#polyqueue

This week’s book haul has a bunch of craft books, because we do a normal and sane number of crafts in this household. Currently we’re picking up books about crocheting little guys as Gabe teaches the household yarn crafts! We stuck a couple of them in the picture for good measure. Plus, we got:

My Dear Agent, Volume 1, a bodyguard/bodyguard romance manga Nic has already read and loved

The Library at Hellebore by Gabe’s beloved Cassandra Khaw, who owns a good percentage of our horror shelf by themself

For Sapphic September, Gabe has been making these super cool Gideon the Ninth shirts! We are obsessed with these lesbian space necromancers and this month was the perfect excuse to make some new designs. We have the front featuring the skulls of each house and the back (our first shirt with a back!) features the poem from the start of the books.

Stay tuned for more Locked Tomb designs soon since we have plans to do another drop so you can choose to rep an individual house💀👀In the meantime, you can find two more Locked Tomb designs already posted on our Etsy along with this new one!

City of Bones by Martha Wells

“I know I am a very bizarre person but I want to read a history textbook set in this world.” —Gabe

Khat is a smart, genre-savvy lead, and it’s delightful to watch him go from the genre he’s mastered to one he didn’t even know was an option. He’s also charmingly willing to abandon good sense for the sake of academic interest, in a way that felt very honest to every academic I’ve ever met. I would read an entire series about him and his huge found family (featuring everyone he and his business partner have basically ever met) and their scholarly pursuits.

We might have spent all of August being slowly run over by chronic health issues, but we'll be dead before we go a whole month without acquiring a couple (dozen) books.

This month, some books we're especially excited about are:

- Nic has already read Hide and Seek by Eden Emory and Ashley Pines in the week since we got it, and they absolutely loved it. They pitched it as "two toxic people play a state-sanctioned murder game, but make it erotica." Check the trigger warnings, though!

- Meghan loved the Folk series by Lily Mayne and she's vibrating out of her skin with enthusiasm for the Monstrous books, a series of m/m fantasy monster romances! A good chance that those will be a hit with the whole household 👀

- We have a whole shelf dedicated to @tkingfisher as Gabe continues to preach the good word to the rest of the house, and A House With Good Bones is already a favorite. Have you heard about houses haunted by generational trauma? Would you like to?

So we've gotten REAL into crochet over the past month...

August absolutely ran us all into the ground with health issues all around, but you know what you CAN do while you're lying on the couch being stomped on by your chronic illnesses? Make some little guys!

Gabe has done some crochet in the past, but at the start of August Meghan learned to crochet and she went full toy shop. So now we are SWIMMING in fuzzy yarn. Most of these little friends are Meghan's work, with a handful of friends from Gabe (Gabe has been working on other projects 👀).

I know rainbow spines or sprayed edges was like a pride month trend or whatever but, like, listen!!! I'm gay EVERY day! You will not contain my queer rainbow ass to just one month in the year!! Become ungovernable!!!

Anyway, here are just some really excellent queer books. I usually highlight one book each of us love but every single book here has a special place in at least one polycule member's heart so I can't, like, choose a favorite child, that's frowned upon.

So...FUCK IT! One sentence pitch for all our darlings:

Silver Under Nightfall & Court of Wanderers by Rin Chupeco - Vampire hunter and hot vampire couple team up to kill monsters and have threesomes, fantastic relationship development and fabulous body horror

Ravensong (Book 2 of the Green Creek Series) by TJ Klune - If you watched Teen Wolf as a teenager and were horribly disappointed by the wasted potential and queerbaiting, this is the gay found family werewolf romance series you are looking for

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao @xiranjayzhao - Local woman tries to murder-suicide a mech pilot, accidentally becomes unstoppable killing machine with her two boyfriends instead, news at 11

Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston - An enemies-to-fake-besties-to-lovers gay romance between a British Prince and the bisexual son of the first woman president of the US that is 110% healing fantasy where US politics are good actually

A Power Unbound (Book 3 of the Last Binding Trilogy) by Freya Marske - A gaslamp magic series set in Edwardian England where each book is stand alone queer romance that builds on the high stakes magical conspiracy that involving the mystery of how exactly magic works and why

Junker Seven by Olive J Kelley @olivejkelley - anti-establishment space western starring T4T lesbians with a grumpy/sunshine vibe

Fable for the End of the World by Ava Reid - Amazon owns the world and if you owe them too much money you get Most Dangerous Game'd on live TV, hot cyborg assassin x latest target sapphics

A Bone in His Teeth by Kellen Graves @skellygraves - Disabled trans lighthouse keeper accidentally incurs a life debt from a murder mermaid, and Kellen is NOT afraid of monsterfucking