DROWN ME IN LADY BOOKS, pt. 2
Jan. 25th, 2026 08:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeMori: I think we’ve turned the corner, sickwise. At least I got a good amount of ladyreading done!
She Loves to Cook and She Loves to Eat, vol. 1-2 by Sakaomi Yuzaki: a gentle-paced slice-of-life feederism comic about two women neighbors who cook delicious food, eat it together, and fall in love. Rogan grabbed this for me ages ago when I was having a shit day and it was perfect reading for that. Also, I just love the character of Kasuga, a big girl who works as a deliverer for a beer company and who isn’t ashamed of eating like it’s a real life Dragon Ball Z fight. I’ll definitely read more of it!
The Lavender House Murder, by Nikki Baker. ‘90s lesbian mystery. This one I made it through because I heard Baker was very good... and she is! The plotting and writing was great! But also oh my god all these people are awful. And that’s on purpose! But I have a real hard time reading books where everyone is cheating on their girlfriends (and the one woman who ISN’T is a bloviating bore). Apparently I don’t like cheating in stories! Also, kudos to Baker for taking a wicked pen-scalpel to the flawed ideals of sisterhood and the mecca of Provincetown; I feel like she maybe read one too many books about saintly monogamous lesbians and went “that’s it, I’m writing the most sanctimonious, hypocritical, fucky women alive!” The murder victim in particular, I feel, is a kind of awful person that all of us have met but is super hard to write well, the kind of activist where everything SHE wants is the most liberatory thing ever, and everything she DOESN’T want is the most oppressive bigoted shit she needs to argue you out of. (Her convincing someone to cheat on her mistress by rubbing her shoulders and talking about how misogynist monogamy is made me want to punch a wall.) Very good and glad I finished, but I don’t think I can read more by her; cheating looks to be a major theme in all her books.
Ladies’ Night, by Elisabeth Bowers. Feminist (NOT lesbian) Canadian mystery of the ‘80s. This one was a random bonus the bookseller snuck into my box. I liked it, though the writing was weaker than Baker. Unsurprisingly, my favorite character was the Native teenager who bides her time for fucking YEARS so she can escape the trap of coerced sex work, heroin addiction, and power that killed her brother. I also found it interesting that one of the main themes of the book is how the divorced, heterosexual private eye protagonist, despite all her attempts to leave her middle-class comfort zone, in the end is kinda unable to escape her own judgments around it. Watching her dislike that teenager for behavior I found totally reasonable was fascinating. Feeling my own emotional investment shift from the protagonist to the people she was angry with was a neat experience.
The Persistent Desire: a Femme-Butch Reader, edited by Joan Nestle. This one’s a reread, but this time on PAPER, not the bootleg scan of it I had for years. It’s an anthology, exactly what it says on the tin, and IT SPEAKS TO MY SOOOOUUUUULLL. The glittery strength of femmes, the quiet dignity of butches, the thoughtfulness and passion and pain... So glad I own it now even though it cost me a bundle. Stand out favs: “Of Althea and Flaxie,” by Cheryl Clarke, “Butch to Butch: A Love Song” and “Letter to a Fifties Femme from a Stone Butch” by Leslie Feinberg, “the Femme Question” and “Our Gift of Touch” by Joan Nestle, “What We’re Rollin’ Around In Bed With: Sexual Silences in Feminism: A Conversation toward Ending Them” by Amber Hollibaugh and Cherríe Moraga, “the Femme Tapes,” of Madeline Davis, Amber Hollibaugh, and Joan Nestle, and “Flamingoes and Bears: a Parable,” by Jewelle Gomez.
“Devotional Crossings: Transgender Sex Workers, Santisima Muerte, and Spiritual Solidarity in Guadalajara and San Francisco,” by Howe, Zaraysky, and Lorentzen. This was a stupid case where it’s one chapter in a 2009 academic anthology never released on ebook, and the Researchgate PDF of this article is both poor quality and MISSING TWO PAGES. So finally Rogan tracked down a cheap used paper copy of Religion at the Corner of Bliss and Nirvana: politics, identity, and faith in new migrant communities JUST so I could read that final page and most of the goddamn citations. Eesh. It was worth it, just to fill in those gaps, but this is definitely going to be one of those cases of “scan, print, fold, and staple that one 30-page chapter, liberate the 300-page book” deal. We want a trans Santa Muerte thing on our shelf (and its extremely brief mention of a woman marrying her).
