What I Got:

• Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi
• L’arbre généreux: l’école de loisirs by Shel Silverstein
• Honing Your Craft: Developing Your Writing Skills on a Budget (zine) by Lydia Rogue
• World War Z by Max Brooks
• is5: poems by e.e. cummings
• The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
• Continuum by Chella Man
• Skate for Your Life by Leo Baker
• Wings of Ebony by J. Elle

What I Read:

• The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green
• Super Late Bloomer by Julia Kaye
• Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger
• The Tea Dragon Tapestry by K. O’Neill
• Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi
• Loveless (ARC) by Alice Oseman
• Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
• Mister Impossible by Maggie Stiefvater
• Started We Are the Weather (audiobook) by Jonathan Safran Foer

Even though we’re already over a week into July, I still really want to discuss all the queer books I read during Pride Month! (Plus one non-queer book.) So I hope you don’t mind the delay and enjoy my somewhat disjointed reviews.

Lately, life has felt so incredibly real and heavy that reading can sometimes feel a little like bullshit. And I’m finally bullshitted out. Life sucks, and I’m reading about this fake life that looks nothing like life after a huge collective trauma and I can’t connect.

The Anthropocene Reviewed turned out to be the book I needed to read. (And if you feel the same way, stay tuned for next month’s post, because I’ve continued my “I want what I read to feel as heavy as real life” mood into July…)

This book isn’t a remedy for that feeling, and in fact was often so honest and raw that I fell deeper into that feeling, but it was what I needed. Because what John Green is good at is finding meaning while still being existential and offering glimmers of hope even when despair is all around. Because sometimes I need to know that I’m not alone before I can start processing my emotions. Because when all the heads you’ve cut off the Hydra monster are now piled on top of you, it can seem impossibly dark and heavy.

The Anthropocene Reviewed podcast was what I used to listen to when I walked to work, and I always marveled how John could turn something small and seemingly insignificant into something with importance and weight. The human condition is hard to live in, let alone comprehend, but the essays in this book (and the podcast) helped me accept and embrace this.

My sister and I read this book together this month and discussed each essay in depth, marveling at how much this book was a pandemic book while also being something we could read and relate to many times before and probably many times after.

I feel bad that this review isn’t very specific and is just me saying that books can be a form of therapy for me, but my only notes on The Story Graph are “*cries in existential*”, so… past me didn’t give current me a lot to work with. I can say that my favorite essays were “Scratch ‘n’ Sniff Stickers,” “The Hall of Presidents,” and “Penguins of Madagascar” because the facts were interesting, it made me understand John’s fiction better, and I can’t stop thinking about it, respectively.

Super Late Bloomer: My Early Days in Transition by Julia Kaye follows Julia as she goes through the process of accepting her transness and starting her medical and social transition. A lot of these were super relatable, often pointing out the ridiculousness of life and gender roles. Even while pointing out this ridiculousness, Julia acknowledges that the fear and consequences that come from this strangeness are very real.

Everyone can get something valuable out of this, whether you’re a trans person or you have a trans person in your life that you want to better understand. While these comics chronicle Julia’s unique story of transitioning, many of the themes and emotions she discusses are universal, especially to other trans people. It’s one of those comics that makes you feel less alone if you need that, and I always do. 

The illustrations are simple yet effective, which really makes it feel like a diary in comics. Also, if you don’t follow her on Instagram, you totally should.

I’ve been meaning to read Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger since it blew up on booktube, and I have to admit, I only found it okay. This book has a really compelling plot and the integration of the Lipan Apache mythology and grieving processes was superb. However, I found some of the dialogue a bit clunky and it was hard for me to care about some of the main side characters (if that makes sense?). They didn’t feel super well-rounded. But the language is beautiful, there’s great on-page ace rep, and there’s so much layered allegory/metaphor to this story in terms of white supremacy, colonialism, and the mistreatment of the earth. Plus, there’s a ghost dog. Ghost dog! Gotta love a ghost dog. 

The thing I liked the most about this book was the family relationships. A lot of times, family gets left out or boiled down to one or two people in novels, but this book really explores the different types of relationships within a family and amongst friends. And because there are ghosts, ancestors, and lost loved ones involved in the story, it complicates these relationships even further. Just like real life, the relationships are complex and imperfect and important and life-giving. This is a perfect example of how your biological family and chosen/found family can intersect. 

I don’t have much to say about The Tea Dragon Tapestry that I haven’t said before about this series. It’s cute and colorful, there’s amazingly diverse rep in so many different directions, and it is hopeful without ringing false (even in my current cynical state of mind). The illustrations are always top notch in K. O’Neill’s books. I often wish I could hang them up on my wall.

