Volume 3, No. 27: My Favorite Books of the Year So Far

Just 50 of my favorites!

Greetings, book and treat people! It’s July, a month I hate, but I’m on vacation with my family and my beloved ocean this week, so I have no complaints at all, only love, love, love.

I closed out the June Books for Trans Rights Fundraiser—thanks so much to everyone who donated! Donations totaled $515 and shipping cost $35, so I donated a total of $480, split between three organizations: the Central Florida Emergency Trans Care Fund, the Transinclusive Group, and the Trans Justice Funding Project (I haven’t received an email receipt from them yet).

So far this year we’ve raised $1,370 for trans justice orgs! I’ll do another fundraiser in the fall. In other housekeeping news: the Queer Your Year July raffle prize is a book bundle from Arsenal Pulp Press! I know! It’s amazing! Check out the details here.

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The Books

We’re halfway through the year, so it’s time for my annual Best of the Year So Far List. I don’t believe in ranking and picking favorites; it just stresses me out. To make this, I went through my 2023 reading spreadsheet from beginning to end. When seeing a title made my heart beat faster, I added the book to the list. Of course I love some of these more than others. But who cares? I love them all.

Titles will take you to Bookshop. Linked text in the descriptions will take you to my review. Books marked with a star are ones I loved on audio. The numbers in parentheses are the Queer Your Year prompts the books might fit (some depend on where you live and how old you are). Let’s go!

Books of My Life

• Any Other City by Hazel Jane Plante: A queer spell of loss and friendship. A trans incarnation of love and rage and healing. A human song of going on, going through, looping around, stilling, remembering, time traveling, falling down, getting up, living, living, living. (17, 44)

• Bellies by Nicola Dinan: Messy queer perfection. It isn’t a romance. It’s not exactly about friendship, and it’s not exactly about found family, although it does encompass both. Most truly, most beautifully, it’s a queer love story about shared history. (14)

• Cereus Blooms at Night by Shani Mootoo: I did my best to review this, but mostly I can only think about it in metaphor. Queerness as an explosion of flowers, their hot heady scents, overpowering, decadent. Queerness as rot, as muck, as decay, as the thing that worms do, devour and transform, as dirt, dirt, dirt, sticky and messy and endlessly permeable. It is an incredible feat of a novel. (7, 31)

• How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee: I reread this in one intense and beautiful weekend. It’s my favorite book of nonfiction. I cannot yet put its impact on me into words. (15, 39)

20th Century Queer Lit

• Harlem Shadows by Claude McKay: Gorgeous poems about 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. (3, 24)

• Alexis by Marguerite Yourcenar, tr. Walter Kaiser: This novel complicates and ultimately rejects the trajectory of progress, the idea that once upon a time queer people suffered, and their suffering was the whole of them. (3, 24)

• Olivia by Dorothy Strachey: A slim novel about sixteen-year-old Olivia, who arrives at a finishing school in France and immediately falls into intense lust/love/infatuation with her teacher. It captures teenage sapphic desire so brilliantly. (3, 24)

• Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid: There is so much going on in this brilliant 150-page book: identity formation, grief, queer self-discovery, the ways that culture, geography, and family shape (and sometimes warp) a person’s understanding of the world. Annie is a fierce mess who speaks her mind, who knows herself, who wants and longs and struggles. (31, 38)

• Zami by Audre Lorde: So much of this memoir is Lorde, moving around in various cities as a young Black lesbian trying to figure out who she is and what she wants. This is what I loved the most. She is an icon, yes, and she left behind an incredible body of work. She is a beloved queer Black ancestor and also she was just a human doing all the small human things. It was humbling and joyful to glimpse a little bit of her floundering twenty-something self. (5, 8, 38)

Constant Transformation

• Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg by Emily Rapp Black: I love nonfiction that feels like a messy pile of questions, arranged in a way that’s new and expansive, and that’s what this is—impossible questions, beautifully wondered. It’s about disability and motherhood and grief and art. Black writes about being an amputee, losing her son to a rare disease when he was very young, and her relationship with Frida Kahlo’s work. It’s some of the best writing about womanhood, bodies, disability, stories, and parenthood that I’ve ever encountered.

