#haints

[azhvne-blog]

IMAGES:

HAINT BLUE ON THE WINDOWS, SHUTTERS, DOORS OF SOUTHERN HOUSES

[esmeraldaka]

South of Midnight | Story Trailer

Can't wait!!!

[fragmentedhekatean]

lmao I had a funny thought a bit ago because i was looking at Appalacian folklore since our family is originally from that area and its funny bec my grandmas porch was painted Haint Blue which is supposed to keep Haints or ghosts/evil spirits away and we live in IOWA

[conjuremanj]

Hoodoo Wind Chimes For Protection.

Example Photo

This is something you'll see in the more lower, swampy areas of the deep south like Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, but not so much the main cities.

The Bone Wind Chimes: These can be made from any type of bones you find or attracted to, you can find your own bones or buy your bones. Bones are a good juju (see post on jujus). These wind chimes are made to help keep Haints away or from entering your home.

Then say a protection prayer apon it.

[tales-from-a-little-witch]

Tales from the red house: the first steps

Tw: talk of sa and child abuse

I don’t know why dad wanted us to move in this stupid fucking house. We had to move our old house away from all my friends and my old school all so we can move here.

At the fresh start, but I don’t know how fresh a start can be in a house like this. This has been in my dad’s family for over five generations. The house belong to my uncle Clayton, but he’s gone now he was the only good thing in the house now there’s nothing.

A lot of bad stuff happened in this house......lot of kids were hurt in ways that a child should never be hurt....

A lot of bad stuff happened to my dad and the siblings here, I know he doesn’t wanna be here, not really at least we only moved here because we were fucked out of our last house but the shitty landlord..

Seeing the house for the first time so long since Clayton died is hard. it’s not as bright and the energy just feels bad.. like it’s wrong without him...

Stepping into the house for the first time, it was so cold not just cold like house that was empty but cold, freezing cold like a ice box.

Don’t even get me started on the smell.. smells like rotten eggs and it just feels so heavy...like the air is heavy.. I’ve only felt that a few times and all those times were bad. I’m worried.

[marsinthecorner]

Some folks say if you see a door in the woods, never go through it. Y'all never know wherr you may end up.

[dzgrizzle]

Absolutely beautiful. Brought a tear to my eye. A true ghost story from Ann Hite.

[ausetkmt]

Many Validate The Claim That 'Jackson Square' In New Orleans' French Quarter Is HAUNTED

I was there on New Year's and I was also there on Halloween same year. And I can tell you that you hear all sorts of things and it's not The River.

[saysmith-ranbir]

Recently read that the Gullah Geechee people paint every entrance into their homes with ‘haint blue’. It seems this pale blue-greenish color confuses the haints (ghosts) and they will past the home by.

[horrorhodgepodge]

The Reformatory

“A gripping, page-turning novel set in Jim Crow Florida that follows Robert Stephens Jr. as he’s sent to a segregated reform school that is a chamber of terrors where he sees the horrors of racism and injustice, for the living, and the dead.” https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62919847-the-reformatory ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 5 out of 5. While Historical Fiction is outside of my usual genre, I’m glad I…

[localhollerhaint]

A lot of yall think that lady on that plane is just crazy, but the hillbilly that I am would've got off with her, I know better than to go doubtin people when they see a haint and I ain't flyin NO WHERE with no haints on the plane!! 🥲🙅‍♀️

[bigangrybutch]

This drawing of Sonny is dope af I didn't realize I hadn't reblogged it 😭😭😭

I've always really loved your unique lineart and shading style!

Got myself a second hand tablet to give digital art another go even though it drives me bonko. I don't know how y'all do this 💀

Anyways, this is my gal Sonny. She hunts monsters :) here she is fishing for a ghost

[tales-from-a-little-witch]

The little girl in the graveyard

When I was very small, my family went to visit my great-grandmother's grave. It was in an old graveyard that wasn't well-taken care of. Being so small, I had no interest in standing around my great-grandmother's grave listening to my parents drone on about the past or hearing her life story repeated yet again. After all, I had heard the tales countless times before. I was also very young to truly understand why my parents were so sad.

They had always told me that when someone passes on, they aren't really gone, and that you can still feel their presence. But this was strange for me, because my great-grandmother had passed away in the fall, yet standing at her grave, I felt no sense of her presence at all.

