Listen—are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life? / Mary Oliver
Or, our first newsletter!
As twitter was burning last month, I said to Anna, hey what if we started a newsletter. Anna being Anna, they indulged me, and here we are! The idea is that this will pretty much replace our usual wrap up posts (from January onwards), with much of the same content, but a little more personal. Hopefully. We’ll see how long it lasts because both me and Anna are notoriously forgetful. But with luck, you can expect this gay little email to land in your inbox once a month!
Here’s a quick rundown of what we posted on the blog in November, to start with.
We reviewed The Stars Undying by Emery Robin, which is a book you do not want to miss out on! Space! Gays! Politics! It’s got it all.
Anna posted their playlist of music releases by LGBT artists from October (along with their favourites of them).
Our interview with Rob Osler went up.
We reviewed Aliette de Bodard’s The Red Scholar’s Wake, another space opera, but, in a way that’s hard to qualify, space opera like you’ve never seen it. Unless you’ve read one of Aliette’s other books. In which case, it’s like that.
Anna recced ten literary fiction books, for fans of the genre or for those looking to get into it.
I did a deep(ish) dive into the gay shit in the Goodreads Choice Awards of 2022.
We reviewed How to Excavate a Heart, the perfect read for the winter holiday season.
I recommended ten sports fiction books with LGBT rep, some of them romances, some not.
We posted our interview with Nathan Tavares.
And, last but not least, we updated our various monthly releases posts!
(And breathe.)
We’ve been reading…
Whereas our wrap ups contained all the books we’d read in a month, Anna has decreed that we should only include books we can say we actively enjoyed in the newsletter (I say decreed, but I did agree). If you do, for some nefarious reason, want to follow everything we read, our Goodreads links are on our blog and about page here.
Giant Days by John Allison & co. This is a graphic novel series following a group of university friends and it is so funny. It’s full of chaotic hijinks and total messes and, honestly, if you haven’t picked this up before now, you’re missing out!
Work for It was a reread (the third one…) but it’s a book that gets better each time you read it. Talia Hibbert is an author who understands her characters and their motivations so well and it really shows in this book.
Fran Dorricott is one of my auto-read authors, so The Loch has been a highly anticipated read for a while. And, boy, did it live up to my expectations! This is a genuinely thrilling thriller, completely unputdownable, and a book that transported you to a house on the edge of a cold Scottish loch.
Speaking of books which transport you, at one point while reading How to Excavate a Heart, I looked up from it to realise that it was, in fact, not New Year’s Day. That’s how engaged I was by this one. This is a book about recovery from a relationship that, looking back on it, was more traumatic than you had originally thought. It’s about almost running over a cute girl, then dating her. It’s about an adorable corgi in his wee snow boots. I don’t read a huge amount of YA anymore, but this one I would highly recommend.
We’ve been watching…
I started 1899 and, although I only made it through the first episode thanks to work and other busy-ness, it definitely caught my attention. Very mysterious and with a lot of secrets waiting to be discovered.
We’ve been listening to…
love you with the lights on / morgxn; Two Men in Love / The Irrepressibles; Im-bim-billilah / Mashrou’ Leila; Oceano di Cose Perse / Casadilego; Presi Male / Michele Bravi ft. Mahmood
Thoughts and things that caught our eyes
This section of the newsletter is going to contain a random selection of things, namely thoughts that might have been spawned by books, shows, films, podcasts and so forth, and also new things that we found out about!
Mari Costa’s The Demon of Beausoleil, a graphic novel about a demon child and the odd couple who raise him, for the price of $7 only.
Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn, which features a 60+ lesbian MC, who just so happens to have been a deadly assassin. Oh, and her ex-employers are trying to kill her now.
A Czech film, Šarlatán, about a 20th century herbalist and the things he did to maintain his status as regimes around him changed
One last thing… If ever you want recs, you can always drop us an email (contact@readsrainbow.com), and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible to answer your question. And hey! We might even use the prompt for recs in this newsletter too!
Until next time (when I promise to have made Anna contribute a bit more)!
