I follow hundreds of queer book blogs to scout out the best sapphic book news and reviews! Many of them get posted on tumblr and twitter as I discover them, but my favourites get saved for these link compilations. Here are some of the posts I’ve found interesting in the last few weeks.
Saffic Analysis:
- Malinda Lo’s The Invisible Lesbian in Young Adult Fiction: Malinda Lo’s informational posts on LGBTQ lit are some of my favourite things to read, and they’re always full of infographics.
- School Library Journal’s Not Quite Banned: Soft Censorship That Makes LGBTQIA+ Stories Disappear: How queer lit gets quietly censored in schools.
- Tor.com’s Season of the Witch: The Rise of Queer Magic in YA SFF: What a time to be alive. Queer witch lit is finally here!
- Anime Feminist’s Yuri is for Everyone: An analysis of yuri demographics and readership: This is an ambitious analysis of who reads yuri (f/f) manga. Spoiler alert: it’s a wide range of demographics.
Personal Reflections:
- Book Riot’s Want to Start a Queer Book Club? Here’s How: Live the dream! Includes some recs for your first reads.
- Tor.com’s Looking Back on Ten Years of Queering SFF, From 2010 to 2020: I’ve only recently discovered Tor.com’s Queering SFF column, so I was surprised to learn that it turned ten this month! The Lesbrary and Queering SFF are both fifth graders!
- Book Riot’s Seeing My Queer, Ill Self in Jenn Shapland’s New Memoir: This is a personal essay relating to Shapland’s description of her illness, and how its erasure connects to the invisibility of her sexuality. Vulnerable and compelling.
- Literary Hub’s Googling Literary Lesbians: On Carson McCullers and the Erotics of Incompletion: Another take on the Shapland new release. I loved this thoughtful meditation on a Google search I know all too well: “Was [NAME] a lesbian?”
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Authors of Colour:
- YA Pride’s LGBTQIAP+ Black History Month Book List 2020: I was so glad to see Black History Month produce so many resources like this!
- LGBTQ Reads’s Black History Month 2020: And this! Which is updated and expanded every year.
- Reads Rainbow’s Book Recs: Books By and About QPOC: Rainbow Reads is a new follow for me, but I’m really liking what I see so far.
- ‘The Color Purple’: A sublime portrayal of lesbianism ahead of its time: This post discusses how The Color Purple, a classic of Black literature, has had its lesbianism erased.
- Lambda Literary had the Audre Lorde Taught Us series, where authors discuss Lorde’s legacy in their own work. Meanwhile, Autostraddle is celebrating Year of Our (Audre) Lorde every month.
New Releases:
- LGBTQ Reads’s TBRainbow Alert: 2020 Graphic Novels and Memoirs, Part I
- Lambda Literary’s New in February: Brandon Taylor, R. Eric Thomas, and Lidia Yuknavitch
- Anxious Nachos’s F/F February: Most anticipated 2020 sapphic releases
- Book Riot’s 15 LGBTQ YA Audiobooks to Listen to in the First Half of 2020
March new releases are going to be their own post, which will be up soon!
This post, and all posts at the Lesbrary, have the covers linked to their Amazon pages. If you click through and buy something, I might get a small referral fee. For even more links, check out the Lesbrary’s twitter! We’re also on Facebook, Goodreads, Youtube and Tumblr.