Happy International Lesbian Day! Here's some super brief book recs to celebrate
Books dealing with love, loss, longing and abandonment
This is How You Lose The Time War is a short but beautifully written epistolary novel between two agents on opposite sides of a time war as they slowly fall in love.
Our Wives Under the Sea is one of the most beautifully written debuts I've ever read about a woman whose wife comes home wrong after they thought she'd died at sea and how it feels to grieve the loss of someone who's still in your home.
Lucky Red is a western novel about a young girl working in a brothel who meets her first female gunslinger and falls head over heels for her, and the consequences that come with loving dangerous people.
Body horror galore
Camp Damascus is about a young woman living in a super conservative christian town built around the worlds most successful conversion camp and the horrors that are uncovered there when praying the gay away fails.
To Be Devoured is about a woman whose fascination with the local vultures turns into obsession and the urge to know what carrion tastes like overtakes her life and leads her down stranger and stranger paths.
Chlorine is about a girl whose entire life revolves around being a competitive swimmer, and how abuse, neglect, and obsession with being the best takes its toll on the young women caught up in these destructive cycles.
Flawed character studies
Big Swiss is about a woman who has a kitchen floor reset in her 40s, moves away and starts a new life as a transcriber for a sex therapist and becomes obsessed with one of his clients before inserting herself into this poor woman's life.
The Seep is a speculative sci-fi set in a future where there's been a quiet alien invasion that has given people the ability to make almost any changes to their own bodies and what that world feels like to someone who doesn't want to partake.
Milk Fed is about a woman in therapy who feels cut off from almost everything until she meets another woman who triggers in her a melding of sex, hunger, and religion and where that takes her. Huge trigger warnings for ED content. It gets tough, y'all.
Fantastical wlw books
Bitterthorn is an amalgamation of fairytales retold as a slow burn sapphic love story between a sad young girl from a cursed land and the evil witch who takes her as a companion in the latest of the generational sacrifices made to appease her.
All the Bad Apples may be set in contemporary Ireland but it is a fairytale following a young girl as she travels across the country looking for a sister she refuses to believe is dead and the people she meets along the way.
Gideon the Ninth needs no introduction on this site but for the sake of formatting - lesbian necromancers in space who find themselves in an isolated murder mystery plot. It's not a romance but it is a love story and this series will change your life if you let it.
Translated novels
Boulder is a short character study following a free spirited woman when she accidentally settles down with the woman she loves and how love and resentment can take up the same space in your chest when life doesn't turn out the way you hoped it would.
Notes of a Crocodile is a cult classic coming of age story about queer teens in Taipei in the 1980s. It was written in the 90s so please keep that in mind if you choose to read it.
Paradise Rot is about an international student studying in Australia and her growing obsession with her housemate as they share a space that allows no privacy. I've never read anything that feels stickier.
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recent reads and recommendations:
i’ve been trying to read more recently and kind of get back into a reading flow where i always have a book on the go to read when i can. as a result i have a lot of new recommendations for you all and thought i would share 💋
in order of earliest to latest reads:
her body and other parties - carmen maria machado ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (5 stars)
themes/genres - unsettling, horror, fantasy, short stories, contemporary, lgbtq+ (wlw, bisexuality), feminism, experimental
we're starting off strong with one of my new favourite authors, carmen maria machado <3 i fell in love with machado through this book. her beautiful, horrible, astonishing writing made this possibly one of my favourite books ever. i can't say i ever expected to be reading (and adoring) a 60 page list of fever-induced law and order synopses but my god it was incredible. a well-deserved five stars to kick off the list.
human acts - han kang ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (5 stars)
themes/genres - south korean history, multiple povs, dark and unsettling (tw for graphic violence and body horror), experimental, contemporary.
this book was beautiful. it takes place during and looking back on the gwangju student uprising of 1980 and uses multiple povs to recount the horrors that occurred during the uprising under the newly instated dictator and martial law. i previously read ‘the vegetarian’ by han kang (another novel i highly recommend) and adored it so picked up human acts to follow up and wow i was not disappointed. it is so poetically beautiful and so haunting, the second pov especially has really stuck with me. a hard read (in terms of content) but a great and necessary one.
things we lost in the fire - mariana enriquez ⭐️⭐️⭐️ (3.5 stars)
themes/genres - short stories, gothic horror, magical realism, latin american literature
i picked this book up after reading enriquez’ ‘the dangers of smoking in bed’ which i loved. i enjoyed this book but i think, comparatively, i enjoyed tdosib a lot more. the book is structured as multiple short stories (mostly) set in argentina from various povs (the same structure as ‘tdosib’). each story is poetic, disturbing and beautiful and enriquez’ writing really highlights a culture i knew little to nothing about previously in such a rich and stunning way. the reason i rated this one a bit lower is simply that i wasn’t as enraptured with ‘twlitf’ as i was with ‘tdosib’ and i found some of the stories less interesting. still a solid read but i would definitely recommend checking out ‘tdosib’ first.
