As I promised last month, I started July by reading The Way Disabled People Love Each Other by my favourite poet, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. I’m not usually a big poetry reader, but I love theirs, and I spent most of the book anticipating rereading it.
As expected, with the release of the Heartstopper Forever movie, my Heartstopper hyperfixation continued full tilt in July and took up most of my headspace, so I spent more time reading fanfic than books. (And I miiight have started writing some.)
The only other books I finished were queer YA graphic novels I picked up because I was looking for readalikes, including Coming Out Perfect by Richard Mercado, The Avant-Guards, Vol. 1 by Carly Usdin and Noah Hayes (which checks off Task #7), and Always Raining Here by Hazel + Bell.
The one that I think Heartstopper fans will like the best was Encore! by Miles Toriko Burks, but I also really enjoyed Kiss Number 8 by Colleen A.F. Venable and Ellen T. Crenshaw, though that one is sadder.
Given how my brain has been lately, I hesitate to make too many grand plans for my August reading, but some options I have checked out from the library are Bad Queer by Gayathiri Kamalakanthan (Task #4) and Queer and How We Got Here: A (Personal) History by Hazel Newlevant (Task #13).
Ideally, I’d also like to reread Taiwan Travelogue by Shuang-zi Yang and translated by Lin King before my book club.
And speaking of rereads, my complete boxed set of Heartstopper just arrived…