Bee's Books | Some unique books for your TBR stack #wei...

Some unique books for your TBR stack #weirdlit #weirdbooks #uniquebooks #bookrecs #lgbtbooks

I hear this often, and while I think there is plenty of room to look critically at the traditional publishing industry and market changes…I think it’s a shallow analysis.

If we’re to talk about how “BookTok ruined reading” (another similar claim I don’t subscribe to because again, I think it’s a narrow understanding of what’s happening in publishing), then we need to talk about how algorithms shape perceptions. And while those algorithms certainly favor certain discourses and topics and perpetuate biases and injustices (Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Umoja Nobel is an excellent read on this), consumers do not engage passively. Every act of engagement feeds that algorithm, and if that engagement is done without critical awareness, a commitment to diversity of thought, and without effort put into seeking out a variety of stories, then certainly, it might appear as though all the books are the same or that the online book community is homogenous in preference.

With a little bit of effort, however, it becomes clear that fresh, singular, subversive, exemplary stories are out there.

Here are a few wonderfully unique stories for your TBR:

• Wife Shaped Bodies by Laura Cranehill

• Herculine by Grace Byron

• The Reformatory by Tanarive Due

• A Sky Full of Elephants by Cebo Campbell

• The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones

• A Dark and Drowning Tide by Allison Saft

Happy reading!

-B

Get to know me through some of my favorite very specific sub-genres!

Do we share any favorites?

Queer body horror:

• Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon
• Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White
• Wife Shaped Bodies by Laura Cranehill
• What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher
• Providence Girls by Morgan Dante

Vengeful vampire romantics:

• Hungerstone by Kat Dunn
• Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk
• Immortal Dark by Tigest Girma
• A Dowry of Blood by S.T. Gibson
• Interview with the Vampire TV series
• A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night film

Radical hopefulness:

• The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
• The Parable of the Sower & The Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler
• The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin
• A Psalm for the Wild-Built & A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers

Very niche non-fiction:

• Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer
• Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique by Sa’ed Atshan
• Plucked by Rebecca Herzig
• Abolish Rent by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis
• Black in Blues by Imani Perry
• Rogue Sexuality in Early Modern English Literature by Ari Friedlander

Weird genre-benders:

• The Seep by Chana Porter
• Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield
• Severance by Ling Ma
• Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
• Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi

#booktaste #bookrecs #readmorebooks #readingispower