I think to myself, It is terrifying to be visible, and then I think, I have been waiting all my life to be seen. — Zeyn Joukhadar
or, January: a review.
A little later than originally planned, since I (Charlotte) went up to York these past couple of days (and visited, among other places, Portal Bookshop), but finally, our third newsletter is here! This has now fully replaced our blog wrap ups, so you’ll find all our favourite reads, watches, & listens in this single newsletter each month.
You also might have noticed we’ve posted less on the blog this month than usual: that’s going to continue, to be honest. We’re not pulling back from the blog, so much as making sure that our content continues to be of the quality we want, to give ourselves time to think about post ideas and not rush reading/watching for them. But we’re still here! If ever you want recs a bit quicker, do feel free to drop us an email.
Finally before we start… this is a long one, so you’re going to have to click through to read it all (sorry!).
First up, as ever, a quick runthrough January on the blog!
Anna posted about December’s music releases.
We revealed first our awards shortlist, and then the results.
Anna posted about YA releases for the first half of the year.
Our interview with Louangie Bou-Montes went up.
I posted about sapphic releases for the first half of the year.
And last but not least, February’s book releases!
We’ve been reading…
Personally I (Anna) had a very good reading month this January. I read both a lot and actually good books. (And yes, I did also read four achillean sports romance novels in the span of basically one weekend, but that is besides the point!) I want to focus on my absolute favourites, though!
Spear by Nicola Griffith; a beautiful lesbian fairy tale, a legend maybe. It has that magical, indescribably quality about the writing. It’s full of characters who change their minds, who grow as people, who live their lives alongside saving the world.
Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke; if you follow us on twitter, you probably saw that I asked for recs of weird books the other day (and everyone Delivered!). This was the book that sparked that. On the surface, it’s about a guy sucked into an app his company uses for chatting at work. But just as much, it’s about the work culture in our modern world, about connections between people, about the beauty & magic of life. Truly, unlike anything I have ever read.
Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead by Emily R. Austin; an atheist lesbian walks into a church to find a job. Sounds like a set up for a joke, and yet! It created one of the most beautiful & most hopeful novels I know. I’ve seen people describe this novel as bleak, and frankly I just don’t understand why. There’s this undercurrent of being alive is magic throughout the whole story.
Boy Parts by Eliza Clark; what a fucked up little book! The mc is a giant bitch, and also a gorgeously unreliable narrator. She curates a certain image of herself, with the way she dresses, speaks, parties, the things she shows us through her pov. But in the end she never really quite pulls it off. And then there’s a whole other layer of more interesting past actions catching up with her...
The best romances I read last month are from Carina Press, which is under Harper Collins, so I’ll just leave you with the titles: Contract Season by Cait Nary & Diamond Ring by K.D. Casey.
In case it wasn’t immediately clear, we both of us read a lot of what might be termed litfic in January (we’re now clearly in our litfic eras). The first book I (Charlotte) have to rec from this month is Conor Sneyd’s Future Fish which is, to put it mildly, batshit insane in the most hilarious way. It’s out in March, so make sure you get your hands on this one!
There were three other ARCs I read this month that really stood out to me. Firstly, Courtney Gould’s second novel, Where Echoes Die, is finally upon us this year and it’s truly worth the wait! Courtney is one of those authors whose work always has incredibly clear and poignant themes, like Melina Marchetta for me in that respect (and, honestly, highest praise there!). Frankly, this one even makes me think of a quote from my favourite of Marchetta’s books, Jellicoe Road: But grief makes a monster out of us sometimes... and sometimes you say and do things to the people you love that you can't forgive yourself for.
Next up, a couple of August releases (I know, I know): Prophet by Helen Macdonald & Sin Blaché, and I Will Greet the Sun Again by Khashayar J. Khabushani. The former is part sci-fi, part litfic, part love story, a mediation on human desire and nostalgia. The latter is about survival and the different forms that it takes. (Please, if you do want to read it, be aware it contains such content as child sexual abuse, incest, domestic abuse & Islamophobia.)
On top of these ARCs, I also did get to some backlist books (my current project is trying to read all 134 books that were on my TBR at the end of last year. It’s progressing about as successfully as you might expect). This includes I, the Divine by Rabih Alameddine, and two Rebecca Brown short story collections: The Last Time I Saw You and The End of Youth. (These two were not on my TBR…) At all three books’ heart is human connection, which makes them the best sort of book imo.
And lastly, I had to add The Skin and Its Girl in here, even though I’ve not quite finished. It’s a book I’m taking my time over, because it has writing that you need to savour and absorb, and I can already tell it’ll be one of my favourites of 2023.
We’ve been watching…
Anna, surprisingly had nothing to add to this section, so it’s all me for once this month. I (re)watched Pixie, which I maintain is actually a fun bisexual awakening wrapped up in a comedy crime caper. I’m right and you cannot change my mind.
Second up, and more conventionally a gay film I suppose, is Los Fuertes, which Anna had been trying to get me to watch for ages. It’s a very understated film, and beautiful for it. It lets you infer a lot of what’s going on, trusting you to pick up on things. And, what should really sell you on watching it, it contains this scene. (Yes, I’m a sucker for fun dancing scenes.)
Thoughts and things that caught our eyes
Just one, real quick, this month: Stephanie Burgis’s Dangerous Flames will be released more generally, so if you didn’t catch it on Patreon you can now get hold of it. It’s just a taste, but (if you’ve read the other 4 novellas in the series — that’s a massive hint btw) the sapphic love to hate to maybe a second chance? So good.