Freshwater is unlike any book I’ve ever read before, and I’m so glad I read it even though it took me a minute to get into. It is about Ada and her selves and the gods living inside her. It is about identity and spirituality and trauma. This is a book that is worth the thought it takes to read it. Akwaeke Emezi has written a book that is challenging emotionally and in form, but it is a story that, again, feels very true and almost viscerally so.

Ending the story in Ada’s voice was super powerful, and the essay included at the end of this edition made me appreciate the form of the novel even more. This book challenges all sorts of things that are accepted as normal and real. It made me confront things I believed to be true that I only believed because they were my experience, like that only one self lives in a singular body. Selfhood is different for everyone and this is a glimpse into one character’s (and author’s) journey into embracing their own version of selfhood. 

Loveless by Alice Oseman was a pleasant surprise. For some reason, I had convinced myself it wouldn’t be as good or relatable because I don’t identify as asexual anymore. But just because I don’t always want a label for my sexuality doesn’t mean I can’t experience similar things to those that claim the label do.

Georgia’s exploration of her identity struck a chord with me. She talks about mourning a life that she should want to have, a “normal” life, and that’s something I’ve definitely gone through when accepting my different queer identities. 

I feel weird reviewing this book because anything I say will be influenced by the fact that I saw so much of myself in Georgia. It’s definitely not a perfect book. It can get a little slow at times, and there’s not always a ton of detail, but it’s still a very poignant and heartwarming story. This book explicitly explores the fact that friendships are just as valuable as romantic relationships and can be just as intense. I’m not aromantic, but romance has never been a huge priority for me, so I love reading books in which the friendships are the most important relationships to the story.

All of these books I read for the Queer Lit Readathon (which I always drag out over the whole month), which is why this random classic by James Baldwin is on my list. It’s not a book about a queer person, per say, but James Baldwin is a gay man and the premise of the story is that a teen raised in a Christian Harlem home is exploring his sexuality for the first time. So I thought this would still fit for the “vintage” category for the readathon.

This is a gorgeously written book. I wrote down a ton of quotes, often just to stare at them a bit longer and contemplate what they mean to me.

The themes of this book are very heavy—domestic abuse, religious trauma, substance abuse, racism, violence, etc.—but I like that Baldwin still shows simple moments in which the kids are just being kids. Like when two boys are cleaning the church before the next day’s service and have a little play fight. James Baldwin reaches into the heads of these characters and pulls out their thoughts for all of us to see even when not much is happening in the outside world. (Aunt Florence is my fave—a badass old lady who takes no shit and doesn’t take herself too seriously.) 

I just wasn’t super absorbed by this book for some reason. The POV jumped around a little bit too much and I wasn’t always sure what was going on. I think it just felt a bit too much like a Virginia Woolf book for me, and her style isn’t my cup of tea.

I do appreciate the skepticism with which some characters approach their faith, and the depictions of both good acts and bad acts committed by those who claim to be Christians. It complicates the idea of a spiritual rebirth and forces readers to see the significance and ultimate inconsequentiality of a single moment of saving. 

Okay, confession: I didn’t finish Mister Impossible in June. But since I’ve already finished it and it’s the last on my Queer Lit Readathon TBR, I wanted to include it here. Plus, it’s the second book in Maggie Stiefvater’s Dreamer Trilogy, and I can’t wait all month to talk about it!

This trilogy so far is just… wow. The number of curveballs thrown at me in just this one book has got to be a record. I’ve got bruises from many of them (emotional, yes, but still bruises), and the twists all make sense in the story. Maggie seamlessly switches between different perspectives, and the book still feels very cohesive while maintaining the integrity of each character’s individual voice.

The characters all evolve in surprising yet believable ways. Matthew’s character especially. His personality and importance to the story increases the most, and he’s an interesting person to follow. Just like Declan, he seems like a boring stereotype on the outside, albeit a different one, but inside of him is a whole frickin’ human. *Next sentence contains mild SPOILERS.* I bring up Matthew in particular because the increase in his thoughts and individuality adds to the idea that as the ley line is getting cleared, dreamt objects are becoming more “real.” Matthew has more depth as this book progresses, because the ley line can jump into his body unencumbered. *End of SPOILERS*

The ending, as all of Maggie’s book endings so far have done, shocked me and hurt me and made me super excited for the next book. Blown. A. Way. 

All of these books, with the exception of The Tea Dragon Tapestry, deal with the heaviness of life in different ways. But the most important thing to me while reading was that they didn’t ignore it. They faced it more-or-less head on, whether “it” was grief or pandemic life or guilt or the follies of self-discovery. Basically, right now I would like my reading list to have a Bo Burnham’s Inside level of honesty and reality. Which is to say, probably a bit too much but also just the right amount.