Thought Train to Pusan

One last book from the Show Your Pride display at the library this month! (Not that I can’t or won’t read many other LGBT books in the time to come). Picked this one up on a whim, and turns out, my instincts were off base on this one. Reading this book felt like a chore, and while there were some nuggets of possibility and good ideas flitting by, it never stuck the landing on, well, anything really. Running follows a 17-year old girl named Bridey, fleeing her past life in America and now finding herself in Athens. She forms a small family with a couple of boys from England, Jasper and Milo, and they live at a hotel, working unofficially as “runners” who bring customers, existing in an almost constant drunken haze. That is, until they begin to question their positions after becoming embroiled in the work of some serious criminals. In addition to visiting different points of the trio’s timeline in Athens, we also jump to pieces of Bridey’s past, as well as the fu...

"Clad not exactly as a boy but, rather confusingly, as the boy I would have been, had I been more of a girl." Another book snagged off of the Show Your Pride display at our local library this month: and can you go wrong with checking out a Sarah Waters novel? Even when they are not great, they are still worth a read for the twists and turns (the mileage of which may vary), but most importantly the striving to connect to the relationships around us, or even just to understand how they fit within our lives: there is always a sense of longing, desire, and humanity. In Tipping the Velvet , the story follows a young woman named Nancy in 1890s England, who finds herself drawn into the wonders of a performer named Kitty, who performs songs as a male impersonator. But it is not the act and life of performing itself which is drawing Nancy away from her family to become a part of Kitty’s life, but a stirring in her heart. From here we see how Nancy and Kitty’s relationshi...

--> Happy Pride month, y’all! Our library has a wonderful little feature display of LGBT+ books, and go figure, the last thing I just returned ended up immediately on it, as well as this book here being something that could easily be featured on it. And a great book it is, in my opinion! If, perhaps, quite an emotional one, given the often difficult-but-important subject matter. And I wanted to read something like this right now as I parse through some complicated personal feelings regarding Pride this year; well, it’s a lot to get into and here is maybe not the place, but what I will say is that we cannot lose the history and importance of said history when understanding where we are now and how we understand other peoples’ experiences, etc. The Great Believers is a story split into two timeframes: one in the 1980s-1990s follows a young man named Yale, living in Chicago and grappling with the realities of the AIDS epidemic, as it begins to affect his world and ...