To me, it was just a lonely grave, enclosing her cold, lifeless husk. My parents were standing with just a shell that had once held her soul, and that's how I saw it back then.

I didn't feel like crying over an empty vessel that had once housed her spirit.

If she wanted to visit me, she would, I believed.

I asked my parents if I could go and explore the graveyard instead.

I ambled around the graveyard, perusing the tombstones, caressing the flowers, and plucking grandfather's beard moss from the low-hanging branches of old trees. Suddenly, I noticed a girl peeking out at me from behind a grave, dressed in old, odd clothes. As a child, she reminded me of the girl from "The Secret of Roan Inish.''

I thought she looked beautiful, like a princess. She waved at me, and I waved back. I can't recall every single word she said, but I can remember us playing tag. Her smile was as bright as sunshine, her voice as sweet as a spring bird's song, and her laughter was downright infectious.

It felt as though we had been playing for hours upon hours. Time slipped through my fingers like grains of sand, as we darted around the graves, weaving in and out between trees and shrubs. I was left panting for air, but she never seemed to weary, seemingly possessing a boundless supply of energy.

I suddenly heard my parents calling out for me, telling me it was time to go. I remembered turning back to the girl, seeing the look of sorrow on her face, but I promised her that we'd play again next time. Then, I ran back to my parents, feeling almost a pang of guilt at having to leave her behind.

Once I was back with my parents, I told them all about the girl I had met and asked them when we'd be coming back. They looked at me, puzzled, and simply got in the car, offering no answers.

I relentlessly babbled on about my friend in the graveyard, both of my parents shooting concerned and confused glances at each other, until my mother finally spoke up.

"Nim-Nims, baby, there was no little girl playing with you."

she said looking back at me over her shoulder. I stared at her, puzzled and indignant, irritated at the thought that my parents were just playing a trick on me. They often pulled little pranks, and I believed this was just another one.

"You guys aren't funny; you're just being mean, I don't like these jokes...."

I protested, my face growing flushed with anger and frustration. Despite my insistence, my parents consistently refuted the existence of the girl. As we drove away, I pointedly gestured towards the precise spot where I had first laid eyes on her.

I was too young to recognize that I was actually gesturing towards a cluster of five small graves, each belonging to a member of the same family.

My parents abruptly fell silent after that, refusing to discuss it further. They told me that perhaps I would get to see her again the next time we visited.

[marsinthecorner]

I've lived in Kentucky all my life, safe to say it's influenced me a bit lol. Song lyrics are Southern Gothic by Dan Tyminski.

[jazzkrebber]

Kuwei: must be hard not being able to laugh

Wylan: I do have a sense of humor you know

Kuwei: I've never heard you laugh before

Wylan: I've never heard you say anything funny

[burins]

I read a LOT of books this year, which is always exciting. I also neglected to do much in the way of write ups during the year proper, so here are little opinions about all 84(!) book-books I read. I love to yap about what I read and I would love to talk about any and all of these. (Graphic novels and comics are gonna be their own post because there are also too many of those.) Bold are my top faves, headphones are things I read as audiobooks.

JAN

Less - Andrew Sean Greer

Shockingly funny book on a writer’s midlife gay crisis. I was a little mid on the end but the prose here was fantastic.

The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future - Ryder Carroll

Beyond Bullets: Creative Journaling Ideas to Customize Your Personal Productivity System - Megan Rutell

Read about a million of these for a program; this was the only one worth recommending if you want to try journaling. (The official guide is Fine but it throws a lot at you at once.)

The 365 Bullet Guide: Organize Your Life Creatively, One Day at a Time - Zennor Compton

Lettering for Planners: A Step- - -Step Guide to Hand Lettering and Modern Calligraphy for Bullet Journals and Beyond - Jordan Truster and Jillian Reece

This should not have been a book.

Afterparties: Stories - Anthony Veasna So

I’ve been meaning to read this for years and years-- So was a friend of a friend-- and it was as excellent as I expected, and also made me tremendously sad that we won’t get more writing from him. 

Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space - Amanda Leduc 🎧

This is theory for a general audience but I still wished it was more robust-- Leduc’s arguments had about the academic rigor of a tumblr post, which is a shame.

Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945–1955 - Harald Jähner 🎧

Nation-making and identity formation in the aftermath of fascism. There has been a lot of writing about the German project of the post-Nazi era, but this was a very solid read.

Water and Salt - Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

I came across Tuffaha’s gut-punch of a poem, “Running Orders,” online, and while the rest of the collection doesn’t always hit as hard, it’s still fantastic.

Bring Up the Bodies - Hilary Mantel 🎧

Reading this and The Mirror and the Light at the beginning of the year really ruined me for all other prose for the entirety of 2024, tbh. Nobody does it like Mantel.

Bandits, Misfits, and Superheroes: Whiteness and Its Borderlands in American Comics and Graphic Novels - Josef Benson and Doug Singsen

After reading Birds of Prey in October-December I really wanted to read some writing on whiteness in comics. This didn’t touch on what I was most interested in exploring and I did come away from the book thinking damn. None of that book was nearly as good as Tony Wei Ling’s fantastic piece on Crumb and alt-comics’ self-hagiography in SOLRAD.

Mending with Boro - Harumi Horiuchi

Make and Mend: Sashiko-Inspired Embroidery Projects to Customize and Repair Textiles and Decorate Your Home - Jessica Marquez

Mend!: A Refashioning Manual and Manifesto - Kate Sekules

Mending with Love: Creative Repairs for Your Favorite Things - Noriko Misumi

Mend It, Wear It, Love It!: Stitch Your Way to a Sustainable Wardrobe - Zoe Edwards

Can you tell I taught a visible mending class in February? Honestly any one of these are a good pick if you’re wanting to get into visible mending. This is the best for giving you a whole menu of techniques to choose from and having very accessible instructions.

Modern Mending - Erin Lewis-Fitzgerald

Mending Matters: Stitch, Patch, and Repair Your Favorite Denim & More - Katrina Rodabaugh

Creative Mending: Beautiful Darning, Patching and Stitching Techniques - Hikaru Noguchi

This is the best one for getting into the ethos of visible mending. It’s a deeply kind book.

Joyful Mending: Visible Repairs for the Perfectly Imperfect Things We Love! - Noriko Misumi

Visible Mending: A Modern Guide to Darning, Stitching and Patching the Clothes You Love - Arounna Khounnoraj

The Mirror and the Light - Hilary Mantel 🎧

Once again. Nobody is doing it like Hilary Mantel.

FEB

Finna - Nino Cipri 🎧

Anticapitalist multiverse Ikea relationship drama should have been my entire jam but this book was simply quite bad.

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy - Cathy O’Neil 🎧

Are you ready to get depressed about data? This is a great book for your liberal mom. I could wish it were more anticarceral but for what it’s actually covering it does a great job.

Vegetables Love Flowers: Companion Planting for Beauty and Bounty - Lisa Mason Ziegler

Garden planning :) 

Flux - Jinwoo Chong 🎧

If you liked Severance (the show) or have ever projected some identity feelings onto a not-very-good TV show, this is a book for you. Imperfect pacing but still gripping, and I’m excited to see what Chong does next-- this is his first book.

Ocean’s Echo - Everina Maxwell

The premise of this book is simply so sexy. And overall the book is too!

The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles - Malka Older

Yayyyy Mossa and Pleiti return! I love this series and I loved this book.

A Land with a People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism edited - Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, Esther Farmer, & Sarah Sills

I don't really have a write up for this. It's powerful and well written and I would recommend it.

Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time - Teju Cole

Best book I read all year, frankly. Teju Cole writes about art and culture and being alive when the world is falling apart like nobody else.

MAR

The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi - Richard Grant 🎧

Oh you hate to see a British guy get sucked in by white Southern niceness. (Richard Grant, in this case, is the British guy.) A lot of the stories in this were excellent but Grant gives way too much credit to folks clinging to the tattered remnants of the Old South.

Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine - Michelle U. Campos

Excellent historical antidote to the idea of perpetual struggle in Palestine. Also interesting read just for looking at how citizens of Jerusalem were using national and imperial identities for their political agendas at the time.

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us - Ed Yong 🎧

Lovely book that resists anthropomorphism and rendered me a font of “hey babe can I tell you a cool snake fact?” for about three weeks. 

