Category: Gender
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As Long as I’m Still Breathing: Becoming a Transgender Orthodox Jew by Avraham Kolenski
As Long as I’m Still Breathing is a 75-page memoir broken up into seven chapters of first-person past-tense prose and free verse poetry. It delves into Avraham’s struggles with depression and how transitioning to male and converting to Judaism helped give him the strength to stay alive. It tells the story of how he converted…
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Lightning Strike by Catherine Asaro
Rating: 3/5, average This one I read with the local book club. I probably wouldn’t have picked it up otherwise, and I might have even skipped it if I didn’t know it was by a woman writer with a PhD in Chemical Physics. The cover on Amazon looks really cheesy, but the writing isn’t too…
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The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon
Rating: 4/5, good I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It reminded me of how fun fantasy novels can be! When I was reading this, I was reading it only at night and I was super excited to go to bed because I could read it before going to sleep. It was a little intimidating at around…
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Women, Race & Class by Angela Y. Davis
Rating: 5/5, excellent This book should be required reading—especially for white feminists! Angela Y. Davis’s Women, Race & Class is a classic feminist text. It came out in 1981 but it’s just as relevant today, and I think it will be evergreen because of its well-referenced discussion of black history. Women, Race & Class is…
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Free Women, Free Men by Camille Paglia
Rating: 3/5, average Trigger Warning: pedophilia, transphobia, sexual assault I must have been in a rebellious mood or something when I bought this. I’d been following Reason magazine online for a little while because my dad was a libertarian and I thought I’d come to understand his politics more by reading it. He never mentioned…
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I Rise: The Transformation of Toni Newman
Rating: 4/5, good I picked up this book because I saw Toni Newman on a Zoom call with Charlie Jane Anders and a lot of other trans and nonbinary authors. There were so many cool authors and good books to pick from it was a little overwhelming (the call included Alok Vaid-Menon, Meredith Talusan, Vivek…
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The Light in Front of Me by Aria Howell
Rating: 4/5, good Full disclosure: This is my partner’s book and I edited it. The Light in Front of Me by Aria Howell is an LGBT high fantasy book. It’s about Valerie, the princess of a kingdom called Rayleth, who is engaged to marry Eliot, the prince of Va’cerio. Valerie and Eliot have been good…
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The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
Rating: 4/5, good Diverse Reading Challenge #4 This book was originally published in 1984 and it’s been a standard in classrooms. I’ve definitely seen it around, though I was never assigned it. We did read Sandra Cisneros’s story “Eleven” in class in 7th grade, and I loved that story. I think The House on Mango…