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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 It wasn't perfect and some of the ideas they had seem out of date now, the ones we know about anyway.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
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The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness

What if you aren't the Chosen One? The one who's supposed to fight the zombies, or the soul-eating ghosts, or whatever the heck this new thing is, with the blue lights and the death?

What if you're like Mikey? Who just wants to graduate and go to prom and maybe finally work up the courage to ask Henna out before someone goes and blows up the high school. Again.

Because sometimes there are problems bigger than this week's end of the world, and sometimes you just have to find the extraordinary in your ordinary life.

Even if your best friend is worshipped by mountain lions.

TITLE: The Rest of Us Just Live Here
AUTHOR: Patrick Ness, narrated by James Fouhey
PUBLISHER: HarperCollins
YEAR: 2015
LENGTH: 348 pages (6 hours 24 minutes)
AGE: Young Adult
GENRE: Contemporary, Fantasy
RECOMMENDED: N/A

Partial Queer Rep Summary: Gay/Achillean Secondary Character(s).

I wanted to like this, but I generally don't like YA contemporary, and once all the weird/magic/superhero stuff is confined to brief glimpses and chapter headings, it leaves an interestingly framed YA contemporary novel where crushes, school dances, and ongoing parental neglect are the big stakes. I'm not interested in those stakes, but if you are then this might work for you. The depiction of OCD was realistic in a way that might be triggering for anyone else who has it, including a lot of ideation. I haven't read anything else I can recall with such a realistic portrayal of this condition, so I liked that inclusion, but that wasn't enough to hold my interest (especially when that started getting stressful for me). It has a very irreverent tone which is used for everything from crush woes to discussions of current and past trauma, so please check the CWs before proceeding. 

CW for sexual content (brief), ableism, homophobia (brief), fatphobia, emotional abuse, alcoholism, mental illness (graphic), dementia, excrement (brief), vomit (backstory), blood, gore, car accident, injury description, medical content, medical trauma, adult/minor relationship (backstory), eating disorder (backstory), self harm (graphic), suicidal thoughts, child death (not depicted), animal death, death.

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A bright beam of light reaches down to land on a huddle of small, grey buildings.


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