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The AfterEllen.com Book Club: August Rewind

When I first started the AfterEllen.com Book Club, I wanted to make the idea of choice central in how it was run, because DEMOCRACY! While presenting a few selections of books to choose from each month has largely worked well, I think, there are a few drawbacks to it. Mainly, the fact that I get to research so many great looking books each year for the club, but then only have time to read a third of them!

Every now and then, we also just need a break-as workers, as people, and yes, even as readers. And I can’t think of a better time to take a break than August.

So starting now, I’m going to make a new AE Book Club tradition. Each August, we’ll take a break to collect our breaths for a little bit. If you want to totally not care about lesbian and queer literature during this month, you go ahead and ignore it! Or if you want to catch up and actually read that book that we all read months and months ago that you didn’t get a chance to read, because you were busy being a productive and magnificent human being in the modern world, you can do that now! Or if there was a book that was included as an option one month that you voted for but no one else did because everyone else were losers, now is the time to go back and celebrate that book!

I present to you a list of all of the books that have been included as options for the AfterEllen.com Book Club since its inception.

Wild, Cheryl Strayed Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters Six Metres of Pavement, Farzana Doctor Inferno, Eileen Myles Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Jeanette Winterson Mean Little Deaf Queer, Terry Galloway Adaptation, Malinda Lo Santa Olivia, Jacqueline Carey The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin Love, In Theory, E.J. Levy Astray, Emma Donoghue The Last Nude, Ellis Avery Rubyfruit Jungle, Rita Mae Brown The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall The Price of Salt, Patricia Highsmith Calling Dr. Laura, Nicole J. Georges The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard, edited by Tom Leger and Riley MacLeod Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg Drag King Dreams, Leslie Feinberg First Spring Grass Fire, Rae Spoon The Raven’s Heart, Jesse Blackadder Carry the One, Carol Anshaw The World We Found, Thrity Umrigar Silhouette of a Sparrow, Molly Beth Griffin Nevada, Imogen Binnie Before the Rain: A Memoir of Love and Revolution, Luisita Lopez Torregrosa The Dream of a Common Language, Adrienne Rich The Madness Vase, Andrea Gibson A Thousand Mornings, Mary Oliver Jericho, Ann McMan And Playing the Role of Herself, K.E. Lane Curious Wine, Katherine V. Forrest The Will of the Empress, Tamora Pierce Ammonite, Nicola Griffith The Privilege of the Sword, Ellen Kushner Blue is the Warmest Color, Julie Maroh Willow: Wonderland, Jeff Parker Stumptown, Greg Rucka Inheritance, Malinda Lo Landing, Emma Donoghue Bottle Rocket Hearts, Zoe Whittall Missed Her, Ivan E. Coyote Cha-Ching!, Ali Liebegott Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive, Julia Serano Bodies of Water, T. Greenwood Redefining Realness, Janet Mock Love Alters: Lesbian Love Stories, edited by Emma Donoghue On Loving Women, Diane Obomsawin Love Burns Bright: A Lifetime of Lesbian Romance, edited by Radclyffe Bi! Notes for a Bisexual Revolution, Shiri Eisner Radical Relations: Lesbian Mothers, Gay Fathers, and Their Children in the United States Since World War II, Daniel Winunwe Rivers Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out, Susan Kuklin Everything Leads to You, Nina LaCour Far From You, Tess Sharpe Fat Angie, e.E. Charlton-Trujillo Gender Failure, Ivan E. Coyote and Rae Spoon The Gravity Between Us, Kristen Zimmer In My Skin: My Life On and Off the Basketball Court, Brittney Griner Annie on My Mind, Nancy Garden

If you’re in, choose a book, and then find the discussion post for it on our Goodreads page and try to revive the discussion this month. I’m going to read finally read Stumptown! And Adrienne Rich! And finish a bunch of recent books that I’ve started and never finished, like In My Skin and Beyond Magenta! You can also talk your book(s) up on Tumblr, tagging them with “AfterEllen Book Club,” and I’ll try to give you a shout out on our book club Tumblr. Let’s do this thing, August!

I’m also curious to know, if you have played along with the book club, even just for a bit, what selections from the above list have been your favorite? So far, I think the ones that have stood out for me are Ellis Avery’s The Last Nude, Malinda Lo’s Adaptation novels, Janet Mock’s Redefining Realness, and just this month, the iconic Annie on My Mind.

As a parting note, I should also mention that Sarah Waters‘ new novel, The Paying Guests, comes out at the end of August. It’s her first new release in five years. We can probably all agree that that will be our pick in September, right?

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