November ended and it got COLD. Thank goodness I now have a thoroughly well insulated home office. Definitely the season for curling up with a book.

Every so often my work book club picks a topic rather than a specific book and we all choose our own book on that topic and talk about them as a group. Which is a great way to discuss some big (and often weighty) themes and actually get people to show up for the discussion. For our December meeting we’re discussing LGBTQIA books and I found I couldn’t stop at one book. In the past month I’ve read three queer books and I have another three queued up to read next.

Happy December.

Books read

Truth & Dare by So Mayer
This is a collection of short stories dealing with gender, trauma, queerness, science (especially physics), history and religion. Some of the stories are essay-like, often with a personal memoir slant that may or may not reflect the author’s own history, while others are sci-fi – and some blend both of those things. All the stories are playful with language and packed with references to everything from classical philosophy to recent TV shows. I loved this but it isn’t a quick read.

Love Me Little by Amanda Vail
In this 1957 novella, a 15-year-old girl and her boarding school roommate agree to lose their virginity over their summer break from school. They go with their families to a holiday camp in upstate New York, where they list all the eligible young men and start flirting in earnest. This is funny, insightful and surprisingly modern. It’s all the more impressive that Vail was only 17 when she wrote this, loosely based on her own family.

Girlcrush by Florence Given
It’s 2030 in a fictional British city and Eartha, an artist, has just realised that her long-term boyfriend is a cheating asshole and that she is bisexual. She makes a messy, drunk confessional video and posts it online, and it goes viral. Suddenly she is discovering queer sex and dating at the same time as becoming a professional influencer and it quickly becomes too much. The online and offline Eartha are diverging, she is overwhelmed with adoration and abuse, and it isn’t clear who she can trust. This is a frank, funny novel that deals with more serious themes than you might expect from that set-up. I really enjoyed it.

Occupation Diaries by Raja Shehadah
Palestinian author, lawyer and human rights activist Shehadah wrote these diaries from his home in Ramallah in 2009-2012. He combines details of everyday life in a Palestinian occupied territory with some history of the region, current events and people he knows. As a well-educated middle-class man who is semi-famous, Shehadah has more freedom than most Palestinians to move around Palestine, Israel and overseas. And yet he still faces restrictions, bureaucracy and loss at every turn. It is tough to read how he felt that Israel was crossing so many lines in its treatment of Palestine that the international community had to finally say that’s enough, in the knowledge that here we are 11 years later in a situation significantly worse and most countries still won’t stand up to Israel.