Volume 3, No. 12: All the Books I've Read So Far for Queer Your Year

Greetings, book and treat people! I usually alternate between free issues and essays for paying subscribers, but since March has five weeks, today I’m doing a special edition for everyone. And it’s another long queer booklist! I promise I’ll be back with my regular wordy book reviews and reflections next week.

Since we’re a quarter of the way through the year (I don’t understand time, either), I thought I’d do a massive list of all the books I’ve read so far for Queer Your Year. According to Storygraph, I’ve completed 29/48 prompts, but I’ve read multiple books for many of those prompts. I’ve had so much fun doing the challenge, and it’s been wonderful to read along with all of you, too. I’ve added so many books to my TBR!

Speaking of Queer Your Year, it’s time for the March raffle!

• This month’s prize is a beautiful deck of TBR cards made by @jesseonyoutube_.

• Anyone who submits a game card and has completed any of the winning prompts will get a prize pack. If you’ve already received a prize pack, you aren’t eligible for another one, but you can still enter the raffle for the monthly prize. Prize packs ship worldwide. Please remember to enter your complete mailing address on the form.

• If you haven’t already downloaded your game card, you can do so here. This is also where you can submit your game card. Further details are here.

• You have until March 31st to submit your game cards.

• And now, the winning prompts! They are: 2, 6, 8, 13, 22, 27, 45, and 46.

Thank you to everyone who bought books from my Trans Books I Love list on Bookshop—and if you haven’t yet, you still can! The commissions I earned totaled less than $10, so I’m going to wait to make a donation. I’m launching a project on Friday that I hope will continue to funnel money to trans justice orgs throughout the year, so stay tuned for that.

The Books

This list includes the 60+ books I’ve read so far for Queer Your Year, as well as a few I’m currently reading (and loving). Usually I only write about books I adore, but today I’ve included a few books that were only okay for me but that I think a lot of you will love. In other words: I’d recommend every book here to someone, and many of them are new favorites! Linked titles will take you to Bookshop. If I’ve written a review, it’s linked in the description. Many of these books work for more than one prompt; where they’re listed is arbitrary.

Happy queer reading, friends!

1. A book in translation from a non-European country

• My Tender Matador by Pedro Lemebel, tr. Katherine Silver: What struck me most about this beautiful little novel, set in Santiago in 1986, is how funny and joyful it is, despite the dire times and constant danger it portrays. It’s about queer pleasure, and the power of queer imagination.

• Solo Dance by Li Kotomi, tr. Arthur Reiji Morris: This is sad, quiet, honest book about a twenty-something Taiwanese lesbian living in Japan and trying to escape her traumatic past. The stark writing style really worked for me.

2. A book of nonfiction by a trans author

• Dream Rooms by River Halen: This is my favorite kind of nonfiction—structurally creative, agile, lots of space for the reader to make connections between ideas. It’s about queerness and transness and bodies, about making art, heartbreak, losing and letting go of family, change and desire and living with violence.

• None of the Above by Travis Alabanza: This brilliant book is a beautiful ode to living in an unfixed state, as well as a smart and scathing condemnation of the systemic injustices that are constantly trying to “fix” people who do not “fit” (especially trans people of color and trans femmes). Alabanza does not stay between the lines, or in the safe places. They have an incredible talent for writing directly and honestly, with a lot of intimacy, about what is most thorny.

• One in Every Crowd by Ivan Coyote: Like all of Coyote’s writing, this book is warm and generous and friendly.

3. A book published before you were born

• Alexis by Marguerite Yourcenar, tr. Walter Kaiser: Oh, this short little novella from 1929, written as a letter from the titular Alexis to his wife, as he tries to explain why he’s finally left her. It’s sad, it’s funny, it’s sharp, it’s singular. I wrote an essay about it here.

• Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid: There is so much going on in this brilliant 150-page book. Annie is a fierce mess who speaks her mind, who knows herself, who wants and longs and struggles. What excited me most (of course) is the queerness.

• At the Bottom of the River by Jamaica Kincaid: This book is sticky and slippery and sweet, it’s water and grass and mountains, green growing things, sky and dirt and root. It’s lush, it’s longing, it’s all the secret places between knowledge and memory, body and spirit, it’s bone old and rushing

4. Intersex author

• XOXY by Kimberly Zieselman: I don’t read that many straightforward autobiographies; I prefer non-linear, genre-bending memoirs. But I enjoyed this one. Zieselman walks us through her childhood, young adulthood, and early years of marriage. She writes with a lot of anger and honesty about discovering that her parents and doctors had kept the fact that she was intersex hidden from her. My favorite parts of the book were the chapters about all of her activism.