She Loves to Cook and She Loves to Eat, vol. 1-2 by Sakaomi Yuzaki: a gentle-paced slice-of-life feederism comic about two women neighbors who cook delicious food, eat it together, and fall in love. Rogan grabbed this for me ages ago when I was having a shit day and it was perfect reading for that. Also, I just love the character of Kasuga, a big girl who works as a deliverer for a beer company and who isn’t ashamed of eating like it’s a real life Dragon Ball Z fight. I’ll definitely read more of it!
The Lavender House Murder, by Nikki Baker. ‘90s lesbian mystery. This one I made it through because I heard Baker was very good... and she is! The plotting and writing was great! But also oh my god all these people are awful. And that’s on purpose! But I have a real hard time reading books where everyone is cheating on their girlfriends (and the one woman who ISN’T is a bloviating bore). Apparently I don’t like cheating in stories! Also, kudos to Baker for taking a wicked pen-scalpel to the flawed ideals of sisterhood and the mecca of Provincetown; I feel like she maybe read one too many books about saintly monogamous lesbians and went “that’s it, I’m writing the most sanctimonious, hypocritical, fucky women alive!” The murder victim in particular, I feel, is a kind of awful person that all of us have met but is super hard to write well, the kind of activist where everything SHE wants is the most liberatory thing ever, and everything she DOESN’T want is the most oppressive bigoted shit she needs to argue you out of. (Her convincing someone to cheat on her mistress by rubbing her shoulders and talking about how misogynist monogamy is made me want to punch a wall.) Very good and glad I finished, but I don’t think I can read more by her; cheating looks to be a major theme in all her books.
Ladies’ Night, by Elisabeth Bowers. Feminist (NOT lesbian) Canadian mystery of the ‘80s. This one was a random bonus the bookseller snuck into my box. I liked it, though the writing was weaker than Baker. Unsurprisingly, my favorite character was the Native teenager who bides her time for fucking YEARS so she can escape the trap of coerced sex work, heroin addiction, and power that killed her brother. I also found it interesting that one of the main themes of the book is how the divorced, heterosexual private eye protagonist, despite all her attempts to leave her middle-class comfort zone, in the end is kinda unable to escape her own judgments around it. Watching her dislike that teenager for behavior I found totally reasonable was fascinating. Feeling my own emotional investment shift from the protagonist to the people she was angry with was a neat experience.
The Persistent Desire: a Femme-Butch Reader, edited by Joan Nestle. This one’s a reread, but this time on PAPER, not the bootleg scan of it I had for years. It’s an anthology, exactly what it says on the tin, and IT SPEAKS TO MY SOOOOUUUUULLL. The glittery strength of femmes, the quiet dignity of butches, the thoughtfulness and passion and pain... So glad I own it now even though it cost me a bundle. Stand out favs: “Of Althea and Flaxie,” by Cheryl Clarke, “Butch to Butch: A Love Song” and “Letter to a Fifties Femme from a Stone Butch” by Leslie Feinberg, “the Femme Question” and “Our Gift of Touch” by Joan Nestle, “What We’re Rollin’ Around In Bed With: Sexual Silences in Feminism: A Conversation toward Ending Them” by Amber Hollibaugh and Cherríe Moraga, “the Femme Tapes,” of Madeline Davis, Amber Hollibaugh, and Joan Nestle, and “Flamingoes and Bears: a Parable,” by Jewelle Gomez.
“Devotional Crossings: Transgender Sex Workers, Santisima Muerte, and Spiritual Solidarity in Guadalajara and San Francisco,” by Howe, Zaraysky, and Lorentzen. This was a stupid case where it’s one chapter in a 2009 academic anthology never released on ebook, and the Researchgate PDF of this article is both poor quality and MISSING TWO PAGES. So finally Rogan tracked down a cheap used paper copy of Religion at the Corner of Bliss and Nirvana: politics, identity, and faith in new migrant communities JUST so I could read that final page and most of the goddamn citations. Eesh. It was worth it, just to fill in those gaps, but this is definitely going to be one of those cases of “scan, print, fold, and staple that one 30-page chapter, liberate the 300-page book” deal. We want a trans Santa Muerte thing on our shelf (and its extremely brief mention of a woman marrying her).
