📚 Hi! I'm Noah avid reader since age 6 and always happy to discuss books! 📚
I read almost all genre with sweet tooth for fantasy and sci-fi. I also have a growing interest in murder mystery and horror. Lots of queer fiction. I'm also catching up on my classics.
Mostly adult and some young adult but I have enjoy middle grade from time to time.
I read in both english and french, english not being my first language but I'm pretty much fluent.
Yearly book count : 25
Last finished reading
Mangez le si vous voulez by Jean Teulé
Reading in progress
Porcelaine sous les ruines by Ada Vivalda
Carmilla by J Sheridan LeFanu
Already read this year (in reverse chronological order)
Persephone's Choice by Yihan Sim
The Ballad of Songbird and Snakes (Hunger Games #0) by Suzanne Collins
Thom Pain (based on nothing) by Will Eno
Making Money by Terry Pratchett
Sauter des gratte-ciel by Julia Von Lucadou
Peau d'homme (Man's Skin) by Hubert and Zanzim
Ruined by S Vaughn, S W Searle and N Smith
Shubeik Lubeik by Deena Mohamed
The Lotus Empire (The Burning Kingdoms #3) by Tasha Suri
Escape Incel Island by Margaret Killjoy
These Deathless Bones by Cassandra Khaw
What Matter of Man by St John Starling
Les serres sous le velours noir by Charlène Ferlay
Cent ans de solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Les chants de Nüying by Émilie Querbalec
The Unwanted Guest (The Locked Tomb's short story) by Tamsyn Muir
Cent millions d'années et un jour by Jean-Baptiste Andrea
Yellowface by R F Kuang
Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
Les Guerriers de l'hiver by Olivier Norek
You Look Like Death, Tales From the Umbrella Academy by Gerard Way
i love this character so much bro. now show me how they’d look shaking and sobbing on the floor after their entire worldview and sense of self and worth has been shattered, all alone with no one in the world who cares enough about them to even politely ask if they’re okay
Hey, UK folks! Waterstones is having a 3-day pre-order sale that includes the UK paperback of Enshittification (which drops on Sept 1). Use SUMMER26 to get 25% off.
Data brokers are a cancer. There's a direct line from the unrestricted collection, retention and processing of our data to a host of evils, from deepfake porn to phishing scams; from racial discrimination in hiring to ICE roundups of migrants; from targeted election interference to identity theft:
Why do data brokers exist? Because we let them. Congress hasn't passed a new federal consumer privacy law since 1988, when they made it illegal for video stores to disclose your VHS rentals. All other acts of consumer surveillance are legal. Data brokers spy on us for the same reason your dog licks its balls: because they can, and we don't stop them:
Getting rid of data brokers wouldn't solve all our problems, but it sure would go a long way to solving many of them. Rather than legally requiring platforms to spy on kids (to exclude them from being targeted by platforms' algorithms), we could prohibit platforms from spying on anyone, including kids, meaning kids couldn't be identified (much less targeted) by algorithms or ads:
Data brokers produce mountains of raw material used for every form of scam and torture. It's data brokers who power the gig economy's "algorithmic wage discrimination" system, where nurses and other workers are offered less pay based on how much credit card debt they're carrying:
So the feds (both Congress and the executive branch) have surrendered, and that leaves states alone on the battlefield fighting the privacy wars alone. State legislatures have taken some big steps, but – crucially – they've stopped short of banning data brokers from operating within their borders. Having taken a ban on data brokers off the table, states are left with complex, often unworkable "compromises" that go nowhere.
