Queer Literature

New Ideas: January 2026 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Fantasy, Graphic Novels, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature, Thrutopia

Spent by Alison Bechdel

I love Bechdel’s work so I saved this book as a treat and I read it all on one go during New Year. It didn’t disappoint. The art is incredible detailed as always (specially the cats, look for the cheeky cats in almost every frame!). Also, this time Bechdel treats us to a fully-coloured work which makes the small community she portrays here all the more vibrant.

There’s something distinctive about this book. Whereas a lot of Bechdel’s work is autobiographical (i.e. Fun Home, Are You My Mother? and The Secret to Superhuman Strength) what Bechdel does here is something different. The main character is called Alison and looks exactly like her. Her partner is called Holly and looks exactly like the Holly from her other works who we know is the author’s partner. However, Bechdel classifies this work as fiction from the get go. For example, the Alison of this work became famous after publishing a graphic novel titled Death and Taxidermy about her father who was a taxidermist artist (so, no Fun Home and no father working in the funeral business). She doesn’t have two younger brothers but an older sister called Sheila. And this graphic novel is not written in the first person but in the third person.

I’m intrigued but also excited – and creatively stimulated – by observing these approaches. Coincidentally, I also read another book this month that plays with the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, Soldiers of Salamis, which I discuss below. But let’s go back to Bechdel’s new work. Spent tells the story of a small community in Vermont in which established graphic novelist Alison and her partner Holly have decided to start a pigmy goat sanctuary. Alison’s work has recently been adapted into a very popular TV series. However, life is not as easy as her friends think: it’s actually excruciating for Alison to see her own life adapted into TV. Also, the publisher who has made an offer for her new work is also involved with some far-right politics that go against everything Alison believes in so she has to decide between her career and her ideals on this next step of her professional journey.

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Best Reads of 2025

Book Review, Books, Climate Fiction, Creative Non Fiction, Crime Fiction, Eco-criticism, Fantasy, Graphic Novels, Historical Fiction, Horror, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature, Science-Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Speculative historical fiction, Thrutopia, Weird Fiction

This was a hard year for me – I was ill for a lot of it which impacted on my reading speed. During the second half of December, however, I decided to consciously stop checking social media and make my life much more analogue. Surprising no one, this was the month I read the most – and also when I mentally felt the healthiest I’ve been in a long while. So this is something I’m hoping to embrace in 2026 – less time in the digital sphere and more time with a book in my hands…

Books that blew my mind:

The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K Le Guin

Very late to the party with this one, I know, but it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. Cosmic horror, philosophy and religion. Fantasy at its best. We follow a teenager who has been hailed as the high-priestess of an ancient religion. Who has been educated to believe she’s one of the most important humans on Earth – but actually, does she have any power at all to decide her own fate? The descriptions of the maze of caves under the tombs of Atuan had be dizzy with fear and wonder.

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Surrounded by Ghosts: October 2025 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Graphic Novels, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature, Spanish

El Celo by Sabina Urraca

The writing of this book is frenetic, visceral and full of detail that is sometimes luscious and other times absolutely disgusting. It took me a while to finish this book because its themes – societal misogyny, sexism, abuse. It follows a female character – ‘The Human’ – who finds a female dog in the streets of Madrid and becomes her owner almost against her will. Taking care of another creature becomes a mammoth task, but The Human, who can barely take of herself as it is, is willing. What she’s not prepared for is her dog in heat – which comes with its own set of complications and pressures for her to handle this wild side of her animal.

As the book advances – often mixing different timelines, The Human as a child growing up in Tenerife, and also as a young woman trying to make life work in Madrid – a few things are revealed. First, that The Human is addicted to anti-anxiety pills she takes to numb a traumatic experience. Her doctor recognises her as a someone who’s suffered from the abuse of an ex-partner so he sends her to group therapy where she meets other women that are nothing like her (they are much older, much younger, they come from complete different places and classes) but that can understand her experience of being hurt by someone they love. The Human bonds with one of the members of this group – Mecha (is interesting to see that other characters are given actual names) – who becomes a friend, a bad influence, and a saviour.

