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My name is Danika, and today I wanted to talk about my top reads of 2018. I have
to start with an apology because two years ago I made a video in which I
ranted about people doing their best 16 books of 2016, and how I thought it was
ridiculous that people kept extending their best of list to match the year,
because it was just gonna keep going on forever and the lists were going to get longer and
longer. And then the next year, I did my top 17 of 2017 because when I made my
list, it just happened to be a 17 books. And this year I put together a list of
the books that I read this year that I want to talk about, and it turned out to
be 18 books, and I didn't want to cut any of them out, because I really wanted to
talk about each one of them. So, of course it worked out that way, that I have to eat
my words and do exactly what I complained about a few years ago. So here
it is: my top 18 of 2018. I'll try to get through them pretty quickly because I know
this is a ridiculously long list, but I read about a hundred books this year, and
I just had quite a few that I really wanted to talk about. Especially because
I haven't been making a lot of videos this year, and a lot of these books I
haven't really mentioned before and I want people to know about them. This is
basically in order from my eighteenth favorite book to my number one
favorite book. Really loved all of these, I recommend all of these, so it doesn't
really matter where it falls in the ranking, but just for fun, I'm counting
down to number one. So my number 18 read was The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power
of Radical Self-Love by Sonya Renee Taylor. I've read some other fat-positive
books. but I really loved how this book didn't just talk about fat positivity: it
talks about how body hatred plays out on people of color's bodies, and on people with
disabilities, and on queer bodies and trans bodies, and kind of connected all
of those together to not just talk about a certain kind of body positivity, but to
really talk about combating body hate in all of its different forms. It talks
about how we have to examine how this body hatred is based in our culture and
in our laws, and how we can work to change that. I really would have loved to
read this book as a teenager. I listened to the audiobook, and I really enjoyed it,
but I would have liked to be able to kind of stop and reread and spend a
little bit longer on certain parts, so I kind of wish I had read it
in a physical form for that reason, but she was a really great, engaging narrator,
so I think either one would work really well.
book I've ever read, but I have a feeling it's going to be my favorite, it's called:
It Won't Be Easy: An Exceedingly Honest (And Slightly Unprofessional) Love Letter
To Teaching by Tom Rademacher(?) I am currently in school to try to learn to
be a high school English teacher--or hopefully a teacher librarian: that's the
dream. So I've really been enjoying looking at different teacher vlogs and
blogs and websites to see what it's actually like being a teacher, so I
checked out this audio book, and I absolutely loved it. I liked that he was
willing to talk about his own mistakes, and some of it not-so-great things that
he's seen in his teaching life. He talks about the best and the worst parts of
teaching in a way that feels really honest. But mostly I love this for its
emphasis on anti-racism in teaching, and how to do that as a white teacher, and
how to be checking yourself for your biases and for things that you might not
realize are racist. And just about continually learning and improving, and I
really appreciated that.
Melanie Gillman is one of my favourite artists, and I had been reading this as it came out
in webcomic format, but I actually appreciated it a lot more being able to
read a large amount of it at once. I just love their art style. They use all
coloured pencils, and they are such incredibly detailed and obviously
time-consuming layouts. This is about Charlie, who is a queer brown kid who
finds herself at this basically white feminist, semi-Christian backpacking trip,
and Charlie feels really out of place being one of the only people of colour at
this backpacking trip, and also being queer, but she ends up making friends
with another camper, Sydney, who is a trans girl who also feels out of place,
and like she has to be closeted to be on this trip, and that she won't be
welcome otherwise. So they end up commiserating. Honestly, my only complaint
about this is that it is volume one, and it
ends kind of abruptly, and I really want volume two, but otherwise I love everything
about this. There is a review at the Lesbrary that I will link below, and I have
some of the pages in there--panels that I really enjoyed, so you should check out
that review and see if those excerpts appeal to you, because I highly recommend
this one--obviously. Obviously I highly recommend everything in this video.
And then there's Drum Roll, Please by Lisa Jenn Bigelow. I love this cover
Lisa Jenn Bigelow is the author of one of my favorite queer young adult books,
which is Silhouette of a Sparrow, so when she came out with this middle grade book, I
had to pick it up, and I loved it. It's about Mellie, who is 13, and her parents
just dropped her off at this music camp, and the day before, they told her
that they are getting divorced. So she is at this camp with her best friend, who's
being kind of distant and just sort of like chasing after boys, and feels
really angry and alone, and isn't sure how to process this big information.
