June Reading Wrap Up
Pride month is over, and so is my Read with Pride staff reading challenge at work. I started running this annual reading challenge to encourage my colleagues to explore the LGBTQIA+ stock we have at the library and expand their knowledge of queer identities and experiences beyond our workplace’s diversity training. Each year, the challenge is to read three queer books over the course of June with the given prompts. It’s been lovely seeing my work chat pop off with people joining the challenge and exchanging book recommendations. Given I read queer books all year round, I like to use the challenge to find books about identities I don’t know as much about. This year, I picked up XOXY, a memoir by an intersex woman, mother, and activist.
June will also be a month I remember because of the extreme heat we experienced here in the UK, with temperatures reaching 35 degrees on multiple days and red weather warnings issued by the met office. I spent much of this time suffering of heat exhaustion and was glad to be staying with my wonderful partner – we looked after each other. But, with strange familiarity to covid lockdowns, we also enjoyed the little things and made the most of temporarily living together. We watched tv shows together each night, including the premier of the aroace short film, Aromcom, and spent the cooler times of day bird watching in the garden.
With some great book choices, too, it has been a memorable month, for sure.
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How Queer Bookshops Changed the World by A.J. West ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
I love that this book exists! I had been looking forward to its release and I'm delighted to have a signed copy that my girlfriend brought me during a visit to Gay's The Word.
"For over a century, booksellers have been the unsung heroes of queer liberation, offering friendship, solidarity and sanctuary. Travelling from Shakespeare and Company in Paris to Gay's The Word in London to the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in New York, A.J. West has written the first history of these remarkable spaces. Tracing their evolution from under-the-counter operations to beloved out-and-proud institutions."
Having some prior knowledge of queer history and literature before picking up this book definitely boosted my enjoyment of it. It was fun to come across names and book titles I recognised or even know well.
There are footnotes throughout, which I'm personally not a fan of, so I skipped over those. But I found the storytelling in the main text fun and easy to follow.
Queer bookshops have meant so much to me and my own queer journey. This is a book I will treasure and keep on my shelves, and will be one I come back to time and time again, I'm sure.
West has made me appreciate queer spaces and communities - of which bookshops are at the heart - all the more. The stories in this book are incredible and heartwarming. I am now inspired to be one of the people at book club (hosted in Gay's The Word) to volunteer to fetch the chairs from the basement just to stand in a room where so much history was made.
The Last Hour Between Worlds by Melissa Caruso ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
I had a ball reading this book. I kept telling myself "just one more chapter" only to read for another hour. It was gripping!
Kembral (Kem) is a Hound whose job involves rescuing things that slip into other existences, called Echos. It's dangerous work, but she is known for her outstanding success rate and ability to blink step. We enter the story after Kem has had a baby and she's on maternity leave. On a rare night off from being a single mum, she attends a year-turning party. But then the whole party gets pulled into the Echo layers and things start to get deadly. Kem's interaction with an Echo relic clock means she's the only one who can remember what keeps happening and so she gets to work to get them all home safe.
The story is quirky and fun and had more graphic deaths than I was expecting. But I think the weirdness makes it. In fact, to make it even better, I feel the author could have gone in even more with the ever-increasing strangeness of the Echo dimensions.
From the "one person to save the world" plot outline, it feels like it would be a YA novel, but actually the characters all being adults with adult lives feeds into the story and gave it another dimension. Kem's decisions are different because she has a kid at home, and Kem and Rika make sacrifices which make sense because of their long history.
Caruso has created an (admittedly small) fleshed-out world of its own with guilds and magic. It's own language too - I loved all the little culture-specific phrases like "thank the moon" and "what in the void!"
I also enjoyed the sapphic romance. Maybe I'll read the next book in the series to see where that goes, but I also feel this book had a satisfying enough ending for me.
I'm looking forward to discussing it with my friends at book club.
XOXY: A Memoir by Kimberly M. Zeiselman ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Kimberly is an "intersex woman, mother and activist," and this is her story of growing up intersex unknowingly, discovering the truth about her body as an adult, and growing into being an advocate, first for her adopted daughters, and then for herself and the intersex community.
Intersex is a queer identity I only knew the basics of before picking up this book. Through reading Kimberly's account, I learnt more about the specifics of various ways to be intersex, language used by (and about) the intersex community, and the surgeries being unnecessarily performed on intersex infants and children. This was also the first time I'd heard about being intersex from an intersex person - rather than scraps of information third- or fourth-hand - which is always important.
The author describes experiences I'd never thought of, such as how entwined intersex and trans rights are and how often the arguments used against these groups are the same. Also about how othering not having periods must be for a teenage girl. As a chronically ill and hard of hearing person, this was one thing I could really relate to; I understand how isolating it can feel to miss out on (teenage) experiences ane conversations, even the ones other people would call us "lucky" for missing.
There were plenty of powerful anecdotes in this book, but there were also an awful lot of names and lists and jumping around of timelines, and I just felt the whole thing could have done with a more editing to make it flow. It also ended quite suddenly. I was expecting a "where do we go from here" chapter, but that was not to be.
This book was really interesting, and I will make use of the references to continue learning about intersex people and how we can stand up for this corner of the LGBTQIA+ community.
Every Step She Takes by Alison Cochrun ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The sapphic version of Happiness for Beginners, this book explores how stepping away from your normal life and out of your comfort zone (in both cases, by going on a weeks-long hike) can give you new clarity and direction.
Sadie is feeling a little stick. Her whole life is long hours at the antiques store her nan left to her and her family trying to set her up with men when she’s not even sure she’s attracted to any of them.
When her travel blogger sister gets injured and can’t go on her trip walking the Camino de Santiago, Sadie offers to take her place and guest blog along the way. It gives her the perfect escape to truly reflect on who she is and what she wants, and one of the first things Sadie does is come out to the woman next to her on the plane.
But it turns out that stranger (Mal) is also on the same Camino tour – a tour for queer woman, no less – which forces Sadie to properly think about her sexuality for the first time ever. Mal then promises to give Sadie all the queer adolescence experiences she missed, but practice kisses soon turn into real feelings.
Mal often sounded like the perfect advocate; they always had the right thing to say to all of Sadie’s questions and insecurities. On one hand, I quite liked this and how it was so affirming as a queer reader. But also, it didn’t always feel like a real thing someone would spontaneously say, and I would have like her to slip up once or twice, or had messier answers.
There was also a power imbalance in the forming relationship with Mal being the “perfect queer” and incredibly rich, compared to baby gay, self-employed Sadie, and this is never addressed.
One other niggle was how the blogging aspect of Saide’s trip just disappears for much of the book. We’re told that Sadie is posting daily for her sister’s blog, but it felt a bit forgotten about in the middle section.
Having said all of that, I had fun reading this story. And the ace rep was a lovely bonus, too.