5. A classic

• Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin: The tenderness I feel toward this book. Tenderness for its flawed and often horrifying characters. Tenderness for the time it was written in. Homophobia and heteropatriarchy are so insidious and persistent. Isolation is so violent. The burden of having to stay hidden is so violent. This book is a study in where the violence comes from and how it’s internalized. You don’t need me to tell you about Baldwin, but I will.

• Passing by Nella Larson: This is basically a perfect novel, and the queerness is very subtextual, but it’s there, in plain sight, if you’re willing to look. I’m very interested in how queer narratives have been written and coded through time, so this was a fascinating reread.

6. A novel set in a rural place

• We Deserve Monuments by Jas Hammonds: This is a soft YA novel about friendship, first love, messy matrilineal relationships, queer and Black joy. I loved the Georgia setting that permeates the whole book.

• Fire Song by Adam Garnet Jones: This is a bleak and sometimes devastating novel set on a reservation in Northern Ontario. Shane is a queer Anishinaabe teenager grieving his younger sister, who recently died by suicide. It’s not so much a story about healing as it is about Shane realizing that he is, in fact, unfixed, that he doesn’t know what he wants. It’s not about escape. It's about finding the courage to grieve.

• If I Had Two Wings by Randall Kenan: Kenan’s writing is so assured and sharp. These stories are set in a small town in North Carolina, and they’re mostly about the ordinary, which includes the occasional ghost.

8. A Black history book

• Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman: This astonishing world-opening book is easily the best history I have ever read. It’s not so much a book as doorway, a portal, a praxis of history, a continuing story.

10. A work of fiction by a disabled author

• So Lucky by Nicola Griffith: This is a tight, controlled, detailed story about a newly disabled queer woman in the months after her MS diagnosis. Griffith is so good at writing anger, denial, and grief. Mostly anger. The protagonist, Mara, is experiencing a paranoia spiral, expect it’s not really paranoia, because everything she’s afraid of is so real. It’s a striking, unsettling book.

11. A nonfiction book about queer parenting

• Waiting in the Wings by Cherríe Moraga: This is a newly released and updated version of Moraga’s memoir of lesbian motherhood in the 1990s. It’s a collection of journal entries, fragments, and essays. It’s both visceral and philosophical.

13. A book with less than 100 ratings on Goodreads

• I Want What I Want by Geoff Brown: A work of trans fiction from the 1960s. It’s bleak, but it’s also beautifully complex and irreducible.

14. A book set on a continent you don’t live on

• 1,000 Coils of Fear by Olivia Wenzel, tr. Priscilla Layne: This is such a strange and beautiful book. Most of it is structured as a conversation between the narrator, a queer Black East German woman, and herself—her alter ego, a voice inside her head, her brain, her heart, something. It’s an incredible storytelling device and it works brilliantly. I’ll be reviewing it here soon!

• A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske: I asked around on Bookstagram for “sexy vibes with magic” books, and someone recommends this. No notes. A+ sexy vibes with magic.

15. An essay collection

• Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H: This collection of essays about queer and Muslim identity, about finding home and making home, about sacred texts and dating apps and revolutionary love—it broke me right open.

16. An SFF book by an Indigenous author

• VenCo by Cherie Dimaline: A fun, witchy, contemporary fantasy with road trip vibes and a coven of mostly queer and trans characters.

18. Asexual author

• Refusing Compulsory Sexuality by Sherronda J. Brown: I started this at the beginning of the month and I’ve been reading it slowly. I’m really enjoying the analysis and scholarship.

20. A work of graphic nonfiction

• They Called Us Enemy by George Takei: I certainly didn’t enjoy reading this graphic memoir about the years Takei and his family spent imprisoned during World War II. It’s a thoughtful, powerful book, though, and Takei is so good at writing from two perspectives: the child he was, who didn’t understand what was happening, and the adult he is, who does.

• A Pros and Cons List for Strong Feelings by Will Betke-Brunswick: This is a playful and devastating memoir about Betke-Brunswick’s mother’s cancer diagnosis and death while they were in college. They draw all the characters as different kinds of birds and somehow it’s whimsical even though the subject matter is tough. I really love how they capture the everyday-ness of grief. There is an ordinariness to so many of the scenes that is both heartbreaking and comforting. It’s such a gentle and loving book, written with so much heart and also survival humor.

23. South Asian author

• Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion by Bushra Rehman: Not much happens in this book, but it still builds. I love stories like this, because they feel so true to how life feels: the pacing is unpredictable. It’s about a queer Pakistani American teenager coming-of-age in Queens in the 1980s, and all the big and small rebellions that shape her path through the world.

24. A book under 150 pages

• Dyke (geology) by Sabrina Imbler: This is an essay/prose poem about geology and being a dyke. It's about the end of a relationship, and lesbian identity, and finding yourself in and losing yourself with and extracting yourself from another person. It's about queer time and geologic time, volcanoes and their memories, attraction and desire and touch, and the weird sacred connections between dykes and rocks, queerness and nature, queerness in nature.

