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wiltking · 4 months

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(same person here) I would actually love a "starter fantasy list" or something similar, if you have anything like that! I've been trying to get back into fantasy lit as an adult, but i've admittedly had kind of a rough go of it.. :/ I like my fantasy best when it's weird and sincere, and that seems strangely harder to find now than it did when i was 8 and spending every second of my free time in the library. But maybe I'm just more jaded now, IDK. i'd appreciate any recs you've got, though! i haven't had much energy for reading recently, but i really, really want to get back to it this year. fingers crossed

also i feel like i should say that i don't...necessarily hate urban fantasy, under the right conditions it can be fun, I'm pretty sure I just got exposed to wayyyy too much of it when i was a high schooler and now i've built up some kind of resistance to it. it was completely inescapable (in my circles) in the 2010s and now it's like i can smell the genre conventions from a mile away. so if you have urban fantasy recs i wouldn't turn them down! it's just not suuuper high on my preference list

secret ending note: I know your main thing is drawing, but I'm pretty sure you like to write too - I remember you saying something a long time ago about how one of the main things that motivates you to write gay fiction is spite that there isn't better stuff out there already. and, tbh? my writing muscles are REALLY rusty, but if it turns out the only way to get the fantasy i want is that i have to write it my god damned self, then i /will/ pick up the pen again, faustian bargain though that may be

luckily for you i like to think 'weird and sincere' is my driving force. here's 5 titles in ascending order of density/difficulty, with each being either a single novel or duology: 1. Lord of the While Hell by ginn hale 2. The Fire's Stone by tanya huff 3. Obsidian Island by arden powell (*horror fantasy, but whimsical) 4. The Still by David Feintuch 5. Ariah by B.R. Sanders

If you're ready for weirder books or longer series, you can check out these lists:

M/M Fantasy Rec lists - my favorite m/m fantasies, no YA, though i'm very much a series guy and these recs might be a little overwhelming!

Old(er) LGBT Book recs - as it says on the tin, pre-2010 adult books with queer characters. some overlap with the m/m list but also contains scifi, and other types of queer fantasies

and yes, i still write! i've been throwing my head at the keyboard with spite and sincerity in my veins for a few years now. most of what i have available is fanfiction (a great way to get back into writing, imo) but i have originals in the works too. it definitely helps keep me sane, and writing for the sake of making the stories you want to read is one of the best reasons to go for it. best of luck!!

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supersoakerfullofblood · 2 months

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Great Books About Gender Identity

Seeing some posts about how new-adult romance novels popularized by BookTok don't show genuine queer experience and largely tokenize queer characters. And look, the prose of these books is ass too. One of my reading interests is how themes of gender/masculinity/femininity interact with other elements in a novel, and with the culture from which the novel was written. I've read a lot of great books on the topic!

As a disclaimer, most of these books don't have explicit queer representation. I read a lot of old books where that wasn't a thing you could openly write about, but you could write about cultural perceptions of masculinity/femininity (a lotta people still didn't like this, but like, you usually weren't stoned for it), which is where modern queer theory and identity comes from! So if you want to feel understood by a novel, here are my book recs on gender, in no particular order:

The Earthsea series by Ursula K. Le Guin: a series of children's fantasy novels that build the foundation for modern children's and YA fantasy (Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, some Neil Gaiman, Brandon Sanderson, etc.). Men and women's roles in society and relations with magic are a major theme in the series, and while no character is queer (though there's a reference late in the series about witches living together), characters are always bound or freed by the gender they express. Also, all the characters are black, which was unheard of at the time of the first book's publication (1968) and is frankly still unheard of today. And it's just a fun read!

The work of Virginia Woolf: My favorite author and one of the largest players in what we today call gender studies. Highly recommend Orlando, where the titular character changes inexplicably from a man to a woman halfway through the novel (it's tempting to call them "the first trans character," but the label feels disingenuous. Transsexuality as we know it didn't exist then, and Orlando didn't choose or want to switch genders. It just happened to them); A Room of One's Own, Woolf's essay on life as a woman author; and The Waves, a book less about gender identity and more about wholistic identity.

The work of Kate Chopin: Chopin is a huge player in starting the feminist literary movement of the 20th century, influencing the work of many authors on this list. If you can stomach Victorian prose, Chopin is for you!

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath: Plath's novel is written from an intimately feminine perspective and wrestles with questions of mental illness from such a perspective. A must-read.