It ends up being a little bit of a love story with another girl at the camp.
I just really appreciated the complexity of the relationships here. Mellie is
trying to develop her own voice and find herself, but she has to balance
advocating for herself without being cruel. It really just comes back to:
relationships are complicated and communication is really hard,
and this doesn't try to simplify that. It shows how you can be in the wrong from
one perspective and in the right from another perspective. So this definitely
lived up to her other book.
called Lovely by Jess Hong, and I just loved this. It's so sweet. This book is
about all the different kinds of people that can be called lovely. The page that
really made it for me shows someone who is wearing these elegant high heels
and they also have really hairy legs, and underneath is the caption "fancy." I just
love that. There's a lot of diversity here: the person who gets described as
sporty is someone with a prosthetic leg, there are gender non-conforming people,
and people of colour, and someone in a wheelchair. And it says "Lovely is
different, weird, and wonderful," and I just thought it was so cute. I really enjoyed reading this.
For number 13, appropriately, I have Toil & Trouble: 15 Tales of
Women & Witchcraft, edited by Tess Sharpe, which was exactly
what I was looking for in an October read. It has so many different takes on
the idea of witches. There are lots of queer witches: there at least five
stories that have a queer woman main character. This is definitely a feminist
collection, and I just loved all of the different perspectives, and the diversity
here, and the idea of coming back to the kind of power that's represented in the
cultural idea of witches and witchcraft. So it has anywhere from the fairy tale-
ish idea of witches to the more modern idea of witches, so if you're interested
in witches at all, definitely try this one out.
Whiteness by Anastasia Higginbotham. And this is just something that I think is
so necessary, and I've never seen another book like it, where it is talking [to]
young white kids about the idea of whiteness. So it talks about white
supremacy, and racism, and police shootings. It starts with a quotation
from a Toni Morrison interview where she said "White people have a very, very
serious problem, and they should start thinking about what they can do about it.
Take me out of it." So it teaches that white people are the ones who need to be
fighting against the system of white supremacy. It says "you can be white
without signing on to whiteness," and it encourages people to "grow justice inside"
of them, and as for the idea that kids are too young to learn about this--which
of them and as for the idea that kids are too young to learn about this which
kids, because kids of colour are often not given a choice about whether they're
going to be learning about this--their response to that is "Innocence is
overrated. Knowledge is power. Get some. Grow wise. Make history." So I
overrated knowledge is power get some grow wise make history so I
and learn a lot from.
Blake. This is another one that I reviewed at the Lesbrary, and I will
link it down below, because I have a lot of thoughts. This is a very difficult
book. It's young adult, but it is about rape culture. And it's about Mara and her
best friend has accused her twin brother of rape--her twin that she is
very close with--and it is basically about her trying to process this. She
kind of splits and believes both of them at the same time. She doesn't want to
believe that about her brother, but she also knows that her best friend isn't
lying. And as she's trying to sort through this, her own unaddressed trauma
starts to bubble up. It's a really uncomfortable read, but there is also the
element of hope. There is both a backlash to Hannah, but she also finds some support
and community. This also deals with Mara's relationship with her ex, who is
non-binary, and about their kind of struggle to figure out the relationship
that they have now. They went from being best friends to dating to breaking up, and
they don't quite know who they are to each other anymore, or why their
relationship ended. I read this so quickly. Partly because Ashley
Herring Blake is an amazing author, and because I was invested in the characters,
but also, honestly, I wanted to finish it and be able to walk away from that story,
because it was so gutting. But it was also incredibly well done. I wouldn't
really have trusted a lot of other authors with this premise, but I knew
that Ashley Herring Blake would be able to do it justice, and she did.
And then for something a lot lighter, there's The Prince and the Dressmaker by
Jen Wang, which I don't even know how to talk about: it's just delightful. It's a
middle grade graphic novel that is about a dressmaker who begins to secretly make
dresses for the prince, who has kind of an alter ego, and is closeted about this.
It's a really a sweet genderqueer love story slash coming-of-age stories slash
fashion extravaganza. I love that there's so many more queer and trans stories
that are coming out for a middle-grade audience, because for a long time, that
was something that no one was doing, so I'm really glad that that is a niche
that's starting to be filled.
