My name is Danika, and today I have my top 17 of 2017. So I'm a little bit
embarrassed about this being my top 17 of 2017. I actually made a video where I
ranted about how silly it is to continue to add numbers to your top 10, top 15, top
17 every year. And yet, here I am. I read about 115 books this year and I just
couldn't narrow it down to my top 10, so I ended up with 17—I could have done
more! There were more that I wanted to talk about. But I figured that was the
last acceptable stopping point. Probably no one wants to watch a top 20 of 2017
video. So here I am with my embarrassing, hypocritical top 17 of 2017. I read about
90-95% of the books this year from the library, so I don't have many of my top
ones with me. For number 17 I'm going with Difficult Women by Roxane Gay. This
is a collection of short stories. This is an extremely dark collection and should
have trigger warnings for rape, violence, as well as a scene of quite extreme fat-
shaming. It's definitely dark and difficult and has a lot to say about
misogyny and kind of the ways that women try to survive it, and being a difficult
woman: being someone who doesn't live up to what we expect women to be. It also
has moments of fabulism in it, which I wasn't expecting: it's not entirely
realism. There are also some queer stories—not
a ton of them, but there were a few, which I was very happy to see. And there are some
moments of hope in this collection. One story actually completely warmed my
heart and I just sighed happily after I finished it. No surprises that is one of
the queer stories. This is one that is not easy to get through, but I thought it
was really well done. It was very powerful. And Roxane Gay is definitely an
author I'm going to continue to follow. And number 16, I have Knit One,
Girl Two by Shira Glassman, and if you're as into the queer book internet as I am,
you will definitely be familiar with Shira Glassman. She's a fantastic author
who does the Mangoverse series, which is a queer fantasy series with lots of
lesbian and bisexual women characters. This is a little novella of hers that's
just a really cute, fun story. It has a lot of different niche interest groups
represented. So, obviously there's the queer women content, both lesbian and bi
women. The main character and the love interest are both artists: one is a yarn
dyer and one is a painter. There's also a lot about fandom, there's some fat
representation. This feels very slice of life and realistic. There's definitely a
romance here, but that's not everything that's happening. It's just as much about
the two main characters' relationships with their siblings or with fandom. This
was just a really fun, light read. You can read it in one sitting! It's only
about two dollars on Amazon, I think, so you should check it out if any of that
sounds interesting. After that is Star-Crossed by Barbara Dee. This is a
middle grade book with a bisexual girl as the main character, which is amazing,
and pretty much a first. And you can tell just from the cover,
which has the two girls dancing together, her and her crush, and that's so sweet, and
it's just incredible to have a middle grade book that has queer representation,
and that shows that on the front cover. This is also super cute and it's about
them acting out a Shakespeare production: Romeo and Juliet. It actually has a lot
of interesting conversation about Shakespeare and about the production.
There's very minimal homophobia in the book. It's cute, it's accepting, and it's
more about the dizzying experience of having a crush in middle school than it
is about coming out. For number 14 I have Meanwhile, Elsewhere which is a
collection of fantasy and sci-fi trans short stories. At least 10 of the 25
stories have sapphic women as the main characters, which is nice. This is a mix
of genres and of people are represented, but there's definitely more trans women
represented, and more sci-fi than fantasy and trans men or non-binary people. As
always with a collection like this, there is a mix: there are some stories that
really spoke to me. Some of them I felt like I could write whole essays about them:
they're just so interesting, the ideas addressed. And some stories completely
lost me, and I can see how other people would love them, but they were
just not personally appealing. Trigger warnings for this collection would
include transphobia, transmisogyny, rape, violence, gore, and suicide. In particular,
there was one story that had the main character who was raping people, and that
one I found particularly distressing. I have my full review linked down below, as
well as my reviews for any of the queer women books that I talk about in this
list. This was a huge book that covers a lot of ground.
Topside Press continues to put out really fascinating books that I will be
picking up as soon as they come out. My next one is sort of a silly pick, it's My
Lady's Choosing: An Interactive Romance Novel by Kitty Curran. This I read as a
review copy. I'm not sure if it's out yet. It's super fun. It's—as the title
suggests—a choose your own adventure romance novel. And there is one path
where you can have a lady love interest. I expected to just follow that path and
only read the queer part, but I actually ended up backtracking and following
pretty much all of the different paths you can take, because I just found them
really fascinating. They all have their own plots and mysteries, and you kind of
go into different genres depending on which love interest you go after. Also
there's an option you can take where you basically end up in a lesbian pirate
gang, so definitely try to find that one. This was just really fun, and I enjoyed
spending the whole night just following along the different choices.
I think choose your own adventure books— they should be more common. They're so
fun. Then there's Tomboy Survival Guide by Ivan Coyote. Ivan Coyote is one of my
favorite authors. They have this incredible writing style that is
beautiful and also approachable. They just really show this conviction to
remain kind even when the world is cruel. Also this book is beautiful just as an
object. There's like a ruler for the back cover, there are all these little
diagrams throughout. So of course I love that. Tt's also interesting because
there's kind of this idea in queer culture that being queer takes place in your
20s and that's about it. You don't really hear a lot from anyone
who is either a queer kid or a queer adult, who is past their 20s or max 30s.
