Both a brutal and an ultimately hopeful collection of essays about surviving under capitalism as a queer person.

I'll be thinking about the final essay, "The Lame One," for a long time:

"My wrath could be useful, not just to me, but to other people.
I could make my wrath a knife to use however I wanted.
A knife is a tool or a weapon, depending on how you hold it."

Starting in late 2021, I've noticed a big uptick in the number of books I've read by/about asexual people, and I decided to read Ace to learn more. You know, as a good ally.

But then some recent experiences made me reevaluate a lot of my assumptions about myself and want to dig deeper. So I read Ace not as an ally, but as someone for whom demisexual seems an increasingly appropriate label.

What I found in its pages isn't a "so you think you might be asexual" primer, but rather a consideration of what asexuality is and how asexuals are positioned in a society that prioritizes sexual and romantic relationships above others. Chen also considers how gender, race, and disability influence how people perceive asexuals both within and outside of the community.

I admire how Chen blends reporting, analysis, and memoir into a book that felt substantial even as I tore through reading it in barely more than a day. By far my favorite parts were the quotes from interviews she conducted with aces, which did not always precisely line up with my experiences, but that were almost always illuminating and interesting and have helped me start the work of teasing apart the differences between romantic, aesthetic, and physical attraction.

One day I shall write the trans lesbian historical romance novel of my dreams (instead of just doing some lazy plotting every now and then), but until that day comes I'm glad that there's A Lady for a Duke. The characters, humor, and angst made it well worth the read, even though it was, once again, a book situation where I just had to try and pretend to be the dude for most of it.

Five friends-to-lovers, fake-your-death, kidnapping-and-sword-fights, please-give-Mira-a-sequel stars.

This felt very much like Tumblr circa 2014, I really disliked the best friend, and the love interest creeped me out.

I read this back in college, when I was also watching The L Word one disc at a time from Netflix and telling myself that I definitely wasn't a lesbian, and I thought of it again while reading Nevada by Imogen Binnie and realized I had never logged it on here. So I'm fixing that.

I don't enjoy the more episodic volumes as much as I enjoy the ones focused more on the core relationships, and this one was very episodic, with lots of little strips showing what a bunch of background characters were doing during the cultural festival. I get that this is slice-of-life, but sometimes there are way too many lives to keep track of all the little slices from. The ending was a huge cliffhanger and although I hope that there will be some major plot progression in Vol. 19... I'm sure that Tadano will weasel out of confessing anything and we'll be in for yet more yearning and uncertainty. Sigh.

Oh hey, this just won a Lammy!

Real, relatable, and quietly heartbreaking.

Yep, this absolutely is sad girl lit but with a vampire protagonist, who spends the whole novel working an absurdly shitty internship, worrying about her mother, having a crush on a boy, and struggling with her food issues. A24 should option it.