Join our book club QueeReaders and read along with our monthly book selections.
Then, join us for our monthly book discussions!
WHAT WE'RE READING
JUNE 2024
Fine
By: Rhea Ewing
A vibrant and informative debut with “great documentary power” (Alison Bechdel), Fine is an elegantly illustrated celebration of the transgender community.
As graphic artist Rhea Ewing neared college graduation in 2012, they became consumed by the question: What is gender? This obsession sparked a quest in which they eagerly approached both friends and strangers in their quiet Midwest town for interviews to turn into comics. A decade later, this project exploded into a sweeping portrait of the intricacies of gender expression with interviewees from all over the country. Questions such as “How do you Identify” produced fiercely honest stories of dealing with adolescence, taking hormones, changing pronouns―and how these experiences can differ, often drastically, depending on culture, race, and religion. Amidst beautifully rendered scenes emerges Ewing’s own story of growing up in rural Kentucky, grappling with their identity as a teenager, and ultimately finding themself through art―and by creating something this very fine. Tender and wise, inclusive and inviting, Fine is an indispensable account for anyone eager to define gender in their own terms.
Tags: Transgender, Graphic Novel
Wednesday, June 12th
6:00 – 7:00pm
We’ll be 100% virtual again for this book club discussion.
Email wils@easternsierrapride.org for the link to join.
join the Mailing list FOR BOOKCLUB UPDATES
Please consider purchasing your copy through Spellbinder Books in Bishop, the Booky Joint in Mammoth, or check out a physical or digital copy through Inyo County Free Library or Mono County Free Library. If the book store is out of copies, ask them to order you one. If this isn’t in the library collection, ask them to order one through Zip Books.
What We've Read
MAY 2024
Giovanni’s Room
By: James Baldwin
From one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures of the past century comes a groundbreaking novel set among the bohemian bars and nightclubs of 1950s Paris, about love and the fear of love.
In the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality.
David is a young American expatriate who has just proposed marriage to his girlfriend, Hella. While she is away on a trip, David meets a bartender named Giovanni to whom he is drawn in spite of himself. Soon the two are spending the night in Giovanni’s curtainless room, which he keeps dark to protect their privacy. But Hella’s return to Paris brings the affair to a crisis, one that rapidly spirals into tragedy.
David struggles for self-knowledge during one long, dark night—“the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life.” With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin’s now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a deeply moving story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.
Tags: Novel, Bisexual
APRIL 2024
A Minor Chorus
By: Billy-Ray Belcourt
A debut novel from a rising literary star that brings the modern queer and Indigenous experience into sharp relief.
In the stark expanse of Northern Alberta, a queer Indigenous doctoral student steps away from his dissertation to write a novel, informed by a series of poignant encounters: a heart-to-heart with fellow doctoral student River over the mounting pressure placed on marginalized scholars; a meeting with Michael, a closeted man from his hometown whose vulnerability and loneliness punctuate the realities of queer life on the fringe. Woven throughout these conversations are memories of Jack, a cousin caught in the cycle of police violence, drugs, and survival. Jack’s life parallels the narrator’s own; the possibilities of escape and imprisonment are left to chance with colonialism stacking the odds. A Minor Chorus introduces a dazzling new literary voice whose vision and fearlessness shine much-needed light on the realities of Indigenous survival.
Tags: Novel, Queer Indigenous
MARCH 2024
Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion
By: Bushra Rehman
Razia Mirza grows up amid the wild grape vines and backyard sunflowers of Corona, Queens, with her best friend, Saima, by her side. When a family rift drives the girls apart, Razia’s heart is broken. She finds solace in Taslima, a new girl in her close-knit Pakistani-American community. They embark on a series of small rebellions: listening to scandalous music, wearing miniskirts, and cutting school to explore the city. When Razia is accepted to Stuyvesant, a prestigious high school in Manhattan, the gulf between the person she is and the daughter her parents want her to be, widens. At Stuyvesant, Razia meets Angela and is attracted to her in a way that blossoms into a new understanding. When their relationship is discovered by an Aunty in the community, Razia must choose between her family and her own future.
Tags: Novel, Lesbian
FEBRUARY 2024
This Book is Gay
By: Juno Dawson
This candid, funny, and uncensored exploration of sexuality and what it’s like to grow up LGBTQ also includes real stories from people across the gender and sexual spectrums, not to mention hilarious illustrations. Inside this revised and updated edition, you’ll find the answers to all the questions you ever wanted to ask, with topics like:
• Stereotypes―the facts and fiction
• Coming out as LGBT
• Where to meet people like you
• The ins and outs of gay sex
• How to flirt
And so much more!
You will be entertained. You will be informed. But most importantly, you will know that however you identify (or don’t) and whomever you love, you are exceptional. You matter. And so does this book.
Tags: Nonfiction, Gay
JANUARY 2024
Middlesex
By: Jeffrey Eugenides
“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974. . . My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver’s license…records my first name simply as Cal.” So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.
Tags: Historical Fiction, Intersex
DECEMBER 2023
Dandelion Daughter
By: Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay
Winner 2022, Prix des Libraires Rights for TV adaptation purchased by Zone 3 A runaway bestseller in Québec, where it has captured the hearts of readers and pushed trans-identity into the mainstream conversation, Dandelion Daughter is an intimate, courageous portrait of what it’s like to grow up having been assigned the wrong sex at birth. Set against the windswept countryside of the remote Charlevoix region some five hours north of Montreal, Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay’s autobiographical novel immortalizes her early years as an alienated boy trapped in a world of small-town values and her parents’ dissolving marriage, through complex adolescent years of self-discovery and first loves, to the harrowing episodes that fuel the growing realization that she must transition and give birth to her new self if she is to continue living at all. One of the first novels of its kind to appear in Québec, this inspiring story has already connected with a wide readership, and has been adopted by many schools to help expand worldviews and curriculums.
