#same feeling at queer bookstore like i'm looking through all of these books just feeling like

[dykekakashi]

girl from date yesterday told me she got more of a friend vibe, which is fine, i'm still just like having that bad 'it's because you don't fit in with queer people' feelings lol. doesn't help that we went to a queer bookstore and i honestly just felt so out of place.

[catis15]

My Opinions/Reviews on Saphic Books:

- Bright Falls Trilogy

- All of them are cute and heartwarming and giggle worthy and shit

- It's cool seeing each of the friend groups POVs and they're all pretty relatable in my opinion

- Pretty good representation of various family relationships especially with mothers

- the various relationships are actually really well written but the stories are still very much focused on the romance, they're not sidelined persey but they're not the main focus of that's what your looking for it's very much about the couple

- I like the variety in body types through the series, there's different heights, weights, yada yada and it's nice to see and they're all appreciated

- There aren't any POC MCs but there are side characters, also lots of gender and lgbtqia+ identity representation NB characters, ace characters, lots of queer couples, I think there may be a polycule mentioned but I'm not entirely sure

- Smut? Yes there is, how much varies between book but I'd argue there's more every book with Iris's book having the most; Id also argue it gets intenser as the series continues but it's all pretty mid (not in the it's bad writing way in the I've read far worse but I've also read some relatively pg 13)

DELILAH GREEN

- I love Delilah sm she can fucking step on me and Id ask her to do it again

- It's a sorta an asshole to everyone but you between her and Claire but not in the typical way? Like it's there but it's not written the way a lot of that trope usually is, idk I just really like how these books are written I think the author does a fantastic job

- Delilah seeing Claire for who she is and like just how much emotion she has is just yes, and also Claire seeing Delilah as like a sweet person and not just an asshole is nice too

- Because I know it bothers some people, Claire is a mother and the kid is talked about, I don't mind parent tropes but ik some people just don't enjoy reading them, I thought Ruby was sweet though and Claire seeing how Delilah interacts with her is also really cute

- Delilah also providing that safe and comforting space for artwork for Ruby is also really sweet and seeing Delilah kinda give Ruby what she herself didn't have is wholesome ASF and Claire just appreciates it and shit idk it's cute

- Hating On The Straight White Man TM (because he is gross to Astrid)

- Delilah is a photographer and Claire runs a bookstore

ASTRID PARKER

- It's cool getting to see Astrid's POV compared to how Delilah (her sister) views her

- Mommy Issues TM and in my opinion it catches some of the subtleties of growing up with a toxic parent really well

- Jordans ex comes along so warning for that, ok some people don't really like that

- Also handles like not missing your ex but feeling like YOU failed because the relationship failed

- again the subtleties of so much is just so well written

- Jordan is very stereotypical lesbian and I'm here for it

- her truck is named adora, her cat is named catra (if I'm remembering correctly), she wears random button ups, got that half saved short hair going (funnily enough I myself had both Astrid and Jordans haircuts at various points in my life lmao), she's a carpenter sorta, she's got an attitude, is into taro, like I love her sm 😂 she's so me fr 😭

- enemies to lovers

- Astrid's a bitch and Jordan pretends not to be into it

- they fuck in a pantry

- it's funny

IRIS KELLY

- iris doesn't do kids and marriages and her more or less traditional family is giving her shit for it

- Stevie has anxiety and handles it the same way I handle mine so that was relatable

- handles the shit that goes along with having anxiety really well so props to the author once again

- fake dating tm

- They're basically giving each other 'classes' because they think they're bad at things; but in reality it's just them being comfortable with stuff they're actually pretty good at; Stevie helps Iris be more comfortable with everyday romance and Iris helps Stevie be more comfortable with adult fun time intimacy outside of committed long term relationships

- but at the same time in queer Shakespeare and it's beautiful

- Home Field Advantage

- will add later

- The Song of the Huntress

- Just bought it and haven't read it yet

- The Priory of the Orange Tree

- Just bought it haven't read it

- Late Bloomer

- a few chapters in

- th author notes are funny and enjoyable

- good representation of things like people pleasing, autism, trust issues due to family trauma, bad relationships that you stay in for the comfort, toxic friends

- They're some pretty heavy themes but their handled in an easy to swallow way

- while these are very present themes the main focus is still the romance, but they're handled a bit more in depth than say the Bright Falls Trilogy

[youfeltthegolux]

Reading recap, November 2022 (Part 1)

At the start of the pandemic, I decided to do something I'd never done in all of my years of being an avid reader: actually keep track of the books I've read. Since I'm trying to be more intentional about the whole thing, I thought it might be fun to think back on what I've read, month by month. I'm going to do a longer "year in review" reflection on my favorite books I read this year in about a month and say more about my reading habits, but this is really just a series of bite-sized reviews. Some book chomps, if you will.

