Hi everyone,

We’re finally here. Day 30. Let’s be honest, this June has been pretty fucked. And it feels like it’s lasted 6 years. Looking back over the past month, I really haven’t had the best reading month at all. My sleep has been a disaster and so I’ve stuggled with concentrating whilst reading and reached nowhere near my goal of 15 books. I hope your months have been more sucessful!

What I did manage to do (however unconsciously), is read 8 books that all have matching coloured covers?! How the fuck I managed this beautiful array of yellow, oranges and pinks completely by accident and without noticing before now, I’ll never know. But as a result, you get some happy Autumnal book covers to look at today!

Books read

This month, I managed to read 8 books in total. My favourite book of the month was definitely Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender which absolutely blew me away and I already want to reread!

The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender

Real Life by Brandon Taylor

The Henna Wars by Adiba Jaigirdar

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

The Gravity of Us by Phil Stamper

Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera

Sissy: A Coming of Gender Story by Jacob Tobia

Blog posts

I still can’t quite believe I actually managed to post every day. I’m so exhausted and I’m going to have soooo much free time in July. If you missed any, here’s a full run down of what happened on my blog this month!

Reviews

• The City We Became by N.K Jemisin
• The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J Klune
• The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics by Olivia Waite
• Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender
• The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon
• Real Life by Brandon Taylor
• The Henna Wars by Adiba Jaigirdar
• The Gravity of Us by Phil Stamper

Recommendation lists

Genres

• Best queer science fiction and fantasy
• Retellings but make it gay
• Historical fiction
• Queer romcoms
• The queer novella
• Memoirs
• Contemporary YA

Identities

• Books by Black authors
• Bisexual books
• Lesbian books
• Gay books
• Trans, nonbinary and gender diverse books
• Asexual and aromantic books

Tropes

• Enemies to lovers
• 2 Fast 2 Tropey (Disaster queers, slowburn & there’s only one bed)
• The tropes to top all the tropes (Monster romance & found family)

Misc

• My TBR
• Discussion post: Let’s get personal
• My favourite queer covers
• Top queer releases of 2020 so far
• Queer releases still to come (July – December 2020)

Community

I wanted to finish by shouting out some incredible creators and the great work they’ve created during Pride month this year. Prepare to add EVEN MORE books your TBR!

• The Quiet Pond have been introducing queer creators all month long with their series Our Friend is Here – Pride Month Edition!
• Bowties & Books had a great video celebrating bisexual, trans and queer books!
• Word Wonders posted a wonderful video about her most anticipated queer releases of 2020! She also posted on her blog with a big list of books with pansexual rep which I’m so happy to see because I only knew of one book that had pan rep when I was creating my posts this month, which is shockingly bad. More pan rep pleeeease!
• Reads Rainbow created prompts from Gilbert Baker’s Pride flag and gave us lots of book recommendations for them!
• The Book Corps posted a huuuuuuge list of F/F books on her TBR!

Finally, as we move into the second half of the year, I hope you all are continuing to support Black authors in the coming months as you have done this month, that you continue to educate yourself on racism, and that you are looking into ways you can support Black people in your local community.

Whilst you’re here, please do also take a few minutes out of your day to sign petitions and donate some money if you are able. It takes two seconds to sign a petition, there’s no excuse. And so you don’t even have to Google right now to find out where to go:

• The Black Lives Matter carrd is your go to resource for information on petitions to sign and places to donate. It’s updated regularly with new information.
• The Australian BLM database has petitions for local issues
• There’s a fantastic database if you’re interested in learning more about prison abolition and the need for this
• If you want to be an ally, you can start by putting in the effort! This resource has a full out SCHEDULE you can follow over a month to educate yourself on racism and how to be an ally. There’s different schedules depending on how much time you can spend a day on this, and it starts at just 10 minutes a day so again, there’s really no excuse!

And to my fellow Aussies, if you’re looking for places to donate to locally, here are some people and charities you can support:

• You can donate to the families of those murdered in custody, Tanya Day, David Dungay Junior, and Joyce Clarke
• Black Rainbow – provide support to Indigenous LGBTQIA+ youth
• Sisters Inside – an absolutely brilliant charity advocating for human rights of women and girls in prison
• The Indigenous Literacy Foundation works to lift literacy levels in remote Aboriginal communities