• Of Love and Other Encounters by Johana Gavez: Flash fiction about sapphic relationships.

• Wound from the Mouth of a Wound by torrin a. greathouse: I don’t know how to write about this astonishing book of poetry about bodies. greathouse writes about her trans, disabled body with fire and precision and rage and tenderness. She writes about what is physical: spines, bones, tongues; she writes about where her womanhood lives, where her disability lives, where her transness lives. She writes storms of violence across bodies, she writes the sacred secrets of resistance into bodies, she writes the trans disabled body as ode, as longing, as celebration, as loss.

• Not Here by Hieu Minh Nguyen: I am not good at reviewing poetry, and I read this a few months ago, but it’s gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous.

26. A book recommended to you by a queer friend or family member

• What About the Rest of Your Life by sung: I just finished this during the Trans Rights Readathon, and I’m still processing it. It’s a memoir told from the inside. It’s not a recovery narrative or a story about healing; it’s a messy book about living through and within grief, loss, trauma.

• Harlem Shadows by Claude McKay: These soft and lovely poems are about many, many things: being homesick for Jamaica, everyday Black life in Harlem, waiters and dancers and sex workers, winter, flowers, moments shared with a lover, protest, racism in America, state violence. They are by turns playful and elegiac. I wrote more about them in this essay about what we owe the dead.

27. A retelling

• My Dear Henry by Kalynn Bayron: Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde reimagined as a queer love story. I loved the atmosphere—so much fog, so many shadows, so many eerie labs and crumbling houses! The plot felt forced to me, but I still enjoyed it.

• Northranger by Rey Terciero & Bre Indigo: This is a contemporary queer retelling of Northanger Abbey set on a ranch in Texas! It moved a little too fast for me, but I loved the art and the horror-movie vibes.

30. A middle grade book featuring a queer family

• Snapdragon by Kat Leyh: Why has it taken me so long to read this tough and tender book about witches and queer lineage and badass grandmas and creature joy? I love everything about it.

31. Caribbean author

• The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts by Soraya Palmer: This is an interesting family saga about two Jamaican Trinidadian sisters and their family ghosts. There’s a lot of Caribbean folklore, and the narration moves between the sisters and their parents and various supernatural beings.

• Crossfire by Staceyann Chin: This kind of poetry just does not work for me, but that doesn’t mean it won’t work for you! Chin’s writing is vibrant and alive and accessible; you can feel the spoken-word energy coming off the page.

32. A book of nature or science writing

• How Far the Light Reaches by Sabrina Imbler: I hope you know how much I love this book by now. If you’re new, you can read my love letter to it here.

33. Weird Queer!

• Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval, tr. Marjam Idriss: Do you like books where the house comes alive? Then you will probably like this novel about Jo, who moves to the UK for grad school and ends up in living in a house full of mushrooms (??) with a roommate she can’t figure out. It’s weird and lush.

• Uranians by Theodore McCoombs: This is a wonderful collection of strange, eerie speculative stories. And then there’s a novella about a bunch of queer artists and scientists on a spaceship hurtling away from earth, and it’s a model of queer anti-utopia that I will hold in my body forever.

35. A book set in space

• Space Story by Fiona Ostby: A snapshot of a graphic novel about a couple separated by chance—one on Earth and one on a space station. It felt like a sketch of a story to me, but if you like quick stories told in bold strokes, check it out!

• Ocean's Echo by Everina Maxwell: A slow-burn romance, a great character study, a fun space mystery, and I love the way Maxwell messes with tropes about telepathy. Sharing your thoughts with your lover sounds like a nightmare! It is, in fact, a nightmare!

37. A work of genre fiction by a trans or nonbinary author

• The Bruising of Qilwa by Naseem Jamnia: This soft little fantasy novella broke me right open. It’s mostly about the ordinary life of a refugee, a person living in a hostile and unfamiliar world, a person who loves their family, who loves their work, who longs for justice, whose back aches, who is pouring themself into a place they want to make into a home. It's about community care and what happens when it fails. And it's about questions that don't have simple answers.

• In the Watchful City by S. Qiouyi Lu: Look, I did not understand this book. It was just too much for my slowly-coming-back-online SFF brain. But I still enjoyed losing myself in the world and its stories. If you like sci-fi/fantasy blends and books about storytelling, I recommend it.

• Feed Them Silence by Lee Mandelo: Oh, this book is sad. Everything about it is just so sad. I felt heavy while I was reading it, weighted down. It’s about a scientist who’s figured out how to link her brain to a wolf’s. It’s about connection and community and climate change and aloneness. It’s so sad. It’s very beautiful. I loved it, and I wept.