For the record, for the last few years I've mostly been reading books in audiobook form, and I try to use the Libby App as much as possible. Because of where I live I'm fortunate to have access to two great local public library systems. When I can't find a book in my local libraries I like to use the Libro.fm app, which allows you to buy books and choose an independent bookstore to support with your purchase, instead of your money going to the space cowboy who won't let his employees take bathroom breaks.

I tend to read a lot of historical nonfiction (especially about cold boys), sci-fi, and romance. This month I read six books, which must be some kind of record for me, and was only possible because I had a few long flights, and some of these books were fairly short. Plus I pretty much inhaled Ocean's Echo, which we'll get to in a moment. Good thing I didn't have many social obligations the first week of the month, when that book dropped.

OK, on to the books!

Ocean's Echo by Everina Maxwell

I ADORED Maxwell's first book, Winter's Orbit, which started life as an original story on AO3. (Seriously, go read it now if you haven't!) I couldn't wait for her follow-up, which I preordered on Libro.fm and guzzled down the first week of November, ignoring various responsibilities and coming up with excuses to putter around the house with my headphones in. Ocean's Echo is a queer romance space opera that's set in the same universe as Winter's Orbit but follows different characters. Tennal, a hot mess royal who has had one too many strikes against him (and can read minds) and Surit, a by-the-books military officer (who can control minds) are paired to work together for Space Plot Reasons. They're essentially commanded to meld minds, against their own wishes, but they decide to secretly refuse orders and fake their mind bond instead. Will they pull it off? Will they come to trust and love each other? WHO CAN SAY?

I so enjoyed this book and like Winter's Orbit I think Maxwell once again gives us a beautifully-crafted look into how two people, thrown together by circumstance, can come to understand and love each other. No spoilers, but there are a few moments in here, especially towards the end, that I found to be totally devastating, which is how I like things.

I also love Maxwell's writing style. I watched a virtual book talk with Maxwell and Freya Marske (which you can catch on YouTube!) and it's clear that they devote so much time to thinking through character development and finding ways to use and subvert character tropes. I will say that I thought the plot of Winter's Orbit was a touch tighter than Ocean's Echo, but that should in no way prevent you from READING THIS BOOK STAT.

One final note (wow, this is not bite-sized at all): I got the audiobook in part because I really enjoyed the audiobook version of Winter's Orbit, and Ocean's Echo was recorded by the same narrator. It's great. But the narrator used essentially the same voice for both Jainan in Winter's Orbit and Surit in Ocean's Echo, which, uh, was kind of distracting at first. FYI.

OK next book:

The Whale: A Love Story by Mark Beauregard

::cue obligatory whale noises::

The Whale is a deep dive lololol into the relationship between Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, built on the two literary giants' letters to each other and the archival traces of their passionate feelings for each other and for each other's work that developed in the early 1850s, while both men lived in the Berkshires region of Massachusetts. This was when Melville was at work on Moby-Dick (Melville dedicated this novel to Hawthorne, whom he also described in a book review as having "[shot] his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul.") At its core, The Whale is about the tortures of writing, of inner life, the joy of a great work of art, and of recognizing oneself in someone else and being seen in return.

Beauregard does a wonderful job constructing conversations between Melville and Hawthorne and describing the yearning that both men expressed for each other (mostly from Melville's point of view; only his letters have survived, and Beauregard created the letters Hawthorne wrote to Melville that appear in The Whale). This book came highly recommended and I didn't love it the way I was hoping to - there are times when I thought it felt a bit stiff or disjointed, but maybe that's only because Melville and Hawthorne's relationship was, itself, full of so many torturous turns. Plus Melville's wife comes across as a one-note nagging woman who just, ya know, gets on his case to make some money so the family doesn't starve. But if you like historical fiction (non-fiction?) it's still very much worth a read.

OK, last one for this post!

Love, Hate & Clickbait by Liz Bowery (mild spoilers ahead)

Eh. This came recommended by a friend whose reading taste I TRUST (the same friend who recommended Winter's Orbit to me last year), who told me they read it in one night.

Eh.

Basically, this book is about two guys - one, a straight asshole dudebro and one, a clueless gay nerd who is very tall - who both work for the same Democratic politician, who is campaigning for the presidential nomination. When she says something homophobic and it's caught on camera, her staffers come up with the brilliant solution of making these two dudes have a fake relationship to show how cool she is with the LGBTQIA+ community.

Have you read Red, White, and Royal Blue? This is no Red, White, and Royal Blue. It's got a lot of fun tropes but the two mains are both unlikable and don't really evolve over the course of the book, other than one of them getting a haircut and the other deciding that couch sex is a good stress-reliever. I didn't really vibe with the writing style, and there's not really any "we realized something about ourselves and about love" payoff. It kind of felt like this book was rushed to market, like someone at the publisher said "I just heard a lot of straight women like reading books about two guys making out! I want one of those on my desk tomorrow morning!" There was a scene where they trip and fall into a big tower of cheese together at a farmer's market, which was cute.