• Snapdragon by Kat Leyh: Intergenerational queer families! Queer grandmas! Weird witchery in the woods! Queer teenage friendship! 1000 stars for this gorgeous graphic novel. (30)

• Boulder by Eva Baltasar, tr. Julia Sanches: What a surreal book. The writing is exquisite. It’s also chilling. It’s a horror story about heteronormativity, about the spiral of agony that ensues when a woman goes along with her partner's dreams because she can't or won’t articulate what she wants. I don’t know what to make of it but I couldn’t look away. (24)

• *Chlorine by Jade Song: Would you rather be a mermaid than a girl? Would you build yourself new out of chlorine and salt, out of longing and loss, if you could? Would you turn your body into violence, rather than bear the violence done to it? Would you turn your queerness into a language of water and motion, into something dangerous and old, if queerness in its human shape hurt too much? (33)

Queer Friendship: Hard & Healing

• *Small Joys by Elvin James Mensah: This is a funny, kindhearted, joyful, and sometimes devastating novel about queer friendship. Also: so much wholesome birding content! So many silly jokes! A thoughtful exploration of mental health. Therapy! (14)

• Mimosa by Archie Bongiovanni: This is one of the truest and most painfully (and sometimes joyfully!) visceral books I’ve ever read about being queer in your thirties. (47)

• *When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb: This very Jewish queer friendship love story about an angel and a demon, Uriel and Little Ash, is a blessing of a book. (34, 37, 41, 47)

Form Reinvented

• *Pageboy by Elliot Page: This one surprised me. By refusing to write a linear trans narrative, Page refuses to bifurcate himself. He refuses to cut himself in two. The whole book is a trans memoir; his whole life is a trans life. There is a lot of change and growth and transformation, but there is no “before and after”. There is just ongoingness. (2, 46)

• Inciting Joy by Ross Gay: I could review this book by saying that I cried through most of it, and that, at the same time, my heart fell full to bursting with how much deliciousness and joy exists in the world and in my life. That’s it, I could end it there. (Spoiler: I did not end it there.)

• *O Beautiful by Jung Yun: This is a beautiful, haunting book about a biracial Asian woman who returns home to North Dakota to write a magazine feature about how the oil boom has transformed a formerly small town. It’s deceptively simple, and brilliant, how Yun tells this story—so many stories, really, about misogyny and race and power and homecoming and womanhood—through the lens of a woman trying, desperately, to tell a story.

• Shubeik Lubeik by Deena Mohamed: What a marvel of a graphic novel. In Mohamed’s version of the world, wishes are commodified. They’re mined, refined, and sold—and, like everything under capitalism, the wish market is rife with exploitation, corruption, and greed. The story follows three very different Egyptians, who’ve each procured a first-class wish (powerful, expensive, heavily regulated), and have to decide how to use it. It’s a story about ordinary, complicit people wrestling with hard decisions in this broken world of ours. (1, 14, 21, 45)

• 1,000 Coils of Fear by Oliva Wenzel, tr. Priscilla Layne: Most of this book 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 not clear. I don’t think it matters. Is she actually having a conversation? Or is this novel supposed to be strange, surreal? It’s an incredible storytelling device and it works brilliantly. (33, 40)

Infinite Queer Pasts

• *The New Life by Tom Crewe: At heart, this is a book about activism. It’s about living in a state that actively wants you to disappear or die, and the tension between working for a better future and trying to live a life you can stand in the moment. (41)

• Lucky Red by Claudia Cravens: A queer Western that’s funny and sexy and surprising. It’s deeply rooted in a different time and place, but it’s about enduring human messes: who and how we love, and how the loving changes us. (41)

• 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. (1)

• The Sleeping Car Porter by Suzette Mayr: This novel is set in 1929, and takes place mostly on a train hurtling across Canada. It’s beautiful and painful, a little bit whimsical and a lot terrifying, a weird and brilliant blend of hyperrealism and hallucinatory surrealism. (41)

• *We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian: My favorite Cat Sebastian to date. I’m not convinced she didn’t write it specifically for me. Coworkers at a newsroom who fall in love over the course of a year. Angst! Domestic tenderness! Perfect pacing!

