigenous heritage!

https://nypost.com/2024/10/21/us-news/author-colby-wilkens-says-shes-native-amer...

Oh dear, this American author has named a Scottish character Fanny, obviously not realizing that fanny is like vulgar slang for vagina there! Oops...I am reading an ARC, maybe it's fixed in the final book.

Otherwise I am enjoying these two enemies / rival Indigenous authors and soon to be lovers and their spooky writing retreat 👻

More satire and less horror than I expected, this was painfully real in its portrayal of immature tech bro masculinity and so-called allies who can't be bothered to get something as simple as someone's pronouns right. It had me cringing. I loved Sammie as a character and the art style was fun! #TransBooks #QueerBooks #HorrorBooks

I loved Jen Silverman's debut novel, so I was excited to check out their second, but this was underwhelming. Objectively it's a very well done piece of fiction, dual father/daughter timelines in 1968 and 2018, both of them apolitical people who fall for revolutionaries. The dialogue is sharp, the themes interesting, but I found the characters bland and didn't care what happened to them or understand why their more charismatic partners liked them.

Kai Cheng Thom's collection of essays displays her trademark combination of searing intellect and critical thinking with deep empathy and compassion. I admire her work so much! She discusses and unpacks a lot of issues inside leftist and queer social justice communities, from #MeToo, suicide, activists' tendency to demand perfection and correct rhetoric over learning and inclusion, white queers asking for her "trans ethnic story," and more. ?

Halloween season TBR! 🎃👻🏚

I'm thinking of starting Boys Weekend first, since it's a graphic novel and from the library

The middle book is Withered, by A.G.A. Wilmot, a queer psychological horror about a haunted house and small town.

On the lighter side, If I Stopped Haunting You by Colby Wilkens is an enemies to lovers story set in a spooky Scottish castle with bi+ Indigenous characters!

#Horror #QueerHorror #Romantsy

My latest queer book quiz is up on Autostraddle:
https://www.autostraddle.com/quiz-what-recent-queer-horror-book-should-you-read-...

Take it to get a #QueerHorror recommendation for Halloween season!

Authors featured:

Elliott Gish
Molly Knox Ostertag
Kierstin White
Kemi Ashing-Giwa
Lindsay King Miller
k-ming chang
Alison Rumfitt
Cassandra Khaw

#QueerBooks #HorrorBooks

If you take it, let me know what book you got!

Jen Silverman has such a good ear for dialogue and is so good at crafting nuanced characters!

Also, kudos to the audiobook performer who is doing a great job reading French characters speaking English!

Objectively the writing in this spooky YA book is unique and very well done, so I'm not sure why it's not grabbing me. Sometimes the perspective of YA is just not my thing, which is fine, it's not written for me anyway! I'll be passing this on to my library's teen group, hopefully a queer/trans teen will appreciate it better than me!

I've never read a book so visceral and heartbreaking while simultaneously so life-affirming and full of love. This is a collection of comics the author made the two years following the death of her partner. It does much more than nearly all the other comics I've read and does it so differently, it almost doesn't feel like a comic. But, of course, it is. The formal experimentation and abstract art pair perfectly with Leavitt's brutally honest words

Okay, WOW and WTF? Gailey does such a great job of thwarting the reader's expectations for haunted house stories and serial killer true crime narratives in this genuinely creepy book. That ending! Very effective use of an unreliable narrator and slow burn tension. Vera is a fascinating character with equally fucked-up (but very different) relationships with her mom, dad, and her childhood home itself. Superb #audiobook performance by Xe Sands!

"Honestly I kind of thought you'd be back. Probably after a year. If I could just keep it together and the house was clean and the dog alive."

The illogical way your brain works when you're grieving ?

"After her [partner of 22 years]'s death, I continued living, which surprised me." ?

This was a really wonderful upper middle grade or lower YA graphic novel about a 12-year-old who skips grade 8 and starts high school a year early. She's pretty lost until she meets Libby in English class, whom she sloooowly realizes she has a crush on. The great humour and the tenderly realized sister/sister relationship were my favourite parts. This book perfectly captures the agonizing ordeal of having a first (queer) crush in tweendom.

Okay, how reliable a narrator is Vera??? I am suspicious. Also it's remarkable how her perspective -- having loved her father, a serial killer -- is so well done that it's hard to remember that he's a monster? That you can't help but feel like he can't be that bad? Or is Vera somehow a murderer too? 😨

A delightful sapphic Regency romance! Loretta is a perfect society lady hiding anything authentic about herself (her intellect and interest in books), who is taken by the sister of the Duke courting her. Charlotte--who already knows she's gay, unlike Loretta--is a bit of a ruffian and a secret painter. I loved the glimpses of a secret queer underground! I wanted a little more depth in the secondary characters & their relationships with the MCs.