Tags: Novel, Transgender
NOVEMBER 2023
To be Taught, if Fortunate
By: Becky Chambers
A stand-alone science fiction novella from the award-winning, bestselling, critically-acclaimed author of the Wayfarers series. At the turn of the twenty-second century, scientists make a breakthrough in human spaceflight. Through a revolutionary method known as somaforming, astronauts can survive in hostile environments off Earth using synthetic biological supplementations. They can produce antifreeze in subzero temperatures, absorb radiation and convert it for food, and conveniently adjust to the pull of different gravitational forces. With the fragility of the body no longer a limiting factor, human beings are at last able to journey to neighboring exoplanets long known to harbor life.
Tags: Science Fiction, Ace
OCTOBER 2023
Lavender House
By: Lev AC Rosen
A delicious story from a new voice in suspense, Lev AC Rosen’s Lavender House is Knives Out with a queer historical twist. Lavender House, 1952: the family seat of recently deceased matriarch Irene Lamontaine, head of the famous Lamontaine soap empire. Irene’s recipes for her signature scents are a well guarded secret―but it’s not the only one behind these gates. This estate offers a unique freedom, where none of the residents or staff hide who they are. But to keep their secret, they’ve needed to keep others out. And now they’re worried they’re keeping a murderer in.
Tags: Mystery, Queer
SEPTEMBER 2023
Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction
By: Joshua Whitehead (Editor)
This exciting and groundbreaking fiction anthology showcases a number of new and emerging 2SQ (Two-Spirit and queer Indigenous) writers from across Turtle Island. These visionary authors show how queer Indigenous communities can bloom and thrive through utopian narratives that detail the vivacity and strength of 2SQness throughout its plight in the maw of settler colonialism’s histories.
Tags: Fiction Short Stories, Two-Spirit, Indigiqueer
AUGUST 2023
The Library of the Unwritten
By: A.J. Hackwith
Many years ago, Claire was named Head Librarian of the Unwritten Wing—a neutral space in Hell where all the stories unfinished by their authors reside. Her job consists mainly of repairing and organizing books, but also of keeping an eye on restless stories that risk materializing as characters and escaping the library. When a Hero escapes from his book and goes in search of his author, Claire must track and capture him with the help of former muse and current assistant Brevity and nervous demon courier Leto.
Tags: Fantasy, Pansexual
JULY 2023
You Exist Too Much
By: Zaina Arafat
On a hot day in Bethlehem, a 12-year-old Palestinian-American girl is yelled at by a group of men outside the Church of the Nativity. She has exposed her legs in a biblical city, an act they deem forbidden, and their judgement will echo on through her adolescence. When our narrator finally admits to her mother that she is queer, her mother’s response only intensifies a sense of shame: “You exist too much,” she tells her daughter.
Tags: Fiction, Bisexual
JUNE 2023
Guillotine
By: Eduardo C. Corral
Guillotine traverses desert landscapes cut through by migrants, the grief of loss, betrayal’s lingering scars, the border itself—great distances in which violence and yearning find roots. Through the voices of undocumented immigrants, border patrol agents, and scorned lovers, award-winning poet Eduardo C. Corral writes dramatic portraits of contradiction, survival, and a deeply human, relentless interiority. With extraordinary lyric imagination, these poems wonder about being unwanted or renounced. What do we do with unrequited love? Is it with or without it that we would waste away?
Tags: Poetry, Gay
APRIL 2023
Sorrowland
By: Rivers Soloman
Vern – seven months pregnant and desperate to escape the strict religious compound where she was raised – flees for the shelter of the woods. There, she gives birth to twins, and plans to raise them far from the influence of the outside world. But even in the forest, Vern is a hunted woman. Forced to fight back against the community that refuses to let her go, she unleashes incredible brutality far beyond what a person should be capable of, her body wracked by inexplicable and uncanny changes.
Tags: Fantasy/Horror, Intersex
MARCH 2023
The Wrong End of the Telescope
By: Rabih Alameddine
Mina Simpson is a successful surgeon and an out trans woman and lesbian. She’s also alienated from her family and has avoided her home country of Lebanon for decades. But when she gets a desperate call from a friend at an NGO in Lesbos, Greece, Mina leaves her job, home, and wife behind to treat Syrian refugees. Although the journey takes her closer to her home country than she prefers, Mina hopes to make a difference during a humanitarian crisis — and she may walk away changed as well.
Tags: Novel, Trans, Lesbian, Immigrant
FEBRUARY 2023
SPEAR
By: Nicola Griffith
“If you think you didn’t need a queer retelling of Arthurian legend in your life, think again. This quiet reimagining of the story of Percival the Knight is about Peretur, a fiery young woman raised by her mother in a cave in Wales. Longing for something beyond the life she knows, she sets out to find glory. She ends up finding a lot more than that, including the home she’s always longed for. This novella is full of soft magic, queer family, sapphic love, and fierce women wielding swords.” – Book Riot
Tags: Novel, Fantasy, Queer Family, Sapphic Love
January 2023
ACE
By: Angela Chen
DECEMBER 2022
GENDER QUEER
By: Maia Kobabe