Queer & Trans Futurity

• Sterling Karat Gold by Isabel Waidner: This book is a counter-reality, a magical conjuring of expansive futures. It’s not logical, it’s not linear, it’s not ordered. It’s a wildly fun and spacious queer universe. It’s about queer and trans abundance. It’s about the world-expanding possibilities of queer friendship. It’s about mundane transformations—the perfect outfit, great set design, a beautiful football game—and the sacredness of those small, beautiful moments, especially in a world intent on policing and destroying queer and trans joy. (14, 24, 33, 37, 47)

• Future Feeling by Joss Lake: What a weird and beautiful book. It’s inventive and joyful, full of illogical absurdities. It’s also serious and smart and cuts right to the heart of so many truths about queer and trans lives. I love the way Lake just delves into mystery—how odd, how delightful, how hard it all is, sex and friendship and gender and interacting with other humans! (33, 37)

• The Future is Disabled by Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha: This book is a retangling. It made me think about so many things in complicated and often uncomfortable ways: grief, friendship, different kinds of communities, mutual aid, interdependence, art, home, joy. Part of what makes Piepzna-Samarasinha's work so powerful is their worldview: disability is at the center of everything they write and do and feel. It’s not just a framework for liberation. It’s in the way they cook, process emotion, make art, grieve, experience pleasure, talk, laugh, move, travel, love, visit with friends, read, think. (23, 44)

• Uranians by Theodore McCombs: Four fantastic speculative stories and one perfect novella, which is a story about queer possibility. An incandescent opera of queer liberation, a philosophy of queerness as infinite shapeshifting travel, a thorny ode to world-building. (33, 35)

Intensely Everyday Books

• *The Bruising of Qilwa by Naseem Jamnia: Oh, this soft little fantasy novella broke me right open. It's set in a Persian-inspired world, an island nation newly independent, and home to a wave of refugees fleeing genocide. Mostly it's a story 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. (37, 47)

• The Dreaming by Andre Bagoo: This is a lovely collection of stories about (mostly) gay men in Trinidad, living their lives. It’s one of my favorite kinds of queer fiction: stories about ordinary life. (31)

• The Call-Out by Cat Fitzpatrick: How do we apologize? How do address conflict in a carceral state? How do we build the kind of world we want to live in, when the actual world we live in is so hard, so binary, so ruthless? What happens when we realize that our queerness will not save us? (22, 39)

• *Pomegranate by Helen Elaine Lee: A beautiful character study about a Black queer woman fighting for her place in the world, determined to choose herself, over and over again, despite the endless racist systems and intersecting oppressions trying to crush her, demean her, make her smaller.

• *Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko: This book snuck up on me. It’s about a queer Aboriginal woman who returns home to New South Wales for a short family visit that turns into a long family visit. So much happens, but none of it is dramatic—it’s all big and quiet and real. (6, 14)

• Fire Song by Adam Garnet Jones: A bleak and sometimes devastating novel set on a reservation in Northern Ontario. It’s not so much a story about healing as it is about admitting that things are not okay. (6)

World-Remaking Nonfiction

• Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman: This astonishing world-opening book is easily the best history I have ever read. (8)

• None of the Above by Travis Alabanza: A beautiful ode to living in an unfixed state; a smart and scathing condemnation of the systemic injustices that are constantly trying to “fix” (so many layers of meaning here) people who do not “fit” (especially trans people of color and trans femmes). (2)

• *Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H: Sometimes you read a book and it cracks you open and remakes the world. Sometimes you read a book and it weaves a new song along your skin, echoes a buzzing note in your tender throat, opens longings you’d set aside years ago, upends you. This was one for me. (15, 23)