It's spooky season!!! 👻🎃🏚

One chapter in and I am hooked by this scary story of a young woman going back to her childhood home that her serial killer father built. Xe Sands is such a good #audiobook performer!

This ode to lesbian pulp novels, starring a contemporary lightly cancelled lesbian writer in LA, is successful at what it's trying to do: a character study of a messy, fucked-up dyke with "controversial opinions" aka rampant biphobia etc experiencing a steep downward spiral while trying to stay sober and find love. I am just not enjoying it. I can't tolerate the protagonist‘s "opinions" even if they're not condoned. Also, not my style of humour.

Beautifully written, honest, and gritty in a way that never felt performative or indulgent or trauma porn-y, this collection of linked short stories offers snippets of a girl then young woman's life from her family's immigration to Canada from Congo as a kid to her mid-20s. I loved how the stories spotlighted her complicated friendships with women. Content warnings for suicide, sexual assault, drugs, drinking. Oh Loli, I hope you are okay now ❤️

"How do I pretend, ... that you are not my favourite person in the world?" ?

Queers of the past are my heroes!

Obviously loved this reread. What a life-sustaining book. I really ought to get myself volume two!

"Listen, whatever it is you try
to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you
like the dreams of your body"

From "Humpbacks"

A great accessible introduction to the concepts of nonbinary gender identities and the gender binary. The inclusions of Vaid-Menon's lived experiences are a nice balance with the analysis and theory. As a pocket guide, this is necessarily simplified and cursory, but I think it does an admirable job addressing a lot. The structure of answering common misconceptions and criticisms -- from the author's social media comments -- worked really well!

A unique science fiction debut that really picked up in the second half. Two timelines: a past where teen Asuka is competing in an elite school to earn a spot on a mission to reestablish humanity on "planet x" in the wake of climate change and world wars. The present is Asuka and colleagues in space, dealing with the aftermath of an explosion that killed the captain, leaving them with a locked-room mystery to solve. NB + sapphic characters!

Well I know this isn't the erotica for me when I find the introduction and context of this book fascinating but wasn't into the actual stories. Published in the 80s during the anti-porn feminist wars, this book of well-written lesbian BDSM stories was controversial and popular. It became a cult classic, especially in Canada as Customs kept seizing it at the border when Vancouver's queer bookstore ordered it. Not for me, but definitely for others!

"Some people cannot be trusted with a helpless body. You know who you are. Some people don't choose to take responsibility for the pain they inflict... Some people think it's kinder to ignore a need they don't understand, to starve someone in the name of decency or equality or love...I don't believe in God..But if you'd feel safer spending a night with one of them than you would with me or some other macho slut, I'll remember you in my prayers."

A great poetry collection, very much on brand with the conflicted title. Wonderful word play throughout. How are humans amazing and resilient but also responsible for atrocities like nuclear bombings and the practice of Korean "comfort women" ie forced prostitution by the Japanese army?

"deserve / deserve / what a sad little word"

"Every day of my life has been something / other than my last"

"If not even my memories love me enough to stay"

Wow wow wow what a journey. I loved July's short story collection and was underwhelmed by her first novel, so I wasn't sure what to expect from this one, but it really resonated with me, especially as a feminist bisexual mom. There were a lot of insights that blew me away. I loved the protagonist‘s relationship with her best friend, the subversion of the road trip story, the look at complicated birth trauma, and the sheer weirdness of it all.

"deserve deserve / what a sad little word"

"Every day of my life has been something othe than my last"

"If not even my memories love me enough to stay"

This poetry collection is so good! #QueerBooks

"She unpacked the revelation like a souvenir from her suitcase."

Great first line!

#QueerBooks

"But thoughts don't work like that. You don't pick them like pears from a tree, they just fall on your head."

"No reason was turning out to be a major theme in life. Generally speaking, when real pain was involved, there was no reason, no one to hold accountable, no apology. Pain just was. It radiated with no narrative and no end."

"Motherfucker... I was referring to life itself."

"We only felt right when we were saving a life together, fixing a flat tire by the side of the highway. We only became us against insurmountable odds. The rest of the time we respectfully forgave each other for utterly failing to be what we felt we deserved. And then some of the time we were fucking furious about this and it seemed impossible to continue."

Ooof

Okay, I'm 50% in and while I still love this character / Miranda July's voice, I am a little sick of Davey. I know a lot of littens have read this. Does he continue to dominate the novel? Or does she move on to something more interesting?