And breaking into my top 10, number 9 is
All Out: The No Longer Secret Stories of Queer Teens Throughout the Ages
edited by Saundra Mitchell. So this is optimistic historical fiction,
it locates queer teens throughout time and in a variety of places, and it also
gives them a happy ending: it rejects the idea that queer people don't have a history,
or that if they do, it is fundamentally tragic. There are a lot of different time
periods, though I wish that more of them had taken place outside of North America
and Europe. My favourite story was Malinda Lo's, and that one is being made into a
novel ,which I'm so excited for, but I also love Dahlia Adler's, which is a love
story about two girls who get together at Kurt Cobain's vigil, and I really
liked all of the stories. There wasn't anything that I felt like was a dud. So
this is another YA collection that I thought was really strong. And then I
accidentally read this book and then Girl Made of Stars back-to-back, which
was a terrible idea. So this is Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture [edited] by
Roxane Gay. This is a book that is so hard to read emotionally. It is a range
of subjects, so it kind of deals with anything from an isolated case of sexual
harassment and how that impacted that individual, to people dealing with really
horrible traumatic rape. I don't know how to describe it other than "brutal" and
"gutting." I think it's necessary because it's true, and it is talking about
something that is incredibly important, but it was also very difficult to get
through. All of the entries were really well-written and were compelling, but the
subject matter is obviously very dark, so you would know best whether it's
something that you're able to read and deal with. If it is something that you
feel like you can handle, I do think it's very eye-opening and important, but it
was definitely one of the hardest books for me to read this year.
I feel like so many of the books on this list I am describing as brutal and gutting.
Apparently that's what I look for from a good book, is for it to emotionally
destroy me, because the next one that I'm going to talk about is Anger is a Gift
by Mark Oshiro. I love Mark Oshiro's writing; I have been reading his
site since he was talking about Harry Potter, so for many years. So I wouldn't
expect any less from him, but this book still blew me away.
It is a breath of fresh air to read a book that is mostly made up of people of
colour and most of them are queer. Se has a friends group that includes trans
characters, non-binary characters, lesbian, gay, bisexual characters. It also deals a
lot with Moss's anxiety and his self-esteem issues in a really realistic
way. But this is primarily a story about police brutality and murder by police.
Moss is black and his father was killed unarmed by police, and his anxiety and
PTSD has to do with that, and is triggered by police presences, or just
hearing sirens--he goes back to that moment. And it's talking about the
increased police presence at his school, and how it is becoming more and more
like a jail. And it's him and his friends group trying to fight back against that,
and the enormous resistance that they face. I really want to warn that it does
have some content that could be really triggering for people. I think it's a
good idea to kind of inform yourself about that, if you are worried that it
might be a particularly triggering for you, but it is incredibly powerful, and it
is still hopeful, and Mark Oshiro is just such an incredible writer, and I
look forward to reading anything else he ever writes. And then I have another
Ashley Herring Blake book, which was the first book I read from her
and that's How To Make a Wish. And this book deals with grief and with unhealthy
or even abusive family relationships. So Grace's father died when she was young,
and ever since then she's felt like she had to be the parent figure to her
mother, Maggie, and had to keep her safe. She doesn't get that kind of support
from her mother. And this is, again, a book where I feel like the relationships are
so complex and nuanced. Grace's best friend, Luca, and his mother are a
constant source of support for her, and they have recently taken in a family
member, Eva, whose mother has just died. Grace and Eva start to
begin to have a relationship. In the meantime, Maggie has taken Eva under her
wing, and Grace is dealing with all of these emotions about it: that she kind of
resents Rva for her mother being a mother figure to her but not to her own
daughter, and she also feels like she needs to warn Eva about who her mother
really is, and that she can be really dangerous and irresponsible, and that
maybe Eva shouldn't be relying on her. So it deals with grief and abuse and
also a bisexual love story--and, yes, it uses the word bisexual!--and it also has
examinations of race and art, because Eva is a black ballet dancer. So this was
definitely a five star read for me, and it was the reason that I immediately
went out and picked up one of her other books. So, finally getting away from some
of these really difficult books, I read... Space Battle Lunchtime! All-ages queer
lady comics are one of my favourite things to read, and one of my favourite
things to watch are reality baking shows. So this comic is an all-ages queer
women graphic novel about a reality cooking slash baking competition set in
space. What else could you possibly want from a book? And I will say that I
finished volume one thinking, "Okay, this is pretty strong subtext, but technically isn't
this just queer subtext?" So if you finish volume one thinking that,
definitely start volume two, because it's not subtext: it becomes very textual
in the second volume. It's just so cute and fun and there's lots of hijinks and
over-the-top action. The romance is sweet. It really fills that kind
of cotton candy happy niche that I needed, because clearly I just alternate
between very sweet, happy stories, and brutally difficult books, and then for number
3 I have the most soothing book I have ever read, which is The Tea Dragon
Society by Katie O'Neill, the same author as Princess Princess Ever After.
