Absolutely precious. Just two teenage boys falling for one another, one while questioning his sexuality, in such a sweet, genuine way.

Part of my June project to read as many Lambda Literary Awards winners and finalists for poetry as I could, with a focus on lesbian and trans authors. Propulsive, incendiary, sexy verse that I wanted to hear out loud, rhythm-rich and image-heavy.

Tales of growing up awkward, finding one's creative niche, and being a woman on the Internet, told with humor and a refreshing restraint against penning a tell-all. This is an eminently pleasant book to read, and I don't think it's less so if one isn't more familiar with Day's work than, "Oh, yeah, I did watch The Guild at some point, didn't I?" and, "Oh, that's right, she was in Dr. Horrible!", which is where I was.

2.5 stars. Maybe it’s just the mood I’ve been in, but I found it difficult to focus on this book and difficult to figure out what exactly it was trying to do. As the ambiguity seems to be at least part of the point, maybe this is just down to a matter of taste.

The second volume of Alice Oseman's Heartstopper continues to be cute and fluffy, the kind of book that I find it impossible to read without a smile on my face. While there's plenty to be said for grittier books about growing up queer, I also think that we need stories like this, stories that feel like a soft place to land in a world of hard, sharp edges.

More sweetness, though this volume tempers the fluff slightly to introduce some more serious issues in Nick and Charlie's lives. I love their growing friend group, and I need a spinoff about Elle immediately.

Honestly, I think that I admire these poems more than I like them. There are pieces in which I could not tell you what I think the words mean, but the forms of which I think are successful in sustaining Choi's connection between cyborgs/AI and Asian femininity. Also, there's a piece about Chobits, naming, and language that is just killer.

Part biography of a taxonomist-turned-eugenicist, part queer memoir, part meditation on the limitations of our attempts to order the world, this is a strange little book. I probably wouldn't have picked it up if not for a podcast that I love, but I'm glad that I read it. It offers a disorienting sort of comfort that feels oddly personal and that I anticipate I'll be thinking about for a long time.

I meant to read this in one day, but it felt like it took me forever. (Maybe I'm turning into a snail person?)

The good:
- The art.
- Some really creepy body horror moments, especially in the early chapters.

The bad:
- The characters don't act like people. There's no clear motivation for what they do, especially staying in town. (Yeah, it's sort of explained right at the end of the book, but that explanation feels too late and too insufficient.) They don't change or grow in convincing ways, and I spent almost all of the book wanting to shake most of them.
- Junji Ito never satisfactorily explains why any of the spiraling creepiness is happening. Episodic chapters add up to a disjointed story of WTF-ery that never really coalesces into anything substantial.

I had seen so many isolated, eerie panels around the Internet over the years that, when I realized we had it in my library system, I had to read it. I'm not upset that I did, but I wasn't that impressed, either.

That said, I need a SFX makeup artist to do a look based on the spiral forehead chapter.