"All my life
I have been restless--
I have felt there is something
more wonderful than gloss--
than wholeness--
than staying at home.
I have not been sure what it is."

"but now and again there's a moment
when the heart cries aloud:
yes, I am willing to be
that wild darkness,
that long, blue body of light."

From "Whelks"

I love a story like this that rests on the shoulders of everyday people but feels part of a grand history. It was fascinating to learn about the homophobic purge that fuels Finn‘s ejection from his 1960s gov't job. (Finn, heterosexual, gets caught in the crossfire, as an alcoholic who chose a gay cruising bar to drink in anonymity.) The story focuses on the life he has cobbled together on Vancouver Island. A melancholy fellow I enjoyed following!

I loved the idea of this romance: sapphic women and nonbinary person! Polyamory! Fancy cocktails! But I am finding the characters pretty bland. Plus, I am potty training my toddler and I accidentally put my copy of the book down on the beach in some of her pee 🙃

This was a super cute graphic novel for tweens set at a theatre summer camp! (Calling all theatre nerds!) Ash is excited about their last summer as a camper and wants it to be perfect but they're nervous about telling their BFF that they have a crush on her. Then, everything seems to be getting in the way of Ash and Ivy spending time together. Great queer representation (nonbinary and bi for Ash and Ivy). Recommended for fans of Raina Telgemeier!

"Without a child I could dance across the sexism of my era, whereas becoming a mother shoved my face right down into it, a latent bias internalized by both of us suddenly lept forth in parenthood. It was now obvious that Harris was openly rewarded for each thing he did while I was quietly shamed for the same things. There was no way to fight back against this, no one to point a finger at, because it came from everywhere." (cont'd in comments)
??

This YA graphic novel was so good: story, characters, concept, and art. Magdalena "Mags" Herrerra is only a senior in high school, but she's basically functioning as an adult (taking care of her disabled abuela, working a part time job), with a paranormal horror twist: there's a bloodthirsty monster living in her basement, tied to her life, that she has to feed from her hand everyday. The art is amazing, especially the strategic use of colour.

"I am forever wanting to know what it feels like to be other people. What were we all doing? What the hell was going on here on earth?"

"False modesty is one of those things it's hard to go easy on, like squirting whipped cream from a can."

I am four minutes into this #audiobook and I love it already.

Well this was a delightful old-fashioned pirate adventure story, set in the 12th century Indian Ocean Islamic world and starring a badass woman Nakhuda (ship captain) and mom. I loved the supporting characters (two are queer), the "let's get the gang back together for one last hooray" vibe, the villain(s) (is Raksh a villain??), how thirsty for pretty men Amina is, and the rich world-building -- historical and fantasy. Excellent as an #audiobook!

Wow, this is so good! Ostertag's art depicting the same two people at different ages and gender expressions is so well done. And I can't wait to find out what this dark secret is!!

There is some useful information in here, but it is certainly not a book meant to be read over a three-week loan period from the library. About 40 pages in, I feel like the "real" content has yet to start and it's still introducing itself. The organization is terrible. I think it might be more useful as an owned book to refer to and read very slowly, but I don't know if I actually like it enough to buy it, especially in hard cover. ?‍♀️

Not as intellectually rigorous as I wanted. I was expecting sharp analysis and insights, and I got a lot of plot summary and opinions without evidence. The chapters focusing on the music and Dirty Dancing as an abortion movie were the best. I enjoyed her ranking of the soundtrack songs, and agreed with a lot of what she said (Otis Redding's Love Man and Solomon Burke's Cry to Me should have been on the album, Hungry Eyes has predatory lyrics).

"Are not all mothers capable of being monsters when it comes to their children?"

"I am murderous and despondent" says Amina. I'm going to start using this when someone asks how I am and I'm in a bad mood ?

BASEBALL, QUEER HISTORY, AND GAY LOVE!! What more could you want? This was a lovely historical romance set in 1960s NYC. Cat Sebastian somehow manages to address and include the time period's intense homophobia but keep the book soothing and sweet. I am BEGGING Cat Sebastian to give this kind of care and attention to some mid-century queer women (*cough the women's pro baseball league *cough) Beautifully performed by Joel Leslie in #audiobook!

I'm not surprised that I've only read 12 of the NYT's best 100 books of the 21st century, and that a few more of them I DNFed. There were plenty of titles there I have deliberately not picked up. I think the diversity of this list would have been improved by only including one book per author.

The only ones here I'd include in my personal list of the best books of the 21st century would be The Fifth Season, Detransition, Baby, and Fun Home.

I can absolutely see how this is charming for other people, but it is not for me.

Not for me, but well written and interesting. Content warnings for self-harm, suicide, and depression.