• How Far the Light Reaches by Sabrina Imbler: Sometimes you read a book that feels as familiar as cold North Atlantic water on your skin, as beautifully distant as salty Pacific spray. Sometimes you read a book that feels like a piece of yourself returned to you, and like a jagged crag of coastline that will never quite fit. Sometimes the beauty of that closeness and that dissonance blends into something entirely new. (2, 15, 32, 39)

• Before We Were Trans by Kit Heyam: I read this in April and I’m still thinking about it. In many ways it’s one of the anthems of my reading year: a book of complexities and nuances, past and present, a book that goes beyond the emptiness of “we have always been here” to something murkier, and more fun, and harder: Who have we always been? How does who we are now change how we see and talk about who we used to be? (2, 39)

Poetry

• A Tinderbox in Three Acts by Cynthia Dewi Oka: This is an incredible collection about the Indonesian genocide that took place in 1965-1966. It’s not an easy book. It’s a play. One of the characters is a kind of ghost of history. There are maps covered in nearly-illegible writing, abstract drawings, strings of words in all caps that feel impossible to untangle. At its heart, I think, is this question: what lies beyond coherence? What happens when we resist the idea that coherence leads to redemption, that there is always a narrative endpoint, that art exists to make meaning?

• Return by Emily Lee Luan: In a blend of English and Chinese, Luan excavates and illuminates so many in-between spaces: the space between home and homeland, memory and experience, spoken and written language. These gorgeous poems about sorrow and longing and diaspora map her own and her family’s history in Taiwan and America. She uses an array of forms, including many poems that draw inspiration from Chinese “reversible poems,” which can be read in either direction—forward or backward. The whole collection is alive with movement; each poem sparks new questions

• Burning Like Her Own Planet by Vandana Khanna: This is a stunning collection of poems about women, girls, goddesses, fierce and soft and striving. Khanna reimagines the lives of Hindu goddesses, placing them in a variety of contemporary contexts. They are born and reborn, they struggle to make space for themselves in a world dominated by men, they rage, they wait and escape and tend and build their own worlds. There is violence, yes, but there is also so much beauty—women naming themselves, women redefining what it means to be powerful.

• Wound from the Mouth of a Wound by torrin a. greathouse: greathouse writes about her trans, disabled body with fire and precision and rage and tenderness Hers is a poetics of teeth and limbs, a physical poetics full of verbs that gnash and tear and sting, a poetics that claims and insists on body as story, that refuses to give the story of her body to anyone else’s voice. (24, 42)

• More Sure by A. Light Zachary: Oh, this sly and playful book! These fierce and striving poems! These declarations and reinventions and wonderings, these beautiful odes to trans complexity and queer joy, these geodes of becoming and unbecoming, these hard and lovely lines that break apart into untold layers, uncovering and recovering themselves, unwilling to be easily contained or neatly named. (24, 42, 44)

• Freedom House by KB Brookins: What a beautiful, wrenching, haunting, playful, loving rage song of a book. These poems are about being Black and trans in America, so they’re about state violence and fear, about death and grief and white entitlement and misogyny. But they are also about little (and not so little) pockets of joy, about queer love, about pleasure—in food, in places known, in jokes, in trans embodiment, in imaginings of a free and beautiful future. (24, 42)

• Concentrate by Courtney Faye Taylor: This collection is about the 1991 murder of Latasha Harlins, a fifteen-year-old Black girl who was shot by the owner of a Korean connivence store in LA. It’s about storytelling and history. It remakes so much on the page. (24, 39, 42)

• As She Appears by Shelly Wong: This is a gorgeous collection full of longing and nature and messy, mended, fraying, vibrant, stitched-together relationships. Nature in these poems is inside and outside the body, it soothes and prickles, it is a way to understand loss and lineage and desire, it is a destination, a danger, a solace. It is a thousand kinds of queer expression. (24, 39, 42)

• Short Film Staring My Beloved’s Red Bronco by K. Iver: A love letter to a departed beloved; a reimagining of queer and trans childhoods; an elegy about Mississippi and growing up and leaving home; a weaving of trans futures in the midst of ongoing grief. (24, 42)

You made it! Please come tell me about your favorites of the year so far in the comments!