our wives under the sea - julia armfield ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (4 stars)
themes/genres - unsettling/disturbing, lgbtq+ (wlw, bisexuality, lesbian), contemporary, two character pov, gothic, the vast open ocean (tw)
this book is heartbreaking. the sense of tension and dread really creeps up on you in this one as more gets revealed and more past horrors unfold. incredibly poetic and ambiguous, slow to start but the last few parts had me speeding through. watery, foamy, flowing and gorgeous.
milk fed - melissa broder ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (5 stars)
themes/genres - mother-daughter relationships, modern judaism, eating disorders (tw), lgbtq+ (wlw) fiction, mental health, identity
i ATE THIS BOOK UP. oh my god. broder so perfectly entangles food, love and sex, obsession and religion and winds metaphors around one another to create a novel that is so weird and yet so normal. it highlights so many societal issues and all the characters are flawed and odd in some way. the main character herself is incredibly problematic at times and somewhat of an unreliable narrator but still very lovable as you can clearly see where her issues stem from and why she is so obsessive. elements of this book really, really spoke to me as a woman who’s had my own issues with food (and mothers and food). a funny, twisted, quite dark and fascinating book that i read in about a day.
in the dream house - carmen maria machado ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (5 stars)
themes/genres - memoir, domestic abuse (tw), emotional abuse (tw), lgbtq+ (wlw, bisexuality), feminism, experimental
another cmm beauty. machado really knows how to take an unusual format and make something beautiful out of it. i'd never read a memoir before this and i'm so glad to say this was the first. genuinely like reading a memoir, a poetry anthology, a collection of short stories and a research paper all at once. beautifully done and so heartbreaking.
nightbitch - rachel yoder ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (5 stars)
themes/genres - art and the artist, fantasy/magical realism, feminism, motherhood, transformation, freedom, violence (tw for graphic animal killing), multi-level marketing schemes?
this book is mad. it is literally about a woman turning into a dog. it's brilliant. if you have recently watched barbie and want something slightly more unhinged but still on the topic of feminism and motherhood, this may be for you. i LOVE weird books and this fit me like a glove. made me think about motherhood like i never have before and the transformation throughout the book is crafted beautifully.
the priory of the orange tree - samantha shannon (currently reading)
themes/genres - high fantasy, magic, religion, dragons, lgbtq+ (wlw), romance, violence and death (tw)
i'm about 350 pages in so far guys, she's still a beast but she's a beast i love and i'll update this when i finish. as for now, don't be afraid, she may look hefty but she's WORTH IT.
hope you enjoyed this list, please send me some more recommendations, i shall gladly receive!
(p.s. i have included some trigger warnings but not an extensive list for every book, please be aware that there may be other potential triggers. does the dog die lists triggers for movies, books and tv shows and includes at least some of the books on this list. reader discretion advised!)
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'But what about the history?' I heard myself say aloud. 'What kind of god would be happy with seeing hundreds of thousands of people expelled from their homes?'
'Rachel!' said Miriam angrily.
She had her pointer finger in her mouth and was biting her nail. I noticed that her thumbnail and ring finger were bitten too, up past the skin. When had she started biting her nails?
It dawned on me then that Miriam might not know how the Palestinians had been expelled- that she might never have learned about it. I wasn't taught this in my Jewish education either.
Mr. Schwebel met my eyes. It seemed he was aware of what I was talking about. Then he looked back down at his plate quickly again and put his fork into a tender piece of beef.
'There's something that the Palestinians call the Nakba,' I said. 'It refers to when they were driven from their homes into exile- when Israel became a state. It sort of puts a different perspective on Israeli independence. I mean, I was taught that the Palestinians went to war with us. But I don't think that's true. If you're kicked out of your home, I don't think you're going to war if you retaliate. You're just defending your home.'
There was silence at the table. Adiv got up and went to the bathroom. Miriam was still chewing on her pointer fingernail. I wondered if I had somehow transmitted the habit to her, if she'd caught it from me.
'That isn't true,' said Mrs. Schwebel. 'I don't know where you got that information, but it's wrong.'
I'd never been a good debater, and I could not point to one place where I'd gotten my information. The Internet, mostly. Students for a Free Palestine. Arguments between stoned people at college parties. Half an audiobook called Disputed Yesterdays: the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Made Simple.
'What part?' I asked. 'That they didn't live there first? That they weren't kicked off their land? That when someone attempts to reclaim what belongs to them, it's not an attack but a defense?'
'All of it,' she said. 'The land belonged to Britain. It didn't belong to anyone else. It did not belong to the Palestinians any more than it belonged to the Christians who lived there. The British gave it to us. It was given as reparation for the Holocaust, because we had nowhere else to go and we should never have nowhere to go again.'
'But there were Palestinians living there,' I said.
'So they were relocated,' said Mrs. Schwebel. 'So what? That's history. It's just how it is.'
'Is it?' I asked.
-Milk Fed, Melissa Border
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