Anyway, my friend who recommended this deeply betrayed me, but I still love them.

Also I heard this book started as fanfic, I'd be curious as to what fandom it's from.

Coming soon: three more book bites!

[sapphicscholar]

i just need more director sanvers. if you're still taking requests, the triad meeting through a book club?

Sure thing! For the last of the requests I received, here we go! (And as a heads up, I went full AU meet cute here with grad student Maggie, bookstore employee Lucy, and newly out Alex, so think mid-20s or so for ages)

*

Really, Maggie should have known better than to think that a lesbian bookclub would be any better than a straight one. Sure, this one is slightly better in that she's fairly certain most people have read the book. Or at least they've watched Carol and are pretending it's the same thing as having read The Price of Salt. But it's still just a group of women sitting around and not talking about the fucking book. At least not in any of the ways Maggie cares about.

Maggie wants to talk about the narrative arc, the way temporality gets torqued around Therese, what it means that this queer, queer book's road chase scene inspired Nabokov, how the weight of certain scenes changed from the book to the film (and why didn't Carol get to have a loaded gun in the film, huh?).

Everyone else wants to talk about feelings. Not even the characters's; no, their own.

Maggie tunes back in to hear some other 20-something bitching about Highsmith because the plot "feels unrealistic." Apparently it's not "good writing" to have a character fall in love so quickly because she has never personally felt anything like infatuation at a checkout counter.

Doodling in the corner of her notebook, Maggie finds herself sketching out big block letters: I HATE THIS. Again and again and again.

After a few minutes, she hears a snort of laughter from beside her and looks over to find a rather attractive woman about her age glancing down at her notebook. After an initial surge of annoyance, Maggie scrawls out a brief: "Sorry."

The woman shrugs. Maggie thinks that's the end of it. At least until she hears a quiet shuffling beside her, then finds the woman snatching a pen right out of the hand of the blonde sitting next to her. The blonde looks more than a little affronted.

The woman spins Maggie's notebook toward herself, and Maggie would be royally pissed if she wasn't so intrigued. (As it stands, she's just a regular amount of annoyed.)

"Don't be." The handwriting is a sloppy scrawl, and Maggie's deeply glad to have done enough archival work that she can read anyone's writing at this point. "I didn't really think this would be an hour of hearing people debate whether you can fall in love at a department store."

Maggie snorts loudly enough to draw the attention of everyone around her, and it's a testament to the years she's spent honing her passive listening skills during seminars full of theory bros enjoying an intellectual circle jerk that she's able to pipe up like she'd been intending to contribute to the conversation all along. She gives a vague nod of acknowledgment to the ongoing conversation, then tries to segue from the time element of the infatuation question that is, apparently, so open to debate, to the discussion questions she'd written out before coming about queer temporality. (Other than a conciliatory little, "Interesting!" from one of the attendees, no one engages, and Maggie goes back to doodling.)

A minute later, a freckled left hand drops down in the middle of her notebook again, and a barely legible, "Your point sounded cool," appears down the margins of her page.

"Shame no one else thought so," Maggie writes. She can't quite shake the feeling that she's back in grade school passing notes during the good years before all anyone wanted to talk about was boys.

"Alex," the blonde woman hisses, "give me back my pen!"

"I'm using it," Alex grumbles, clutching more tightly to it, only to have her fingers pried back one at a time in what looks like a familiar ritual, if the way Alex immediately throws her other hand around the top of the pen is any indication.

"Ladies." The tone is sharp, and both Alex and the blonde woman sit back in their seats, looking slightly and thoroughly chastised, respectively.

Maggie drops her own pen in front of Alex a moment later, and Alex shoots her a grin.

"Sorry. Kara didn't bring enough to share with the class," Alex writes.

Maggie snorts and steals the pen back. "Your gf?"

"Ew," Alex says aloud, earning another set of glares from the room that she resolutely ignores. She does shift back to the written word, though, taking the pen from Maggie's outstretched hand and scrawling, "Sister."

They go back and forth for a while, writing notes about the novel and the other book club members until a bookstore employee appears behind them, laying a hand on both of their shoulders and leaning in close. "I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to ask you both to leave the book club table."

Maggie can feel her cheeks warm, and Alex swallows heavily.

It's only once they've been led out to the cafe area that the woman--Lucy, according to her name tag--lets out a loud laugh that transforms into a full on cackle. "Sorry," she wheezes between snorts of laughter, shaking her head and looking not at all apologetic. "I've just never seen anyone get kicked out of book club before."

