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    Book Recs: Lesbian Adult Fantasy

    In keeping with the fact it’s Lesbian Visibility Week this week, today’s rec list is going to be one of solely lesbian adult fantasy recs (as requested by Anna). And I mean specifically lesbian, rather than sapphic in general (of which I have an old list here), so we’re talking characters who are attracted to women, but also are completely not attracted to men (simplistically put).

    A couple of disclaimers: firstly, I’m fairly sure I’m right in reading these characters as lesbians. But obviously, since it’s fantasy, you don’t tend to get the word itself used, or even hedged around like in contemporary. As such, these are to-the-best-of-my-knowledge recs. Secondly, yeah, a lot of these are upcoming ones. Turns out I haven’t read all that many sapphic adult fantasies that you can pinpoint as lesbian. Something to work on.

    All that aside, though, here are ten books you absolutely need to read. Call it lesbian canon, if you will.

    And hey, a lot of those titles are available on Scribd, so if you want to check out that service but don’t have an account yet, use my invite code to get 2 months for free! (This also gives me one free month.)

    Since writing this post, I’ve continued these recs as a series, so if you want to check out the other posts in that:

    Gay | Bi/Pan | Trans

    Part twos:

    Lesbian (II) | Gay (II) | Bi/Pan (II) | Trans (II)

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    Book Recs: Lesbian Lit

    This is a rec list I keep promising and then never coming through on, but finally, finally, I’ve got my act together. If you’ve followed me on twitter, you’ll know I regularly complain about lesbians in (generally YA) lit never using the word lesbian about themselves. I even wrote a whole post about just that.

    But I never offered you the books I know that do use the word lesbian (of which, I’m finding, I know depressingly few). So, these are they (with the exception of one, which I had to get Anna to tell me how to rec). If you’re looking for more, there are some in this thread.

    Before we start, I just need to make clear how I’m deciding on these books. First and foremost, each book has to feature a lesbian character who claims the word lesbian for themselves. Not someone else calling them a lesbian, not random mentions of lesbianism but the mc never says “I’m a lesbian”. Yes, I’m being a bit strict in cases, but I want to offer you ten books where the mc claims the label in a positive context.

    I have also tried to keep only to YA books, but I had to sneak one adult in there to make up numbers.

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    Book Recs: LGBT Found Family

    Let’s be honest, we all know that there is no trope better than found family. And actually, as long as we’re being honest with each other, found family as a concept is inherently gay. There’s just something about choosing your own family, that rings true to all LGBT people.

    So yeah, here I am with ten LGBT stories featuring the found family trope. Only the best for you guys!

    And hey, a lot of those titles are available on Scribd, so if you want to check out that service but don’t have an account yet, use my invite code to get 2 months for free! (This also gives me one free month.)

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    Book Recs: High Fantasy (II)

    It’s been a while since I did my first high fantasy rec list on here, and I’ve read a lot more of it since so, it being Friday and I cannot come up with a more interesting theme for this list, I decided that it’s the perfect time for a sequel.

    In the interests of making this list a little more, I don’t know, readable, I suppose, I’m going to only include books that are already out. So, yes, there are several upcoming I’ve read and loved, but they won’t be on here. Plenty of motivation to make a part three then though…

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    Book Recs: Enemies to Lovers (II)

    Waaaay back when this blog was just a baby blog, I did a rec list of enemies to lovers (or otherwise hate to love) and that rec list has been probably one of the most viewed of all time. But then I went back and looked at it the other day, and was like… this is quite basic.

    And hence the idea for a second part was born.

    Before we begin, however, I would like to say yes I am aware that enemies to lovers and hate to love are not synonymous. No, I don’t really care, but if you want to be specific, this is more of a hate to love list.

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    Book Recs: College-aged LGBT Protags

    As requested by Lena on Twitter, here are ten books with “characters in college/university or that general age range”. A few are straight up taking place at uni, a few are just with protags roughly that age.