This one is also queer: there are two men who are in a relationship, and then
possibly some subtext between the two girls who form a really close
relationship. But I absolutely love the art style in this: it's so intricate, there's
tons of little details, I love the differing layouts. And also, it just has tea dragons,
which are these tiny dragons that you raise, and they grow little tea leaves on their
heads that if you harvest, have, like, magical properties? Suffice to say, Tea
Dragon Society is super cute, sweet, soothing, and it has tiny little dragons,
and I love it. My number 2 spot goes to The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor
Jenkins Reid. I know everyone's been reading this, and talking about it, and
loving it, and everybody is right. This is about Evelyn Hugo, who is an aging
Hollywood starlet, who has hired kind of an unknown journalist to write her life
story. And Evelyn is such an interesting character: she is so complex and flawed.
She has used people to get what she wanted out of life. She makes mistakes.
She has to make some really difficult decisions. And I know that this is the
kind of character that a lot of people will say is "unlikable." Personally, I loved
her. She is bisexual, and don't be fooled by the title, because she was very clear
that the love of her life is a woman. I just loved how real and complicated this
character felt. It also made me think about queer women in the 50s and how
difficult that would be. Evelyn was privileged in a lot of different ways:
she was rich and famous and white-passing, but she was also trapped.
She couldn't acknowledge the love of her life without losing everything that she
had built. I listened to the audiobook, and I thought that was a great way to
experience the story. Even if it doesn't seem like the kind of book that you usually
read--"old Hollywood" is not something that I would immediately be drawn to--but this
is so incredibly well-written, I definitely think it's worth picking up,
even if it's a little bit outside of your usual genre. And my number one pick for
this year was Ragged Company by Richard Wagamese. And it is kind of
about a group of homeless people who win the lottery, but it's also about a lot of
other different things: it's about survivance, it's about reaching out and
making connections with people, it's about moving through tragedy and
dealing with your past, even when you have been running from it for a
long time. It's just a really great deep dive into these characters and the
family that they have built together. It is about trauma. It deals with, again,
some very dark, difficult things. This is an indigenous author and it also has
several indigenous main characters, and talks about the kind of systemic racism
that they experience in their lives and how that affects them. It is just
incredibly well done. This is definitely the book that really got to me the most
this year. I really felt so pulled into the story and into these people's
emotional lives. This is just so well told that I want to read everything that
he wrote. So I'll link the video review in case you want more about this one, but
obviously I really recommend it: it was my favorite book that I read this year.
And those are my top 18 books of 2018! Let me know in the comments if you've
read any of these and what you thought of them, and if you have a yearly wrap-up,
feel free to link that as well, and I will definitely check it out. I also wanted
to give a shout out to my Patreon supporters like Jacqui Plummer. Thank you
so much for your support! Patrons really make it possible for me to make more
content, and I really appreciate that, especially when trying to juggle school
and work and all my online things. Patreon means that I can carve out a
little more time for the Lesbrary and this channel and everything else that I
want to be doing online. If you're interested in supporting me on Patreon,
you get lots of perks, including if you pledge two dollars or more a month, you get
added to the exclusive email list where I hold monthly giveaways for a queer
book. And once we hit 200 dollars a month, I will be doing two of those every month,
so you will have twice the chances to win. So thank you for watching, and thank
you if you're a supporter on Patreon, or if you're a supporter by watching and
liking and commenting and subscribing and doing all of those amazing things,
and I hope you all had a good 2018 of reading! Thanks!
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