I really enjoyed this story and thought the writing (in Spanish) was really good. It was an uncomfortable, claustrophobic read – which makes sense, considering the narrator is constantly surrounded by many ghosts, the ghost of her grandmother, who she adored when she was a child, but who died of dementia, the ghost of her ex partner, still controlling and frightening her even though they are not together anymore, the ghost of a still birth in the family which was never discussed or acknowledged, the ghost of her grandfather, who dies during the book right after confessing an unsettling truth, the ghost of the career she’s left behind in marketing, the money and the stability, as she tries to become a writer and recover from trauma, the ghosts of all the abusive lovers of the women from her group therapy sessions… and so on.

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Travels through space and time: August 2025 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Fantasy, Graphic Novels, Horror, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature, Science-Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Weird Fiction
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Here by Richard McGuire

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When I worked at the bookshop, we had a graphic novel that I would check on occasion. Its concept fascinated me. If you don’t know it yet, Here tells a story through double-page illustrations of the same space – a room in a house – spanning years, centuries, and millennia. For example, if you are watching the space millennia ago, there is only plants, maybe some strange prehistoric animal lurking in the background. In the future, water floods everywhere. Or we may get glimpses of a futuristic society. The present time focuses mainly on the twentieth century, allowing you to see the same family grow and evolve in the same space.

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More queerness and manta rays: June 2025 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Climate Fiction, Creative Non Fiction, Eco-criticism, Graphic Novels, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature

Mimosa by Archie Bongiovanni

One of the things I enjoyed the most about this graphic novel is how it focused on queer characters in their thirties/forties. A lot of queer literature tends to have a focus on coming out stories, normally featuring younger characters – but I’m often eager to find more literature written about middle-aged queer people and old queer people too!

In this story, the four protagonists (Chris, Elise, Jo, and Alex) are struggling with many different things, from divorce to single parenting to dating in your thirties (when you may feel the extra pressure of having it all ‘figured out’) to looking for a job that feels meaningful and so on. One of the best moments in this story is when the characters decide to put all together a new club night for older queers (that they call ‘Grind’), so the club scene is not only dominated by the younger generation.

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Books I can’t shut up about: May 2025 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Climate Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature, Science-Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Weird Fiction

Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo

This is the second (and final part) of the Six of Crows duology. I enjoyed it as much as the first one, especially when it came to the evolution of some of the characters from the previous book, such as Wylan, the disowned son of the wealthy merchant Van Eck. Something I loved about this series is how dark it can get, but also, how it also contains some hilarious moments (such as the gang kidnapping Van Eck’s young wife, who turns out to be a very bad singer who loves to sing…and torments them all). Another character that I enjoyed getting to know more of in this second book was Jasper – a gunslinger with a great sense of humour (and also, a gambling issue). His relationship with his father is both sad and tender (he’s been spending his father’s money while pretending he’s a university student, whereas in reality he’s just devoted to a life of crime as a member of Kaz’s band).

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Reading in transit: April 2025 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Fantasy, Graphic Novels, Queer Literature, Spanish

Un Apartamento en Urano (An Apartment in Urano) by Paul B Preciado

Since last year, it seems that I’ve been on a self-imposed quest to read Preciado’s entire backlist, and what can I say? I’m loving the journey, and I can’t stop talking about how great he is as a writer and philosopher. This book is a special one, as it’s a collection of short articles that Preciado originally published in French in the newspaper Libération from 2013 to 2018. This is, coincidentally, the time when Preciado decided to transition and started using a male name and male pronouns, so many of these articles – which he refers to as ‘crónicas del cruce’ (‘chronics of a crossing’) – document it. But Preciado is not only experiencing a gender transition – as he writes, he goes through an important romantic break-up, he travels from France to Spain to Greece and many other countries in between. He reflects deeply on the idea of belonging to a place (and a gender).

