Murderbot, you've grown so much! All the accolades to Kevin R Free, whose majestic #audiobook performance is absolutely perfect. He IS Murderbot, as far as I'm concerned. Can't wait til the next one!

Well I'm going to give an in-person queer book club a try, and this one is the read for February's meeting. I'm always a bit contrary with traditional style book clubs where everyone reads the same book, I don't know why, I just don't want to be told what to read at any specific time? Anyway, this book (told from the perspective of a queer mountain lion) is very weird so far, which is up my alley.
#QueerBooks

I gave this one a good go and read over a quarter of it. I'd heard it was a bit slow to start but had lots of positive reviews. Alas, my mind keeps wandering off while listening so I'm taking that as a sign I should bail. I absolutely loved The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, and I see the comparisons, but these characters are not grabbing me like Evelyn and her people did. I find Cate Kay kind of passive and opaque.

Looking at the art in this book feels more like going to an art gallery than reading a graphic memoir!

#QueerBooks

What's not to love with a closed room murder mystery for Murderbot? I will say reading somewhere before I started this that it's set before Book 5 helped me not be confused about timelines, which I think I would have been otherwise.

I can't believe I only have one Murderbot book left! 😭

A surreal, cerebral, and lush collection. Using an unusual overarching conceit, Kwan‘s poetry debut fully commits, taking readers on a tour of motel‘s rooms, bar, back alleys, fire escape. It also investigates ghosts. The poems explore migration and placelessness, queer love and desire, music, and family. “That summer the knife slid so sweetly / into the navel orange on the chopping board / and our lips were so sticky / we kissed and they bled.”

What a goddamn delight to have a full length Murderbot book and to get to see ART and the Preservation crew again and to see Murderbot grow!! It even admits to having feelings!! The only thing better than one Murderbot is two Murderbots, which this book has! (Murderbot 2.0, love your work)

Incredible #audiobook performance by Kevin R Free!

The best reading view in the world 😍

This visually and narratively stunning work continues the story of Karen Reyes, baby dyke in 1960s Chicago trying to solve the murder of Anya, her upstairs neighbor and Holocaust survivor. She also meets her first gf and finds out a lot about her brother. The intricate art is done solely in ballpoint pen! Queerness as monstrosity and the reclaiming of that are central conceits, but Ferris also interrogates grief, memory, and sibling relationships.

Finished this novella in the bath tonight with chocolate and bubly water!

A revenge fantasy on a terrible man, a lesbian septuagenarian romance, and hilarious Victorian-esque insults about men being fetid and vile? Utter perfection.

#QueerBooks #Romantsy

A lovely contemporary sapphic romance with a not so great cover 🙃. I loved how this played with the celebrity/regular person and second chance romance tropes, which it sort of fits into but kind of doesn't, making it complicated and interesting. There is also career stuff going on for both women (lawyer and actress/director), complex secondary characters (their moms are BFFs!), and realistic hot sex scenes! Amazing #audiobook performance!

Excited to be starting this #audiobook of The Night Circus, which seems to be a favourite for a lot of people. I can't believe I haven't read it yet! Jim Dale performs the audiobook and I didn't realize his voice would remind me of Harry Potter so much!

A mix of body horror and environmental horror with a queer lens. One of those well-done books that was not for me. A series of linked short stories set in a wasteland where the water is killing everyone, the book works best as an allegory of the grotesque and darkness underneath Southern Ontario and humanity in general. For me it lacked strong characterization. CWs: child/baby death, abusive parents/partners, animal death/abuse, sexual assault.

I read 84 books this year, across 21 882 pages, including romance, poetry, science fiction, mystery, fantasy, lit fic, YA, horror, memoir, graphic novels/memoirs, essay collections, and one novel-in-verse (more please!). Almost all queer and trans books! I fell short of my goal of 100, but considering I gave birth to my 2nd kid this year and spent a lot of this year looking after two kids 3 and under, I think I did pretty good! Mostly audiobooks!

The art in this graphic novel is incredible! All done with ballpoint pens!! Look for the inscription on the left to see which 16th century painting it's a recreation of. The 10-year-old narrator and her brother like to go to the art gallery in Chicago and the kid draws this after seeing it.

