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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 It wasn't perfect and some of the ideas they had seem out of date now, the ones we know about anyway.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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A Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

Aster has little to offer folks in the way of rebuttal when they call her ogre and freak. She's used to the names; she only wishes there was more truth to them. If she were truly a monster, she'd be powerful enough to tear down the walls around her until nothing remains of her world. Aster lives in the lowdeck slums of the HSS Matilda, a space vessel organized much like the antebellum South. For generations, Matilda has ferried the last of humanity to a mythical Promised Land. On its way, the ship's leaders have imposed harsh moral restrictions and deep indignities on dark-skinned sharecroppers like Aster. Embroiled in a grudge with a brutal overseer, Aster learns there may be a way to improve her lot-if she's willing to sow the seeds of civil war.

TITLE: An Unkindness of Ghosts
AUTHOR: Rivers Solomon
PUBLISHER: Blackstone Audiobooks
YEAR: 2017
LENGTH: 352 pages (11 hours 54 minutes)
AGE: Adult
GENRE: Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction
RECOMMENDED: N/A

Partial Queer Rep Summary: Lesbian/Sapphic Secondary Character(s), Trans Main Character(s), Closeted/Questioning Main Character(s), Intersex Main Character(s).

DNF 5 hour 17 minutes in (44%).

I love so much about this book, I just couldn't handle a particular topic that's triggering for me when I was already stressed (mostly in good ways) by the story so far. The worldbuilding is very cool, paying attention to language and tiny cultural differences existing between the decks. The audiobook performance is good. I like Aster as a main character.

I really wish I could handle finishing this, but I just can't.

CW for sexual content (brief), ableism, cursing, racism, homophobia, transphobia (brief), interphobia (brief), pregnancy, abortion, alcohol, mental illness, dementia (backstory), child abuse, sexual harassment, sexual assault (backstory), fire/fire injury (brief), vomit, blood, violence (graphic), self harm (brief), infertility, medical content (graphic), medical trauma (graphic), cancer, terminal illness, slavery, police brutality, suicide (backstory), parental death (backstory), death.

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A Black person made of a star-filled night sky


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