#reader's advisory

Hello friends, I am back with more reading recommendations for your agonies! Next up we have the long awaited and much requested Sad Boat Fiction list. As with all of my lists, this is NOT exhaustive and there WILL be great books left off, and also you may or may not like these books! I only rec things that I've personally enjoyed or that come highly recommended by trusted friends, but taste in books is incredibly subjective, especially with fiction. If I missed your favorite, please add it in the comments or drop it in my DMs!

Now that I'm feeling more settled in my new job, I will hopefully have a lot more time to make book lists and do more virtual Readers' Advisory. I have lists in the works for women in polar exploration and companion reads for the HBO War series, but if there's something else you would love to see, please send me a message!

Classics of the Genre

At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft

The Terror by Dan Simmons

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Dark Matter by Michelle Paver

Media Tie-Ins

Who Goes There? (Filmed as The Thing) by John W. Campbell, Jr.

The North Water by Ian McGuire

Cold Skin by Alfred Sánchez Piñol

The Terror by Dan Simmons

Graphic Novels

Whiteout by Greg Rucka

How to Survive in the North by Luke Healy

The Worst Journey in the World- The Graphic Novel Volume 1: Making Our Easting Down adapted by Sarah Airriess from the book by Apsley Cherry-Garrard*

*this is only fiction in the broadest possible sense of the term, but there is a shiny new American version of this book coming out with a gorgeous new cover and you should pre-order it immediately

Science Fiction

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin

Antarctica by Kim Stanley Robinson

Romance

Under a Pole Star by Stef Penney

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

My Last Continent by Midge Raymond

Inspired by the Terra Nova Expedition

The Worst Journey in the World- The Graphic Novel Volume 1: Making Our Easting Down adapted by Sarah Airriess from the book by Apsley Cherry-Garrard*

The Birthday Boys by Beryl Bainbridge

Terra Nova: A Play by Ted Tally

Antarctic Navigation by Elizabeth Arthur

*this is only fiction in the broadest possible sense of the term, but there is a shiny new American version of this book coming out with a gorgeous new cover and you should pre-order it immediately

Inspired by the Franklin Expedition

The Rifles by William T. Vollmann

Minds of Winter by Ed O'Loughlin

Solomon Gursky Was Here by Mordecai Richler

On the Proper Use of Stars by Dominique Fortier

Literary Fiction

The Voyage of the Narwhal by Andrea Barrett

Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy

We, The Drowned by Carsten Jensen

Inspired by the Classics

The Route of Ice and Salt by José Luis Zárate

Ahab's Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund

Modern Day Antarctica

How the Penguins Saved Veronica by Hazel Prior

South Pole Station by Ashley Shelby

Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

Polar and Nautical Horror

Where the Dead Wait by Ally Wilkes

Dark Matter by Michelle Paver

Cold Earth by Sarah Moss

The Deep by Nick Cutter

All the White Spaces by Ally Wilkes

Dark Water by Elizabeth Lowry

The Deep by Alma Katsu

Almost done reading Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (not sure how I went this long without reading it) and I have NO idea what to start next.

Open to recommendations if anyone has anything they'd like to share! 😊

I'm not sure if that's getting them or giving them, but I was wondering if you have any recs for butch/femme romance books?

I've read a lot of butch and femme-centric nonfiction lately (the femme mystique, the persistent desire etcetera) and lesbian classics (e.g. the well of loneliness, tipping the velvet), and now I'm looking for something fictional but less depressing.

No pressure to answer, but thanks if you do get around to it! ✨

omg hi!!!

sorry this took me a little while to reply to! i’ve been waiting till i had the time to sit down and do some proper reader’s advisory (the technical library term for when librarians recommend media based on a patrons desires for their next piece), but firstly I want to thank you for submitting this! It brought me so so so much joy to see in my inbox :)

OKAY SO - i have a couple recs, a few of which I can personally vouch for and one i can’t. I've also included Storygraph links on the titles so you can read the summaries and check the content warnings! (I always always always recommend checking out content warnings on storygraph before reading something, and that feels especially true for a few of these). Also! I read mostly contemporary stuff, so that's mostly the kinds of recommendations you'll get from me currently. I am actively working on expanding this though, so perhaps I will have other thoughts soon!

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo - this is a sweet YA, historical fiction coming of age story about teenagers who find a lesbian bar in San Francisco in the 1950s and are swept into the culture (and hardships) that it entails. There are several elder butch/femme folks and (if I'm remembering correctly) one of the main characters very baby butch. I've seen it get recommended a lot on here (here being butchfemme tumblr), but in my opinion it is that way for a good reason. I am not a historical fiction person usually but i LOVED this one.

DISCLAIMER: it is kind of depressing, so if you're looking for something purely lighthearted right now I'd probably bookmark this one for later.

One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston - this is a magical realism romance set in present-day (2021 i think) NYC. It's not super explicitly butch/femme, in that (again, if I'm remembering correctly) it doesn't really directly engage with the social/political/community aspects of butch/femme culture, but it is a sweet and lighthearted romance involving a femme in her 20s falling for a butch (or butch-adjacent, depending on how you look at it) who is stuck in time on the subway. It's by no means the best literature I've ever read, but it is fun and pretty lighthearted.

