Lesbian books to suit every taste
The filmmaker John Waters once said: “We need to make books cool again. If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t f*ck them.”
While we do not support such an extreme measure, we would love to see more people reading books- especially lesbian literature. We reckon that writer and booklover extraordinaire Danika Ellis also shares the sentiment.
Ellis runs The Lesbrary, a queer women book blog that was added to the U.S. Library of Congress’s LGBTQ+ Studies Web Archive to preserve it as an important LGBTQ+ historical record.
“It’s not hard to find good lesbian books,” she wrote in an article for Book Riot. “If you google ‘lesbian books,’ you’ll see… The front page is almost all nicely curated lists of sapphic fiction… including my list of 100 must-read sapphic books!”
We checked out Ellis’s list, and we came up with our own shortlist to help you quickly find something worthy to bury your nose in.
[Editor’s note: These recommendations are mostly classic works for those who’re still starting out, but if the readers have new titles to recommend, please drop a comment below!]
1. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (Fiction)
Lesbian author Jeanette Winterson is definitely one of our favorite authors, and her semi-autobiographical debut novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit tops our list of recommended lesbian books.
The novel, winner of the Whitbread Prize for best first fiction, is about a sensitive teenage girl rebelling against conventional values.
The blurb on Amazon sums up this modern classic succinctly: “The narrator, Jeanette, cuts her teeth on the knowledge that she is one of God’s elect, but as this budding evangelical comes of age, and comes to terms with her preference for her own sex, the peculiar balance of her God-fearing household crumbles.”
2. Annie on My Mind (Young Adult)
Perhaps you are a baby lesbian, or maybe you are looking for a book for your lesbian teen. If so, we recommend Annie on My Mind- a novel about the romantic relationship between two 17-year-old New York City girls.
First published in 1982, Nancy Garden’s groundbreaking work holds the distinction of being the first novel aimed at young adults to create a lesbian love story with a positive ending.
3. Bodymap (Poetry)
If you have had your fill of lesbian prose, maybe you might be aching for a dose of sapphic poetry instead. We recommend Lambda Award-winner Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s book of poems.
Bodymap was a finalist for the 2015 Triangle Awards and was shortlisted for the 2016 ReLit Award. In this volume, the author “maps hard and vulnerable terrains of queer desire, survivorhood, transformative love, sick and disabled queer genius and all the homes we claim and deserve.”
4. As the Crow Flies (Comics)
Some of us prefer reading stories with pictures, and graphic novels can be just as poignant as more traditional literary genres.
Melanie Gillman’s As the Crow Flies tells the story of 13-year-old Charlie Lamont who is spending a week of her summer vacation stuck at an all-white Christian youth backpacking camp. Charlie is queer, black, and- as the story unfolds- questioning what was once a firm belief in God.
5. Aimee & Jaguar: A Love Story, Berlin 1943 (Nonfiction)
If true stories are more of you thing, you might enjoy Aimee & Jaguar by Erica Fischer.
Lilly Wust (“Aimée”) was a conventional middle-class mother of four, and estranged from her philandering husband, when she met Felice Schragenheim (“Jaguar”)- Jewish and living on the streets- in 1941. The book follows Lilly’s heroic efforts to conceal and protect Felice through the next two years amidst Berlin’s strict deportation laws.
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We hope you find something you can sink your teeth into from our shortlist of lesbian books!