The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free - Paulina Bren 🎧

You know I should have expected a book like this to be exactly what it was and yet. In addition to the sort of milquetoast stabs at feminism the structure is bad-- it devolves into Sylvia Plath’s life story and doesn’t really recover. I don’t mind reading a book about Sylvia Plath but I would like to plan to do that going in. 

The Hunter - Tana French

Only Tana can manage to write a book that is mostly just pretty normal conversations for 75% of its runtime and yet made me unbelievably stressed the whole time I was reading. Creeping dread! We love it.

Shades of Grey - Jasper Fforde

I last read this in high school when I was so excited to see that the sequel would be coming out any day now. Over a decade later, any day at last arrived! So it was time for a reread. The sexual politics of this book are insane, which I didn’t pick up on in 10th grade, but it is still an extremely clever and enjoyable book.

Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus - Bill Wasik 🎧

I learned a lot of fun facts in this book but it was rambling and also I do wish books like this would stop trying to overstate the importance of their topic. Rabies can’t be the source of vampire legends AND zombie legends AND werewolves. (Zombies in particular. We know where those come from and it ain’t rabies!)

The Transcriptionist - Amy Rowland 🎧

As a former transcriptionist the idea of a mystery that revolves around the intrinsic weirdness of being the fly on the wall was very appealing to me! This wasn’t quite the book I thought it was but I still enjoyed it. 

City Editor - Stanley Walker

If you can ignore the amount of name-dropping of people who were certainly famous in 1934 newsrooms but I have certainly never heard of, there are definitely some amusing anecdotes. Walker writes with a dynamism and bombast I would love to see in any kind of writing nowadays. However it is also a book written - a newspaperman in 1934 so it does hit every single -ism like it’s trying to get a pinball high score.

The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism - Adam Nagourney 🎧

This book is exceedingly kind to the NYT and it was wild to read this the month that the Hamas mass rape story very publicly fell apart. However reading it did give me a very clear picture of how that story, and stories like it, happened in the first place. 

Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom - Carl Bernstein 🎧

Of all the “how do newspapers work?” books I read in March-April to prep for a fic I didn’t end up being able to write, this was my favorite. Bernstein is an engaging narrator and this answered my questions about how a story actually happens (particularly pre-internet.)

APR

Beacons in the Darkness: Hope and Transformation Among America's Community Newspapers - Dave Hoekstra

This ping-pongs between case studies in a way that would be totally fine in a feature story and is unforgivable in a book. But the case studies are interesting!

Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life - Margaret Sullivan

This is more memoir than NYT hagiography, and thus I enjoyed it much more.

Ocean’s Godori - Elaine Cho

I’ve got to stop reading SFF that came out this year. Unfortunately, it is part of my job to be aware of SFF that comes out this year. The pacing on this was UNBELIEVABLY sick-- the inciting plot incident only occurred halfway through the book, and the first 60 pages were us being fairly clumsily introduced to too many characters. The author’s end notes effusively thanked her editor and I think she should not have done that because a really solid editing job could have made this into something I really enjoyed. (People who work in publishing I’m sorry about publishing.)

Bombshell - Sarah MacLean

If your whole plot is going to hinge on a Deep Dark Secret, it better be deep and dark. 

Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance - Jeremy Eichler 🎧

I got this for my grandma for Christmas and that was a mistake because this book is so depressing. If I had thought for two seconds I would have known this! However. I did like it! 

MAY

JUN

Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics - Qiana Whitted

Really loved this one. 

Super Bodies: Comic Book Illustration, Artistic Styles, and Narrative Impact - Jeffrey A. Brown

This book would have been fantastic if the author had a) had any art historical or visual analysis training and b) done research about manga and the ways its styles have been used in the west. As neither of those were true this book mostly made me wish it was another, better book. Good comics recs though. 

Red Side Story - Jasper Fforde

Long-awaited sequel! This is an entirely solid book, though I wish I could have read it when I was a teen because it would have rocked my shit then. 

