hermionesviolin | Entries tagged with book clubs

Last Friday, Ari pointed out that we could keep doing bff book club even after finishing our initial book. So we have 2 pieces left in Once Out of Nature: Selected Essays on the Transformation of Gender by Joy Ladin (2024) and then are gonna have 8(?) essays in Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom (2019). (We opted to continue doing anthologies, 1 piece/week.)

Two days ago, I finished The House of Impossible Beauties by Joseph Cassara (2018) for local library LGBTQ+ book group tonight.

I didn't read All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson & Katharine K. Wilkinson (2020) for climate change book club yesterday, but I would like to read it.

Today I finished reading Kyle Lukoff's new middle-grade novel A World Worth Saving -- which was due back at the library today and I thought wouldn't renew because I had been on a waitlist for it, but apparently there is no longer a waitlist.

I have not yet read Andrew Joseph White's 2022 YA novel Hell Followed With Us, which is in the same vein as A World Worth Saving and Camp Damascus. [A World Worth Saving and Hell Followed With Us are not book club books -- but speak to the struggle to fit in anything that isn't a book club book.]

Today I started reading Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout (2015) by Laura Jane Grace for 24 March (Women's History Month) DEI book club.

I have not yet started reading The Rust Maidens by Gwendolyn Kiste (2018) for March 30 feminist sff book club -- though it looks on the shorter side.

Queer sports journalist Frankie de la Cretaz does Out Of Your League Book Club, and the April book is Fair Play: How Sports Shape the Gender Debates by Katie Barnes (2023), which I would like to do (though book club is only for paid subscribers and ugh, I don't wanna give more money to Substack because Nazis).

Also in April is:

[April 9 climate change book club] Hum by Helen Phillips -- speculative fiction

[April 17 LGBTQ+ library book group] Minor Chorus by Billy-Ray Belcourt

[April (Arab American Heritage Month) DEI book club] prob something Palestinian

And on and on it goes.

So, last May or so, someone we'll call A. started a DEI bookclub at my work.

It has recently dwindled down to a Core Four of us showing up for discussion meetings (though there's about a dozen people in the Slack channel). But about a week after the inauguration, A. posted a notice in the social channel on work Slack about our February (Black History Month) book and invited folks to come to the meeting, join the low-pressure Slack channel, whatever, if interested (since it felt like people might have more appetite for this sort of thing in This Current Climate).

2 people joined the Slack channel, including someone we'll call O.

Two days later, Jan 31, I posted in the bookclub channel:

It's very me that now that we've picked what we're doing for February I'm thinking ahead to what we're gonna do for March. Back in December [when I had posted about month themes through June] I had said:
March: Women's History Month -- we could overlap this with letting [R.] nominate a slate of graphic novels, or with picking an Indigenous memoir (something [A]. would like at some point)
Do people have preferences?
Another option (given recent aggressive attacks on trans people) is to do a book by a trans woman (could be fiction or non-fiction) in March.

Based on the ensuing responses, on Feb 5, A. posted a poll:

What type of text/author do we want to focus on in March?
Memoior written by an indigenous woman
Text written by a trans woman
Include both options in the reading selection/ poll

Feb 11 (today), A. posted in the bookclub channel:

Okay, based on the poll, I'll include options representing both types of texts/ authors! Does anyone have any recommendations for books by a trans woman?

O replied:

I have two: either She's Not There by Jennifer Finney Boyle or Whipping Girl by Julia Serano
I have read the first one and found it very poignant

My partner then got a flurry of messages from me as I spent time on Goodreads:

I have now learned that JFB also wrote a book called Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs and honestly I would be more interested to read that [than her famous transition memoir] and I don't even like dogs. (Ob Jupiter Ascending caveat applies, obvs.)

Good Boy is a universal account of a remarkable story: showing how a young boy became a middle-aged woman—accompanied at seven crucial moments of growth and transformation by seven memorable dogs. “Everything I know about love,” she writes, “I learned from dogs.” Their love enables us to pull off what seem like impossible feats: to find our way home when we are lost, to live our lives with humor and courage, and above all, to best become our true selves.
I had not realized she was such a prolific author.

From her GR bio:
> Her 2008 memoir, I'm Looking Through You, is about growing up in a haunted house. While trans issues form part of the exposition of the book, the primary focus of I'm Looking Through You is on what it means to be "haunted," and how we all seek to find peace with our various ghosts, both the supernatural and the all-too-human.

Again, ALSO MORE INTERESTING!

I also have opinions about how JFB's famous memoir is from 2003 -- so it's over 20 years old at this point. (The haunting book is 2008, as noted above, and the dog one is 2020.) There is value in classics, to be sure, but given how much Discourse has changed over the years, I would overall prefer to read more recent works. I am also just not interested in a standard Transition Memoir. (Not to be confused with what Casey Plett calls Gender Novels.) I recognize I am not a typical cis audience in this way. I'm on gender Tumblr way less than my genderqueer best friend is, and I get all my Gender Reveal podcast filtered through my trans partner, and yet -- I feel like I should make some sort of riff on the xkcd "average familiarity" comic here or something, but I am running out of steam for thinking/writing.

burning like matchsticks in the face of the darkness

when faced with my demons I clothe them and feed them

Entries tagged with book clubs

I am maybe in too many book clubs? 😂

[JFB] in which I am kind of a bitch about trans lit (and/or cis people, or something)

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May 2025

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