    I really wanted to include two more books, but I just featured them on my last rec list (Warm Hug LGBT Books), so I figured y’all need some more variety. Please know, though, Abroad by Liz Jacobs & Weak Heart by Ban Gilmartin also fit this theme perfectly.

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    Book Recs: Scribd, Intermediate Mode

    So, you’ve opened up Scribd. The choices are overwhelming. You’ve read everything Anna suggested on their previous post. But where do you go from here?

    Not to worry because today it’s my turn to provide you with 50* books that you can read on Scribd! I’ve done the digging so you don’t have to! So whether you’re looking for YA or adult, classics or poetry, sapphic, achillean or trans/nonbinary rep, hopefully there’s something here for you.

    A little disclaimer first though: I myself haven’t read all of these books (some of what I initially included has been taken off since, thanks for that Scribd!), but they are all, if not read, then ones I want to read sometime soon.

    *You may not actually have access to all 50 of these books, since Scribd can vary in availability depending on country.

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    Book Recs: Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum

    In desperation, two days ago, I asked for a rec list theme. The response I got was the theme of pirates, or the sea in general. Now, I’ve not read that many pirate books (not that I would feel able to rec, at least), so I went with the latter.

    So, if you’ve been listening to sea shanties non-stop for however long, in this list you’ll be able to find yourself a book that they’re the perfect soundtrack to.

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    Book Recs: Warm LGBT Hug Books

    We asked what rec lists you guys would like to see & got this gorgeous request that maybe, possibly we have almost fought over. Just maybe.

    So anyway, the request was: “wholesome books full of queer characters if possible, essentially just books that feel like a big queer warm hug because I cannot handle reading anything else”. You would fight to recommend people books like that, too, wouldn’t you? Enjoy then!

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    Book Recs: Best of 2020

    Buckle in, guys, this is gonna be a monster of a post! To give you some context for just how giant our list of favourite reads of this year is: we only listed three books each from 2018 & five books each from 2019.

    But this time? We had to divide our list into 3 categories: backlist books, books released in 2020 & books to be released in 2021. We also cheated for the last two categories and added a group of books that both of us loved, so we didn’t have to fight over them. Also all the groups are 5 books long, apart from the group of 2021 ARCs which is uhh… 16 books long.

    So yes, in total here are 41 books we read this year and loved the most! Enjoy!

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    Book Recs: Gender in SFF

    A while back, Anna asked for rec list suggestions and one of the ones that came up was nonbinary SFF. Now, they passed that onto me, since that’s not really their ballpark, and I sort of changed the rules ever so slightly. Instead of solely nonbinary rep (although most of the books here are still that), I’ve just gone for SFF that actually considers gender in its worldbuilding.

    It’s a smaller category than you might think, sadly. But because it’s Christmas (or another winter holiday of your choice), I’ve lengthened this post from the usual 10 books to include a couple more.

    So, enjoy!

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    Book Recs: YA Contemporary That Isn’t About Coming Out

    Books which features coming out scenes are all very well and good — we do, after all, need to see a wide range of those and there are areas where that story still hasn’t been told — but sometimes you just want to read a book where the fact that the main character is gay is wholly incidental to the story. That is, not a coming out story, nor really a romance.

    So, here are 10 books which (hopefully) suit that remit. Yes, some do feature romances, but they aren’t romance books, in the sense that it’s central to the story. (Oh, and they’re all contemporary, because it doesn’t really make sense to make my task easier by including other genres, since obviously they wouldn’t have coming out scenes.)

    But anyway. On with the list.

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    Reads Rainbow Awards 2020: The Results

    It’s finally time! The results are in! Six weeks of voting and over 1000 votes cast, and we finally have the winners right here.

    Last year, we included the top five (or more, since there were a lot of ties) in each category but this year, we can have a distinct top three in every category bar one, so that’s what we’ve gone with. However, if you do want to know how the numbers worked out, there’ll be a link below to the results (as of tomorrow, probably, thanks to internet connectivity and slow computer issues).

    See the breakdown of results here!

    Otherwise, happy scrolling!