5 Books Totally Unrelated to the Holidays to Get You Through the Season
‘Tis the season to be jolly, but to some, the holidays are more exhausting than anything else. Here is a selection of five books from our LGBTQ+ library to read this winter that have nothing to do with the holidays.
Like all the books in our library, they are free to check out at any time, unless somebody snags them first!
1. A Queer History of the United States for Young People
By Michael Bronshi
Queer history didn’t start with Stonewall. This book explores how LGBTQ people have always been a part of our national identity, and contributing to the country and culture for over 400 years. It is crucial for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer youth to know their history. But, this history is not easy to find since it’s rarely taught in schools or commemorated in other ways. A Queer History of the United States for Young People corrects this and demonstrates that LGBTQ people have long been vital to shaping our understanding of what America is today.
2. The Persian Boy
By Mary Renault
The Persian Boy traces the last years of Alexander’s life through the eyes of his lover, Bagoas. Abducted and gelded as a boy, Bagoas was sold as a courtesan to King Darius of Persia, but found freedom with Alexander after the Macedon army conquered his homeland. Their relationship sustains Alexander as he weathers assassination plots, the demands of two foreign wives, a sometimes-mutinous army, and his own ferocious temper. After Alexander’s mysterious death, we are left wondering if this Persian boy understood the great warrior and his ambitions better than anyone.
3. Poems: Selected and New, 1950-1974
By Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich is a major American Poet whose work compels the attention of an ever-growing number of readers. For this new book, she has selected poems that span almost a quarter of a century – 24 years of radical inner growth in the poet. She has made herself important to her readers because she shares with them her commitment to that growth. The present selection draws from all seven of the poet’s earlier books; it also includes eight poems not published in earlier volumes and thirteen poems written since Diving into the Wreck. Readers familiar with Rich’s career will find her poems long unavailable; others, who have come more recently to her work, will discover how far back into the past her themes go. Most significantly, the book is not, as she says, “a summing-up or even a retrospective”; it is “the graph of a process still going on.”
4. Carry On
By Rainbow Rowell
Simon Snow is the worst Chosen One who’s ever been chosen. That’s what his roommate, Baz, says. And Baz might be evil and a vampire and a complete git, but he’s probably right. Half the time, Simon can’t even make his wand work, and the other half, he starts something on fire. His mentor’s avoiding him, his girlfriend broke up with him, and there’s a magic-eating monster running around wearing Simon’s face. Baz would be having a field day with all this, if he were here. It’s their last year at the Watford School of Magicks, and Simon’s infuriating nemesis didn’t even bother to show up. Carry On is a ghost story, a love story and a mystery. It has just as much kissing and talking as you’d expect from a Rainbow Rowell story – but far, far more monsters.
5. The Line of Beauty
By Alan Hollinghurst
In the summer of 1983, 20-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children. Toby, whom Nick had idolized at Oxford-and Catherine, is highly critical of her family’s assumptions and ambitions. As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in the world of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of this glamorous family. His two vividly contrasting love affairs, one with a young black clerk and one with a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling to Nick as the desire for power and riches among his friends. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly comic, this U.K. bestseller is a major work by one of our finest writers.