Ivan Coyote is in their 40s and it's really nice to see this depiction of a
queer future, of what it looks like to survive that queer adolescence and grow
up. And they also have this much more nuanced understanding of queer politics
having seen it through more time. I can't recommend Ivan Coyote's books strongly
enough, but this is a great one to start with. It has a lot about gender and
politics, but also just personal stories. They are, above all, an amazing
storyteller. Another kind of fun one was the Mockingbird series by Chelsea Cain.
I am including this as one entry because this series was cancelled far too soon.
There are only two volumes, but the second volume... only the first half is
actually Mockingbird, and then they just fill in the volume by throwing in
an Avengers comic that had like the old Mockingbird character that has nothing
to do with the series. I would highly recommend just skipping it: just get the
first and second volume, read the actual story all the way through, and then stop
and just put it down. The first volume has this puzzle box structure where the
first issue you keep seeing Mockingbird as she has brought in on these random
doctor appointments, and she is getting pulled from whatever she was doing at
that moment, so you just kind of see her in scuba gear in one part of the issue
and, then the next part she'll have just like a little army of corgis around her,
and then through the next issues, you see what she was doing when she was
pulled into the doctor's office each of those times. So you get to see it expand,
and kind of see how these stories slot together.
I loved the main character. She has a great, sarcastic sense of humor.
I laughed out loud several times. I also liked that she was a scientist. I liked
the first volume best, but the second volume has a story that includes
mer-corgies. And it has her wearing a shirt that says
"Ask me about my feminist agenda" on the cover, which apparently was hugely
controversial, and also it has just the ideal ending for a love triangle, Another
fun one was the Lumberjanes series. I read volumes 1 through 6 just in the
last month or so. You might actually remember, in my queer comics collection
video I mentioned that although I've been collecting these, and they seem
great, I hadn't actually read them. So after that I did correct my mistake: I
did read them. And I love them! They're just so fun.
The first volume is probably my least favorite? Which is not saying much
because I still really liked it. It's just these fun fantasy adventure story
is set in an all-girls camp, and there's a great diversity of characters here,
including a trans character. It isn't until, I think, a couple of volumes in
that you find out that she is trans. And there is also a romance between two of
the girls, which is just very much in the background for most of the series, but
they do get their own storyline in I think volume 3, and they do kiss on
volume 6. So it's kind of a little bit of ambiguous at first, but it gets to be
much more blatantly a romantic relationship. But sweet and fun and I loved
it and I will continue to read all of these and hopefully it just continues forever.
And then of course I have to mention The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. This is
one of those books that honestly could have been half as good and it still
would have been great. It's complex, it's nuanced, it has distinct, well-rounded
characters. I really enjoyed the dynamics that were happening between characters.
It's, of course, thought-provoking and absolutely wrenching, powerful—I'm
running out of adjectives. So you've heard the hype about The Hate U Give,
and I would have to echo it. So another one that I read the advanced reader copy
of and I don't think it's out yet is Kim Reaper: Grim Beginnings. This is a comic
about a part-time Grim Reaper and the girl who has a crush on her. This was so
ridiculously cute. I was just giggling to myself as I was reading it. Becca is
just the most adorable main character in a comic I've ever seen. She's got the
little hair buns, like kind of Sailor Moon style. And she has, like, a little tummy
and you can see her stomach outline—you can see just the little outline of her
tummy and [stutters] that... just affected me. So much. I'm like: here is this character who
is so cute. And she has a tummy! And you can see it!
And she's still, like, wearing adorable clothes and is not bothered by it, and
everyone knows she's super cute. And it's funny and goofy and it has a sweet
little romance, as well as these ridiculous adventures, including fighting
a bodybuilder and his army of cats, and you should just check it out. What more can I say?
So apparently I either only know or only
love books that are either extreme of dark and difficult and fluffy and fun,
because the next book on my list is Hunger: A Memoir of My Body by Roxane Gay,
and yes, this is the second Roxane Gay book on this list. This is a dark,
sometimes brutal book about her relationship with her body. And it deals
a lot with trauma, especially rape, disordered eating, fat hatred, but despite
the subject matter, I kept getting pulled in by her casual, conversational style.
Roxane Gay is bisexual, and even though that's not the main focus of the book,
she does talk about her coming out and some of her relationships with other
women. This was an incredibly powerful book, but I would really think about
before going into it how it would affect you to read about disordered eating,
about fat hatred, about hatred of your own body, about rape. But overall, I
would highly, highly recommend this one.
Bouncing back to something a little more
fun: River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey. This is a killer hippo Western. It's kind of
an alternate history. There was a proposal at some point to bring hippos
over to the U.S. to be used as meat, and this book explores what that would have
been like if it happened, and the U.S. was basically overrun by feral hippos. It has
this caper storyline with this diverse cast of mostly people in color, mostly
queer people. It includes a nonbinary character who uses they/them pronouns.