"Yeah, well," Maggie shrugs. "Guess you can't pass notes during book club. Not like we were even talking about the book..."

"Yeah, and if we weren't gonna talk about the book, pop culture led me to believe there would be a lot more wine," Alex chimes in.

Lucy grins. "Hate to break it to you both, but there's a lot of feelings talk and no wine here. Unless you smuggle it in yourself. But I wouldn't encourage it. I think it's probably a two strikes kinda book club. One if you're bad enough," she adds with a wink.

"Oh?" Maggie lifts an eyebrow.

"Turns out it's in really bad form to hit on the organizer's girlfriend."

Alex lets out a bark of shocked laughter.

Lucy holds two hands in the air. "It's not like she was wearing a nametag that said, 'Callie's girlfriend; do not engage.'"

"Some real L Word level shit here," Maggie says.

"We might have some aspiring Jennies in there, too. Who knows? There may just be a sequel to Thus Spoke Sarah Schuster being typed out right in my cafe." Alex glances between them as they laugh, and Lucy raises her eyebrows at Alex. "Never seen it?"

Alex shakes her head. "Kind of, um, new to all this."

"Oh. Well, welcome," Maggie says. "We have Subarus and good coffee and shitty book clubs."

"And some truly terrible television," Lucy adds.

"Yeah, that. It's better to get all your gay friends together to watch with drinks or something. Makes it a little less sad."

Lucy nods sagely.

"I guess I probably just ruined my chances of turning any of them into my new gay Central Perk gang, huh?" Alex asks, gesturing in the vague direction of the book club table.

"Probably," Maggie sighs.

"But hey," Lucy says, "you've got two queer women standing right next to you. Play your cards right, and maybe I'll give you my number when my shift ends in"--she glances up at the clock--"half an hour."

Alex's cheeks pink, and Maggie wonders if she's just managed to become a third wheel to a very attractive relationship in the making.

But then Lucy nudges Maggie. "Offer goes for you, too, you know? Just because you've already seen it doesn't mean you can't help me indoctrinate a new baby gay, am I right?"

Maggie manages a small smile. "Only if I wouldn't be intruding."

"No!" Alex's voice cracks on the word, and she bites her lower lip and wrinkles her nose at the sound. "No, I mean, it'd be fun to have you there, too."

Lucy nods and turns on her heels, pausing only briefly to toss over her shoulder. "You know, I always said that the show coulda solved a lot of its problems by letting Shane be poly. Food for thought..."

[literaticat]

Do you have any tips for promoting a LGBTQ+ book in a place that’s not queer friendly? My first book came out last year and has no romance, so my community really rallied around me and bought tons of copies/attended events/etc. But I live in Alabama and I’m no fool—I know the response won’t be the same for my second, v. queer novel. Should I even try to promote locally at all? I don’t have a queer-friendly place near me and based on what’s going on in the world, I’m a little afraid tbh…thoughts?

If you have a decent bookstore / B&N nearby, and you want to host something for your friends/family/neighbors, ask them if you can have a little launch party there and they can sell books. Tell them, look, I don't expect this to be HUGE or anything, but I'm inviting x-number of people, I'll talk a bit and have cupcakes and sign books. Probably the only people that will come will be the people you invite, because that's the nature of the beast with Launch Parties like this -- though technically the store will be "open" it will probably be much like a private party, and should be fine. And you never know - maybe there are Queer Folk that you don't even know in your community who will be thrilled that such a book is being celebrated.

If you want to do something for your local friends and family and neighbors, and you DO have a decent bookstore / B&N or something nearby, ask them if you can host a little launch party there and they can sell books -- invite everyone you know, and assume that random haters are just not going to bother going to a bookstore (because they probably aren't) -- it will basically be a private party

If you don't have a decent bookstore nearby, and you want to have something for friends/family/neighbors, host a party at your house or at a cafe or restaurant that has a private party area, and invite people to buy the book ahead of time and you'll sign it.

If you are embarrassed or otherwise weirded-out to have your local friends/family/neighbors read the book (like, it is super-sexy and you know they are quite conservative)... well, maybe skip that piece.

IF that's the case, you really feel like, look, this is Too Queer For The Neighbors kinda thing -- you might stick to doing virtual events so that you can hopefully snag participants from all over the world that DO want to celebrate that kind of book. Do a virtual launch party, that you promote widely online (through a bookstore in another city that does this kind of event, if possible, so they can sell books!) -- maybe in conversation with another Queer author to draw even more people.

It's not weird AT ALL to have a virtual launch party in this day and age anyway -- lots of bookstores aren't even doing physical events much at all because of COVID. So nobody will blink an eye. And you can tell the friends/family you KNOW will be interested in celebrating with you, so they come -- but skip the folks that you are iffy about.