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 ❤️

"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!