The work of Oscar Wilde: Thrown in jail for a bit for likely being at least a little gay, Wilde's writing frequently riffs on and critiques gendered social customs. Highly recommend The Importance of Being Earnest, Lady Windermere's Fan, and definitely other stuff of his I haven't read yet.

The work of Madeline Miller: I think Circe is the only "BookTok book" I've read that I thought was good, and boy is it fantastic. Its ideas of gender feel a bit cliche or elementary at times (Circe sometimes reads like an "empowered girlboss" stereotype), but how it plays with this identity at the same time it plays with Circe's identity in her family and pantheon make this book special. And Miller really is a delightful prose stylist. Galatea is also pretty good, and I haven't read Song of Achilles yet.

The Hours by Michael Cunningham: based on Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Cunningham reprises Woolf's themes for a book set in the 90s! Great read, and another master of the craft.

The poetry of Sappho: The popular conception of Sappho is that she's this girlboss prodigal lesbian in a patriarchal society, which isn't true. There's definitely some truth there, but it's much more nuanced, and certainly Sappho couldn't conceive of the labels we put on her today and those labels' connotations. In any case, her poetry is some of the first, if not the first, love poetry from a feminine perspective.

Any piece of literature about slavery/colonialism written by a woman: This is a broad category, but the intersection of femininity and race is a broad topic which many writers fall into. You really can't go wrong here. My recs are Toni Morrison, Jean Rhys, Zora Neale Hurston, Oroonoko by Aphra Bein, and Jean Toomer. I still need to read Gwendolyn Brooks, Octavia Butler, and Alice Walker.

The work of Shakespeare: You can't go wrong here. Obviously not explicitly queer, but many of his plays deal with cultural gender perceptions and, of course, crossdressing! Twelfth Night is probably his strongest play on this front, but The Winter's Tale and Measure for Measure are both great here, and most of his plays have at least a little commentary on the gender front.

Leave other recs in the comments/rts! :)

#writeblr #writing #fanfic #bookblr #booklr #books #literature

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5chatzi · 12 days

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Okay I'm going to send you some partly-solicited recs for queer literature and classics because I have a decent amount of exposure to both~~

My qualifications include a degree in English and now being halfway towards my MLIS lol this is what I was made for

For queer lit, sometimes it depends heavily on your own orientation, like bi people want to read books with bi representation, etc. But those preferences notwithstanding, here are some generally quality titles:

Zenovia July by Lisa Bunker: A trans girl solves a cyber crime. Mystery, YA, contemporary setting, trans rep

The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune: a gay man who lives a boring government-worker life travels to an island in order to monitor the family of magical children who live there. Fantasy, found family, adult fiction (it has some kid's book vibes but does contain mild sexual content and mild swearing), gay representation.

Ace by Angela Chen -- nonfiction, part memoir exploration of what it means to be asexual, for the author personally and for society generally.

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo -- a Chinese-American girl in 1950s San Francisco comes to terms with being a lesbian. Historical fiction, adult fiction (or might be YA?? There is what I'd call mild sexual content), lesbian representation, AAPI representation

Jeanette Winterson is a queer author whose work I generally like!(don't have specific title recs though) (I have read The Passion, and she has a couple biographies shelved in the queer library in which I volunteer. The Passion is not very explicitly queer from my memory but it is very good regardless.

For classics, here are titles that I personally Actually Enjoyed Reading and found relatively accessible:

To Kill a Mockingbird (and I also like the film-- I should have added that to my answer to your ask)

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf is my absolute favourite classic novel, but I won't pretend it's for everyone, or that it's especially accessible. It's written in a heavily Modernist style that involves a quite lyrical, non-linear plot. But the prose is breathtakingly gorgeous and it has a really moving anti-war message.

Also, Orlando by Woolf as well, and this one is also queer! Features a genderqueer/trans/otherwise gendernonconforming character.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins is very long, but it's a mystery, and I found it engaging. The section narrated by the character Marianne is the best, and I headcanon her as asexual or possibly a lesbian.

The Color Purple by Alice Walker is what I would call poignant, and it's fairly short. Be warned that it contains some SA content, racism, and AAVE dialect that could be hard to understand.

Macbeth or Twelfth Night or King Lear are my favourite Shakespeare works to recommend. But with Shakespeare, it's better if you can see a film or live performance, since just reading the script can be difficult to follow.

Little Women!!! God, I love Little Women. Honestly not sure how that wasn't the first one I thought of.

Oh thanks so much for the thorough response!