JULY

The Ladies Rewrite the Rules - Suzanne Allain

Really the only thing you need to know about this Regency #girlboss book is that at the very end of the book, which made almost no pretenses to historical accuracy wrt attitudes about gender roles, the main narrative tension is the love interest’s plans to go off with the East India Company to make his fortune. The other characters have no moral qualms about this; it’s proposed with the same air that a modern book would talk about someone going to college across the country. It made me feel completely insane. 

Escape Velocity - Victor Manibo

You know when you read a book and you say wow, I can’t wait to watch this as a Netflix special, but boy was it not very good as a book? That. Also I really wish we had spent more than about two scenes with the servants on the space hotel, so that I could care about them as people and not as plot devices!

Making Our Future: Visionary Folklore and Everyday Culture in Appalachia - Emily Hilliard

Engaging stories of modern West Virginia.

Belonging: A Culture of Place - bell hooks

The writing on exile in this did make me cry while I was eating lunch.

AUG

Appalachia on the Table: Representing Mountain Food and People - Erica Adams Locklear

More historical than I expected but solid writing on how perception of food affects perception of people.

What You Are Looking For is in the Library - Michiko Aoyama

I really didn’t expect this to get me but I am not immune to lovely, small-scale stories of people being kind to one another in community. Teared up on desk. 

SEPT

Watercolor Is for Everyone: Simple Lessons to Make Your Creative Practice a Daily Habit - Kateri Ewing

This was for a class and everyone liked the class! 

Hot Summer - Elle Everhart

I am so hit or miss on contemporary romance. This was a messy, delightful reality show romp. Light on drama, but the robust character relationships are the star of the show.

Loving Mountains, Loving Men - Jeff Mann

The poems here are generally better than the prose, which gets a bit repetitive at times. The poems are also generally very good, and a few of them made me cry. 

Second Night Stand - Karelia and Fay Stetz-Waters

I wish I had known going in that the authors were a married couple looking to tell “a story about a healthy queer romance.” All love to them, but I am simply not very interested in reading a story that bills itself that way! And as you might imagine there was a lot of therapy speak and very little narrative tension. Sex scenes were great, though, and if you want a very queer comfort read you might enjoy this. 

You Should Be So Lucky - Cat Sebastian

Very chewy character relationships. Sebastian manages to tell a story that feels of its time (1950s sports/journalism) while not being deeply bleak, which is a balance that many many queer historical romances completely bomb.

Lady Eve's Last Con - Rebecca Fraimow

Delightful lesbian screwball comedy. In space! 

OCT

Slippery Creatures - KJ Charles

The Sugared Game - KJ Charles

Subtle Blood - KJ Charles

Imagine if Lord Peter Wimsey had a passionate love affair with a gruff and tortured soldier recently back from WWI. That’s basically these books and I inhaled them. Shout out to detectorist for the rec!

The No-Show - Beth O’Leary 🎧

About 60% of the way through this book, I said, oh man, I hope that the twist to this book isn’t [redacted]. That would make me so mad. Well, it was, and it did! 

Drunk on All Your Strange New Words - Eddie Robson 🎧

Scratched the itch for sci-fi mystery, and the premise is fantastic. The narrator does a mostly excellent job but her American accents are distractingly bad, so if that will bother you read the book.

Deviant Hollers: Queering Appalachian Ecologies for a Sustainable Future edited - Zane McNeill and Rebecca Scott

Most of the essays in this are great! Every so often I get in my head about whether I can claim an Appalachian or Southern identity and whether I should do any writing on the subject. And then I read an essay that makes a lot of claims about “I centralize queer, trans, rural southern voices” and then does not proceed to actually demonstrate how they are doing any of that work, and go oh wait I’m actually fine. 

NOV

Better the Blood - Michael Bennett 🎧

A pretty solid thriller elevated by a very solid conceit: a Maori detective is investigating modern-day killings connected to a 19th century execution of a Maori chief by a group of British soldiers. This suffered a little from being written by a screenwriter who very clearly had certain shots in mind while writing (sometimes that works in prose, sometimes it doesn’t) and also from periodic intercut scenes from the killer’s POV (also a convention that works better in TV) which did undercut whodunit tension. Also the main character is a cop. But I ended up finding her sympathetic, which is a HUGE ask given the subject matter. 