The Night Off by Meghan O'Brien - okay so this is straight up kinky erotica, but it was exactly what I was looking for when I read it, so it felt important to include incase that's something you're interested in. It's basically about this very tightly wound femme falling in love with a butch sex worker. It's mostly erotica, but there is some plot holding the story together, which I very much appreciated. Again, PLEASE look into this before you read it/pay attention to content warnings, because it could be pretty intense for someone who leans more vanilla in their sexuality/desires.

Okay, this is the last rec I have and is the one I can't personally vouch for, but it caught my eye while I was researching.

Home Field Advantage by Dahlia Adler - this is a YA enemies to lovers romance between a cheerleader and the new quarterback of the football team (who is a girl, which causes immense chaos). It seems lighthearted and fun, while looking like it still tackles some big subjects. It is very much YA though, so if that's not what you're looking for I'd probably pass on this one. Also! I haven't read it so I'm not sure how specifically butch/femme it is, it's entirely possible that it's more masc/fem - which could be fine for you, but just wanted to include as a disclaimer.

Thank you again, SO MUCH, for sending in this ask! I had so so so much fun with it, and if you have any thoughts or feedback I would love to hear it.

Also, for any other folks seeing this, PLEASE send me book rec requests! I LOVE doing this!!!!

it’s small press day and i, a lover of reading self and independently published comics, would like to share just a handful of my favourites that i’ve read!

first up: quite literally anything by @quindriepress, i have never read anything from them that i didn’t like, and quindrie has also introduced me to creators whose other work i love and adore. but a quick highlight reel of my favourites:

from wolvendaughter i went on to read other works by ver and i am Obsessed. i will read anything they put out and wish i could cover my walls in their art. sacred bodies is a wonderful wonderful comic about relationships and intimacy and has cool bird people.

seriously, what else could you need?

next up is anything by fran morton, who writes great and weird and eerie stories. “with malicious intent” reminds me of em carroll’s work in particular!

last year i learned about the shortbox comics fair, which takes place every october and debuts new comics (in pdf form). having to pick just a few (i couldn’t afford everything i wanted) was absolutely torturous, but i enjoyed everything i ended up picking out and it was such an incredible display of talent and imagination. it debuted sacred bodies and the other comics i read were “in the faded light” by narrenstrich, “death fiddles and we dance” by deb jj lee, and “the offering” by jocelin kee. “the offering”, where a temple merges with an office and so the protagonist has to share a cubicle with a god, was such a phenomenal read!

also the depiction of the god was perfect, 11/10 no notes.

finally for today is far distant by a liang chan! i don’t remember how i got my hands on a copy of this – someone must have imported it from the US because i know i got it at an event or market somewhere – but i am SO glad that the art drew me to it and convinced me to pick it up. it’s very odd and i’m not sure i entirely understand it but i find it deeply compelling and with a lot to reflect on with every read.

Sure!

So, the one I was reading recently, that I talked about on here somewhere, was called After The Ice: A Global Human History. It covers the period from about the end of the last ice age (about 20,000 years ago) to the beginning of recorded history (about 5000 years ago). The author uses this conceit (which I thought might be cheesy, but was actually kind of neat) where an imaginary narrator tours each continent, visiting various archeological sites at the time they were inhabited. It alternates between describing what was actually found at the sites, and narrative sections describing scenes that would account for the what was found however-many-thousand years later. (There's some educated guessing involved in those scenes, but the footnotes do a pretty good job of signposting how close to or distant from the evidence he is at any time.)

Another good one for the late-prehistory-to-early-history period is The Dawn of Everything, which has an ideological focus on demonstrating the non-inevitability of structural inequality as seen in feudalism and capitalism. It's not necessarily as careful as would be ideal about explaining how its conclusions about prehistoric human societies connect up with the archaeological evidence, but it has lots of big, interesting ideas.

If you want to go further back, the classic overview of human evolution that I read was Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee. It's fairly old--1991--but it's a classic and still in print. There's quite a bit that's been discovered since then, but it's still a decent starting point.

Ian Tattersall's Understanding Human Evolution is a much more recent (2022) book that might be another good starting point.

Once you've got the big picture, there are a lot of good books about specific aspects. Lydia Pyne's Seven Skeletons looks at some of the most famous specimens in the study of human origins. Another one I read recently was Ancestral Appetites, which talks about food in the context of human evolution and prehistory, and Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, which is about the use of fire and cooking as a driver of human evolution.

Last Ape Standing looks at homo sapiens in the context of other extinct hominins, and Rebecca Wragg-Sykes's Kindred focused on the Neandertals.

thank you and happy new year

Hello, happy New Year! This is a great question to come back to because, well, we've already answered a similar question right here. That post covers our main reader's advisory tools.

Of course, since we answered that ask in August, I reached out to our most senior reader's advisor to see if she'd like to add anything specific to your question. She did not disappoint! Here's some fresh advice from reader's advisor Chris:

For general knowledge of "what's out there" that might make a good book recommendation, I suggest reading as many professional reviews as possible and then comparing them with reviews on Goodreads. Professional reviewers and "real people" don't always agree!

She also recommended Nancy Pearl's How to Read a Book in 5 Minutes (PDF). Shout out to the Washington Library Association for making that available online.

So, skim reading - not exactly, but How to Read a Book in 5 Minutes is close!

Then look no further than The Queen's Thief by Megan Whalen Turner! The first book, The Thief, is a quick and deceptively simple tale that (as with every book in this 6 book series) reveals more and more with each subsequent re-read.