• Even Though I Knew the End by C.L. Polk: Another SFF bust for me! This is a noir mystery novella set in 1930s Chicago. It is very religious! It is all about demons and angels! I do not care much about those things. If you do enjoy religious magic and/or detective stories, I’m sure you’ll have fun with this. I certainly had fun with the sapphic romance.

• The Two Doctors Górski by Isaac Fellman: This one didn’t quite come together for me, but I love Fellman’s writing. He is very good at writing academic institutions into life, with all their hypocrisy and violence and idiosyncrasies.

39. A Lambda Award finalist or winner

• Brickmakers by Selva Almada, tr. Annie McDermott: This novel begins with two young men dying on the grounds of an amusement park, and moves back in time, through their memories, and through the POVs of their families, to unravel what lead to their deaths. What’s most remarkable is the pacing— it’s all build-up, all backstory. It’s not about the event that causes one of them to stab the other. It’s about the years and years of toxic masculinity they’re both endured and internalized. It’s about domestic violence, and casual homophobia, and misogyny, and how those things live in bodies, are passed on. It’s so subtle and smart, and while it’s grim and full of queer suffering, I did not find it bleak.

40. African author

• Hullo, Bu-Bye, Koko, Come In by Koleka Putuma: A book of poetry about archival knowledge, generational knowledge, music, and Black queer activist traditions. I love the way Putuma uses footnotes and quotes. (This is hard to get in the U.S. I bought it on Amazon and I won’t judge you if you do, too, but I can’t make myself link there.)

41. A work of historical fiction set before 1950

• The New Life by Tom Crewe: This historical novel does not feel historical; it feels like a guide for how to to be an activist right now.

• The Sleeping Car Porter by Suzette Mayr: Claustrophobic, haunting, tense, hallucinatory, beautiful.

42. A debut poetry collection 

• I Am the Most Dangerous Thing by Candace Williams: Beautiful, rageful, fiery, hopeful pomes about Blackness, writing, violence, history. The whiteout poems are especially haunting.

• Brother Sleep by Aldo Amparán: I can’t stop thinking about these poems—they’re about the grief of losing a brother, and living on a border, and displacement, and translation, and queer masculinity, and dreams. The language is so startling.

43. Fluff!

• The Gentleman's Book of Vices by Jess Everlee: An entertaining gay Victorian romance starring writers of porn! I love romance starring pornographers, especially Victorian pornographers, my god were they having fun. This book made me laugh out loud and it also features a charming, cozy, come-as-you-are queer bar.

44. A book published by Arsenal Pulp Press

• How Poetry Saved My Life by Amber Dawn:

• Any Other City by Hazel Jane Plante: I’m only a little way into this fictional memoir about a trans musician, but I already love it, which is not a surprise, since Hazel Jane Plante is a magician of story.

• More Sure by A. Light Zachary: I’m almost done with this gorgeous poetry collection about gender and family and language, about carving out space for yourself and rejecting binaries. It’s funny, it’s tender, it’s coy, it’s full of queer joy and trans complexity.

47. Nonbinary protagonist 

• Endpapers by Jennifer Savran Kelly: I love the openness of this book. It’s about someone who isn’t sure, who’s stuck, who feels trapped and stagnant and a little bit wrong—in her life, her gender, her art, her relationship. She wrestles with all this stuck-ness but doesn’t resolve it perfectly.

• Mimosa by Archie Bongiovanni: This is the most visceral depiction of what it’s like being queer in your thirties that I’ve read recently.

• Ander & Santi Were Here by Jonny Garza Villa: The first third of this novel felt slow to me, but oh, wow, it was worth it. It’s a beautiful love story between a nonbinary Mexican American artist taking a gap year before college and an undocumented Mexican boy who works at their family’s taqueria. It’s also a love letter to San Antonio. I adored the art, and Ander’s family, and all the softness, and the way it ended.

48. A book you’ve been longing to reread

• A Minor Chorus by Billy-Ray Belcourt: This beautiful book hit me differently on the reread. One thing that came through louder for me this time is its collectivity. The narrator remains unnamed, which matters—so much else is named. At first it felt like he was trying to disappear into the stories of others. But it’s not disappearing at all that he’s doing—I think it’s more that he is coming into, weaving through, tangling in, jaggedly joining.

• How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee: I’ve been slowly rereading these essays since January, and they are even wiser and more generous than when I read them for the first time years ago.

You’ve made it to the bottom of another mega newsletter! Here’s a little beauty to send you on your way: Yes, it’s more bulbs from the bulb show a few weeks ago. Even I, lover of winter, am excited about all the green growing things that are coming.

Catch you next week, bookish friends! Next week’s essay will either be about Rebecca as a queer tragedy, or my relationship to Jewishness and sacred texts (just in time for Passover). Either way, if you want to read it, you can subscribe here.