## 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

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**Happy reading!**

-B

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### 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