The Stars Too Fondly - Emily Hamilton 🎧

Hated this. I tried to be measured in my initial review but every single part of this book was simply so bad. I wish I had those 11 hours of my life back. If this author is your friend I apologize, and also I hope she didn’t base a character on you, because every character in this book acts like a 15yo.  

Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy edited by Meredith McCarroll & Anthony Harkins

I worked my way through my own booklist this fall and this was one of the best books on it. I kept trying to put it on display at the library but our copy was checked out the entire time. Give this to your uncle who won’t shut up about Ohio. 

The Pairing - Casey McQuiston 🎧

First half of this was way more compelling than I expected it to be, and then McQuiston makes the WILD choice to switch POVs entirely and permanently halfway through the book. And I found the second character pretentious and given to fits of purple prose (he describes the first character as a “superbloom” at one point and also won’t shut up about the most art history 101 pieces of art) so I did not particularly enjoy the book as a whole. I will give it points though for having a pretty non-cringey “hi i’m actually nonbinary” conversation, which is astonishingly rare.

Jonny Appleseed - Joshua Whitehead

This was initially a book club pick for a meeting that didn’t end up happening, which is a bummer because I would like to talk about this book with more people! A lot of lines in this are going to stick with me-- Whitehead shifts through time and place with deftness and grace. If you like K-Ming Chang’s Bestiary I think you will enjoy this-- Whitehead revels in the body in a similar way.  

I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition - Lucy Sante 🎧

If you’re not already a little familiar with the NYC art scene in the 70s and 80s you may not enjoy this, because Sante name-drops a lot. I am, and I loved it-- it’s a lovely meditation on growing old and hitting your breaking point. Sante is also a fantastic writer, and this is an excellent counterbalance to the particular type of trans writing that is very very common online. (Nothing wrong with that writing, but you need a balanced diet.)

The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society - CM Waggoner

I loved Waggoner’s previous books and I did end up enjoying this one a lot! It’s an enjoyable send-up of the cozy mystery genre.

Regarding the Pain of Others - Susan Sontag

A reread for my yaoi zine piece! Not only does this still hit but I think it’s a particularly apt piece of writing to be reading right now, when we are daily surrounded - images of suffering. Sontag, as ever, does not have any neat answers for us, but she does make you think more deeply about the world that surrounds you.

DEC

How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom - Johanna Hedva 🎧

I loved parts of this, and I hated other parts, which for me is a good sign about a book of theory. I have more thoughts about disability activism and being online that don’t fit into a quick write-up for a book. 

Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia - Stephen Stoll

This took me six months to read, but mostly because I was reading it occasionally on desk and I kept having to return the ebook. It demands a little bit more sustained attention than I was giving it! It’s an excellent overview of the history of land use in Appalachia through the 1930s and it gave me a lot of good context for the mountains I grew up under. 

The Forbidden Book - Sacha Lamb 🎧

Unfortunately, I think I would have liked this a lot more if I hadn’t read When The Angels Left the Old Country first! It’s a perfectly nice YA story-- but it definitely feels YA, and I don’t tend to enjoy reading a lot of YA.

Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am - Julia Cooke 🎧

I still don’t really know how I feel about this book. It does avoid some of the pitfalls of #girlboss nonfiction, but also it falls right into others. Mostly I wish it had engaged really at all with the people these women met on their travels, or like. Literally anyone Vietnamese. 

Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation - Eli Clare

Oof ouch my bones!!! This hits on a lot and does it with incredible grace.

To Say Nothing of the Dog - Connie Willis🎧

I wish my grandma was still alive so I could recommend this to her, because she would have adored it. Delightful time travel Victoriana. 

The Message - Ta-Nehisi Coates 🎧

I really admire the move of making the entire second half of your highly anticipated book about the injustices you saw in Palestine, and I hope it pays off and every NPR listener who loved Between the World and Me picks this up and reads to the end. 

Everyone in this Room Will Someday Be Dead by Emily Austin

This book reads like a 200-page panic attack, which is not a diss! Really revels in the situational hilarity of anxiety/OCD/something unspecified.

Rules for Ghosting by Shelly Jay Shore

Okay I had to add this one in because I finished it after making my post. This book (contemporary queer Jewish romance with a bit of the supernatural) was so lovely and deeply felt and often laugh out loud funny. The family relationships are the real star although the romance is also very sweet.