I was expecting to maybe DNF this romance audiobook, as I've been having bad luck with sapphic romances lately, but I am actually liking it so far. I also think the cover is kinda ugly, so that didn't necessarily endear me to it.

🤞it stays good!

I mostly loved this. My beliefs include a) the British royal family are a bunch of colonizing shits hoarding wealth, b) ACAB, c) military service should not be glorified. It's not that this VERY sexy, funny, and romantic story about a royal bodyguard and a royal personal assistant is about those things, but they are in the background, not exactly condoned but neither are they questioned. Anyway, this couple is great, incredible chemistry!

What a delight! A story within a story, a story about stories, featuring Chih, a nonbinary story collecting cleric; weretigers; a mammoth upon which Chih rides up a mountain; sapphic love and poetry. Great #audiobook narration by Cindy Kay!

I actually think this book is doing what it's trying to do -- an authentic dive into a lesbian new adult feeling stuck and experiencing growing pains with old friends and doing stupid 21-year-old stuff -- pretty well, but I am just not very interested. Ha, maybe I am too old! Plus, I started this thinking it was a Christmas book, when apparently it is an American Thanksgiving book.

Fittingly, I finished this book last night while my baby slept on my chest. What a gift S. Bear Bergman's work is. I will refer back to this guide many times. Topics include transitioning from one activity to another, gender and heteronormativity, talking to kids about difference and diversity, key values to pass down to your kids, food, and replacing the idea of a family tree with a family garden. Practical, honest, vulnerable, compassionate.

These characters are not clicking with me. I find Birdie and Rafi borderline insufferable, actually. I loved the idea of three queer adult siblings gathering at their mom's house for Christmas and fixing their romantic / career lives but I have to care about the characters for it work. Oh well!

Actually made some progress in this gigantic book today while my baby slept. Only ...650 pages to go 😅

Well this was delightful, festive, and very gay. A teenager home for Christmas during the first semester of college -- where he is flunking his theatre classes, even though it's his dream to be an actor -- and applies for a job as a mall elf. The job entails a big competition with a cash prize to promote the mall, and one of Cam's fellow elves is a cute, very chipper guy named Marco. These two! Fun subplots too, called Cam's dad's secret romance.

Is the premise of this tri-holiday rom com totally unrealistic? Yes. Did I love it anyway? Yes. Uzma Jalaluddin is wonderful, as usual, but I was surprised to be just as interested in the other storyline by Marissa Stapley. Lighthearted holiday fun!! Funny jokes too, including an anachronistic nod to the characters of Frozen, even though the novel is set in 2000. Majestically performed by Ulka Simone Mohanty, a fellow Canadian like the authors!

I'm already in the middle of four books, but I have to start this one during the Christmas season right? 🎄❄️☃️🎅

Rosen does a swell job evoking classic 1950s film noir vibes while filling the story with a diverse queer cast and a complicated gay ex-cop P.I. reckoning with the implications of his past career. The themes -- book banning, government censorship, the utter importance of queer people seeing themselves reflected in books -- are beautifully evoked. Highly recommended as a puzzling mystery and a richly imagined 1950s San Francisco historical fiction.

Much deserved book, bath, and beer 🍺 📖🛁

This one started off strong, but kind of fizzled after a while. I loved the outsider and monster-as-protagonist angle and the sapphic ace representation in the human/monster relationship. Something about the plot didn't grab me though and I found my mind wandering. I didn't feel especially emotionally engaged with the characters either, though I liked them in theory. Did others in the #QueerBC have similar experiences or am I an outlier here?

A brutal, brilliant, unsettling masterpiece that upends the typical haunted house novel. The story focuses on Ezri and their two sisters, who grew up in a McMansion in a white suburb of Dallas, where strange and increasingly terrible inexplicable things happened. There's a lot here about trauma, memory, racism/segregation, and parenting. As a parent, I found this book very impactful but simultaneously difficult to read. CW: childhood sexual abuse

"Maybe my mother is God, and that's why nothing I do pleases her. Maybe my mother is God, and that's why even though she never once saved me, I keep praying that this time she will."

Wow, what a beginning that this book is absolutely living up to.

#BlackBooks #QueerBooks #Horror

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 ❤️