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We've Always Been Queer

The podcast is Books That Burn because the original idea was "books that burn you", discussing fictional depictions of trauma. It's also an intentional reminder of the pile of burning books, you know the photo I mean, the one from WWII. It's a pile of books about queerness, gender, and sexuality. Just in case you don't know, the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) was headed by Magnus Hirschfeld.  It was a resource for gay, intersex, and transgender people, both of knowledge and medical help. It also helped the community with addiction treatment and contraception. It wasn't perfect and some of the ideas they had seem out of date now, the ones we know about anyway. But they were trying to make queer people's lives better, and they were a community resource at a time when people really needed it. Which is all the time, we always need these accesses. And the Nazis burned the whole library. It took days, they had to drag the books ou...

Mort by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #4, Death #1)

Death comes to us all. When he came to Mort, he offered him a job.

After being assured that being dead was not compulsory, Mort accepted. However, he soon found that romantic longings did not mix easily with the responsibilities of being Death's apprentice...

TITLE: Mort
AUTHOR: Terry Pratchett
PUBLISHER: Turtleback Books
YEAR: 1987
LENGTH: 316 pages
AGE: Adult
GENRE: Fantasy
RECOMMENDED: No

Queer Rep Summary: No canon queer rep.

Most of this was fun and I had a good time, but there were too many random moments that took me out of the narrative with an off-putting comment that didn’t fit the rest of the story. Usually this took the place of treating the mention of someone’s fatness or the idea that they might be insane as if the observation of it was the whole joke. These moments were especially frustrating because so much of the rest of the humor is great. It’s paced well, the dynamic between DEATH and Mort was strange but interesting, and I liked the ending. 

CW for ableism, fatphobia, alcohol, toxic relationship (not depicted), violence, suicidal thoughts, animal death, murder, death.

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