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Provocateurs, agitators and change-makers: March 2025 Reading Long

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Crime Fiction, Graphic Novels, Horror, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature, Science-Fiction, Speculative Fiction

Overwork by Brigid Schulte

I found this book in the ‘highlights’ section of my local library, and it came at the right time. Since suffering from academic burnout (and depression and anxiety) during my PhD (while having six other part-time jobs to make a living, because my studentships weren’t really enough), I became interested in work and all the social and legal implications around it. I consider myself an artist first (a writer, primarily). Still, I’ve also had a series of jobs to make a living because the money I make from my writing is pitiful and doesn’t even remotely get close to minimum wage. I know this is the case for many of my writer friends (actually, all of them). I’m pretty fine with it. I mean, I know writing as a profession is extremely devalued, and I’d like to fight to change things in that regard. But I also enjoy having other occupations – I’m a social creature by nature and an extrovert. When I was working in retail, for example, I really thrived by serving other people and aiming to make their days better through our short interactions. It not only made me feel useful, but it also made me feel closer to my community. (For context, I worked as a bookseller for a few years.) Now, I despise some jobs I’ve done (ahem, marketing is pretty up on the list, it was too soul crushing) and loved others (being an academic, teaching and researching Creative Writing). But the constant of my job life has been marked by overwork, uncertainty, precariousness, and generally feeling dehumanised by the businesses I have been part of as an employee. Sometimes I’ve wondered if that’s my fault (am I too sensitive, like my grandmother used to say? Am I just weak? Am I just too much of an idealist?) But also, slowly but surely, I come to realise that a lot of systems we are part of are not designed to make us feel cherished, or to make us feel like our development matters or that we are important. On the contrary, we are treated as liabilities, as highly disposable parts.

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Futures, the spirit world and bodies: February 2025 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Climate Fiction, Creative Non Fiction, Eco-criticism, Fantasy, Graphic Novels, Horror, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature, Science-Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Thrutopia

Any Human Power by Manda Scott

This is, probably, one of the books I enjoyed the most this year because I keep thinking about it even months after finishing it. This is a thrutopia, that is, it imagines ways in which we could navigate an uncertain future (considering how things are going right now in 2025, I think we all know what an ‘uncertain future’ feels like).

The start of the book is interesting: we get introduced to Lan, an old woman on her deathbed. Lan is a queer scientist and an English shaman (in that she uses dreams to travel to the ). As she says goodbye to her family, she promises her grandson that she’ll take care of him.

We move forward, and Lan is the Otherworld, enjoying her existence there but somehow unable to cross to the land of the dead as the promise she made to her grandson is somehow keeping her in a sort of limbo (which seems a chill place where she can enjoy wild nature and even the company of a mysterious dog, but still, she’s on her own). Suddenly, she gets pulled back into the world of the living (as a ghost) because her grandson, now a young man, is asking for her help. And from then on, Lan will need to do everything in her power (as a ghost, so she can’t even communicate with the living unless she uses the dreamworld) to save her family, who is about to undergo a perilous time.

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Best Reads of 2024

Book Review, Climate Fiction, Creative Non Fiction, Crime Fiction, Eco-criticism, Fantasy, Graphic Novels, Horror, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature, Science-Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Thrutopia

2024 was another good year for reading – even better than 2023, it turned out. I feel I have successfully developed a good reading habit again and nothing makes me happier these days than sitting down with a coffee and a book to lose myself in it. This year I did a lot of international adventures – including two transatlantic trips (California and NYC), long car journeys into the far north (the Highlands) and the far south (Cornwall) and crossing Europe by train – and books kept me company all along. 

I’ve also realised that many books in this year’s list (almost half) are written by trans and non-binary authors and almostall books are queer in some degree or another – something that I wasn’t necessarily actively pursuing but I suppose reflects some (internal) journey I may have gone through in 2024!

Here is a selection of what I enjoyed the most this past year.

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