And the main character is a bisexual guy who's also a person of color.
This was super fun, very quick to get through, though it does go a little bit
dark in places, and there is some gore. But it was such a quick, exciting read.
This was definitely one of the books that I had the most fun reading this
year. And from fun to exploring your own mortality: my next book is Smoke Gets In
Your Eyes and Other Lessons From the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty. I would
say this is the book that changed my perspective the most this year. I've been
following her YouTube channel, Ask a Mortician, for a while, and then I listen
to the audiobook, which was fantastic. She has a great voice for both the
narration and the YouTube videos. Basically this book is about how we in
the West have a really fucked up relationship with death and with
mourning and grief. That our relationship with death is built around denial and
how much that hurts us. That we don't have healthy rituals in place to deal with
grief, and with accepting our own mortality. Basically this is about being
death positive, which if you're not familiar, sounds completely ridiculous,
until you read this book, or until you watch some of her YouTube videos and see
how it actually makes perfect sense. That we need to have a better relationship
with death. That we need to think about it more, and that will help us to live
better lives. It is a memoir and she does talk about some of her mental health issues
and how this journey with the death industry affected her and how it got to
some pretty dark places. I thought it was incredibly told and had a lot of really
important ideas that I will be considering long after I finished it.
Number four on my list is Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado.
This is a collection of short stories. It blends feminism, queerness, and fabulism.
This one I also listen to it as an audiobook,but I wish I had read it in
print, because there's a novella-length story that is all of the episodes of SVU
rewritten, and although I really liked the idea, and I did start to come around
on the story by the end of it, it was so long, and I
know what I was gonna end, and I don't watch Law & Order SVU. So if I had been
reading it in person, I would have just skimmed it. And I would have liked
to spend more time with the other stories that were very thoughtful and
that I would have liked to kind of read a little bit, and then think about, and
then move on. This book is very bisexual, which I was really happy about. I
realized that this year I actually read a lot of bisexual books, which makes
sense because it's also the year that I've really come to terms with being bisexual
and accepted that label, so I actually have fewer lesbian books on this list
than usual and more bisexual books. And that's kind of nice, to have more books
that reflect my own identity. But almost every story in this collection has the
queer woman as the main character, usually a bisexual woman. I think my
favorite story was the first one: "The Husband Stitch," which retells the urban
legend about the girl with the ribbon around her neck. If you read Scary
Stories To Tell In the Dark, you'll remember that one, but this really
fleshes it out, and also weaves in all of these other urban legends and stories,
and really exposes the misogyny at the heart of a lot of those stories. This
book is beautifully unsettling, gorgeously written, it's definitely a
book that makes me want to pick up anything she ever writes.
Number three on
my list is Everfair by Nisi Shawl, which I have difficulty talking about
because it's so ambitious, and far-reaching, and nuanced, and complex.
It's a steampunk, alternate history of the Belgian occupation of the Congo. It
also has several queer women as the main characters. It switches between different
characters' perspectives. There's tons of point-of-view characters—I actually lost
count. But it means that you get to see these issues from multiple perspectives,
through different lenses. This spans decades, and it covers politics, war, love,
grief, betrayal. The steampunk element is actually a lot more in the background
than I was expecting. I would say that the relationship between the two women
narrators is at the heart of the book. It is not a simple, fluffy, feel-good romance:
it's complex, it's deeply flawed, but it's also passionate and genuine, and you see
how these two people try to fit together, and all the different things that play
out in their relationship around, again, race, power dynamics, and their specific
places in the world. This is a very thoughtful book. It took me a while to
get through. I think some people criticized it for not having enough
action? But that's not really what it's trying to do. It's much more of a
meditation on this idea. It almost acts more like a thought experiment. Again,
I'll link my full review down below, because I have many, many thoughts about
this book. It definitely blew my mind.
Another really fun one was Sugartown
by Hazel Newlevant. This is a queer, polyamorous, BDSM, fluffy love story. It's
fun, it's super quick: this is a tiny little book. What I loved most about this
book was that people treat each other with kindness! They check in. They are
flawed, but they communicate, and they try to do their best by each other. The art
is also super cute and warm, and I just wanted to crawl into the pages
and curl up there. I love this. This is now definitely one of my go-to happy
reads. And finally, my number one read of 2017 is Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars:
A Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir by Kai Cheng Thom. I had never understood what a
fictionalized memoir was until I read this book. It blends together in fairy
tale elements—beached mermaids—with this hard, unshakable truth. The narrative of
poetic, dreamlike prose describes transmisogyny,
racism, police brutality, murder, self-harm. It really reworks the idea of the trans
memoir and of memoir in general. And it ended up just being a beautiful, brutal,
unforgettable read.
So those were my top 17 of 2017. I'm sure this was an
incredibly long video ,so thank you for sticking around for the whole thing. Let
me know what some of your favorite reads from 2017 were and what you thought of
these if you've read any of them, and thank you for watching!
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