I’ll admit most of these are wildly outside my normal genre, but I’m always willing to try new things.

I have read Macbeth in school but it’s been ages and I am pretty sure I’ve read Little Women but I can’t remember it would have been a long time ago. Oh and To Kill a Mockingbird. I think everyone has read that in school but don’t think I’ve read it since.

I’m gonna write them down and check them out and see how it goes. I pretty much exclusively read non fiction so should be interesting 😅

#meg answers mail

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nona-gay-simus · 2 months

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Re the ask suggesting Benjanun Sriduangkaew, they probably did so because that author (who is a woman, just clarifying since you said 'him' -- the first name does get mistaken for 'Benjamin' a lot but nope author is a lesbian writing for lesbians) writes a lot of butch4butch science fiction with like, weird body stuff with both sf and fantasy elements (often as intimacy proxy), sort of like TLT, and also has really pleasing prose like Muir. There's a lot of variety and gender complexity to her lesbian characters which is really refreshing. Unfortunately I don't know that there are audiobooks, all her books are small press so this may not be funded to exist. However, they usually are on the shorter side or even novella length and are not big bricks like so much sff. She also cowrites a series as 'Maria Ying'.

Oh sorry, it's good to know they are a woman!

And I love the idea of butch4butch, but something about fem4fem is just not doing it for me esp because most of the times these characters feel extremely straight-washed. There are exceptions like I Kissed Shara Wheeler where the main relationship is fem4fem, but the emotions are very intense and both characters have very unique and different queer experience that feel real.

(Also, Im personally not inherently against men writing lesbians, though certainly wouldn't prioritize them - also, re: lesbians writing for lesbians, I'm also very much pro bi/pan and otherwise sapphic people writing sapphic people. I just don't want them to all be thin, white and conventionally attentive women. Like make them hot, sure, but make them hot in a gay way, pls!)

I have definitely put them on my tbr, it's just that rn between my degree and my full time job I don't have the spoons to read with my eyes. 🥲 I can't even make myself read the tlt shorts or a graphic novel which was rec to me as "modern au Griddlehark" (it's Belle of the Ball if anyone is curious.)

Honestly if I hadn't discovered audiobooks in late 2022 I never would have read TLT!

Also, if anyone is interested I'm writing several SFF projects that (I hope) capture the humor, prose (?? That part is the most difficult), gender and character dynamics like Taz Muir though I don't have anything reader ready, besides one ya romcom, which I'm currently querying lit agents with.

#asks #mine #book rec #stuff #rant #my writing

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lgbtqreads · 4 years

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Hey, 2 questions: Why did you get into doing this (dedicating so much time into the site/blog recommending queer lit), and specifically why did you decide to focus on queer lit? I've been wanting to do something similar but like. less specifically focused on only books. And I don't know if you've answered anything like this before but do you have any anti-recs? Like books you would never rec to people about cause I have a few I wish I'd had warnings against because of how bad they are.

If you want to do it, go for it! I get asked for TV and movie recs all the time but truthfully I never watch movies and I mostly watch the same shows over and over so I’m not very useful there. I’ve been book blogging for a long time and there are a lot of pieces to why I chose to do this, a couple of them being that when I was publishing my own f/f books in 2015-16, I saw there were verrrrry few sites I could even dream of promoting them on, and also I loved the work YA Pride (then Gay YA) was doing, but I saw queer MG and NA on the rise and I though they could use some boosting too.

It was also a really big drive for me to see how many queer readers were alone in their queerness where they were, and in many cases didn’t have the safety to explore it - that’s why Under the Gaydar was one of the site’s first features. Eventually it became...this. And I do have progressively less time for it as I release two books next year, have my second kid in *checks watch* seven weeks or so, and continue to (thankfully) have a fulltime job, but I wanted to keep it going as strongly as I could for as long as I could so that if I ever lapsed, there’d still be a strong, searchable database in place - that’s why I make sure to link back to the site often.

As for anti-recs, yes, but I don’t state them publicly. There are books that have come off the site, especially as better representation has filled in gaps, and there are books I never suggest to Patrons, but one person’s I HATE THIS is another person’s I NEEDED THIS. A year or two ago, I got an Ask about whether the rep in a book was really that bad, because they’d actually connected with it, and uhhhh I’d written the book; the Asker had no idea I run the site. So, you know, who am I to say what other people shouldn’t be reading. But, for example, you’re never going to see me rec Luna now that books by and centering trans people exist.

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