This is where DROP comes in. DROP stands for "Delete Request and Opt-out Platform," and it's a new phase of California's privacy regime that kicks off next month. Under DROP, you fill in some paperwork and then the state requires every data brokerage operating in California to delete your data, as well as any inferences they've made about you based on that data:
Implementing DROP is nowhere near as good as banning data brokers. The idea that data brokers should be able to collect, retain and process your data unless you tell them not to implies that everyone starts off wanting to be spied on, and therefore data brokers should assume that unless they hear otherwise, we're delighted to be the subject of commercial surveillance. This is an incredibly stupid supposition, contradicted by all available evidence. For example, when Apple offered iPhone owners a one-click option to block Facebook from spying on them, 96% of iPhone owners clicked the button:
Indeed, given this fact, one wonders why Apple bothers with the "don't spy on me" button at all. Why not have a "do spy on me" button that is unchecked by default, and leave users to dig through their settings to find the option to opt in to being surveilled? Of course, then it would make the fact that Apple spies on its customers and uses the data to target ads (with no way to opt out) a little awkward:
In the absence of a ban on surveillance without explicit, opt-in consent, we are left with the bizarre fiction that most of us want to be spied on, a fiction that pervades the DROP process, making the entire procedure nearly impossible to complete.
To start the DROP process, you must first create a Login.gov ID. This is an incredibly invasive process that involves photographing multiple pieces of ID and taking several selfies using special apps and webpages that hijack your device's camera and processor in a bid to prevent bad actors from spoofing the process. There's a plausible reason for this rigmarole: Login.gov is the authentication system for multiple federal, state and local IT systems in the US, so a fake or stolen Login.gov ID could be used to access your IRS, Social Security, and other very sensitive accounts.
The corollary of this is the promise of Login.gov: once you create your ID (a lengthy, multi-stage process) you won't have to jump through lots of painful bureaucratic hoops to access a wide variety of government services.
DROP didn't get the memo.
After you log in to DROP via Login.gov, you are sent a text message – to the phone number in your Login.gov profile – with a link to access a "secure" website that takes over your camera to let you take a "secure" photo of the front and back of your California driver's license or your US passport. What if you don't have either of those? I guess that means you want to be spied on by data brokers.
Note that these are the same credentials you have to supply to get the Login.gov ID that you've just used to get to this step in the process. In other words, in order to get to the stage where they ask you to photograph your driver's license, you have to have already photographed and validated your driver's license.
Once you complete this (pointless, redundant) step, you're directed back to your computer, where the process continues. Here, you must fill in all kinds of biographical detail, as well as specialized pieces of information, including your car's VIN. This is a piece of information that most people don't have – but which the California DMV does have and could auto-feed into the system, given that you've repeatedly affirmatively identified yourself to the service.
You also have to provide your mobile advertising identifier, a long, unique number that you may or may not be able to extract from your phone, depending on the model and the OS version. If you can't get it that way, you can install an app like AAID, which comes with a long list of – you guessed it – permissions to extract, store and process your private information.
Here's the thing: the whole point of a mobile ad identifier is that apps can access it (this is how they identify and track you). That step, where the system made you switch to your phone and use your camera to photograph your driver's license? That step could have automatically pulled this data off your device. That's the whole fucking point of this exercise: that web-pages and apps can request your mobile ad identifier.
Instead, DROP wants users to dig through their phone's deepest settings and/or install an app to retrieve a 32-digit number, which they then must key into a webform on their computer or in a different app on their phone.
Once you've done this, you must fill in another page of biographical information, including information that you've already provided to Login.gov and information you've already filled in on previous screens.
On this screen, you must also verify your phone number by sending yourself a text and then pasting in a unique number the system sends to you. But remember how this whole thing started? The first step is that you authenticate with Login.gov, which sends a text to your phone so you can take a (redundant) picture of your driver's license. There is no way you could get this far in the process unless you controlled the phone number you've just "verified" with the system.
Next, you must verify your email address, by receiving an email with a unique code in it and keying or pasting that into the webform, too. Again, remember how this process started: with you logging in with Login.gov, using your email address, which the system has already treated as verified since the very start of this (very) long and (very) complicated process.
This whole thing is terrible, and it is predicated on the absurd premise that Californians have to be defended from the threat of strangers who pretend to be them in order to sneakily opt them out of surveillance. DROP requires stronger authentication than any other US government system I've ever interacted with. I file my tax returns with fewer authentication steps. I renew my car's DMV registration with fewer authentication steps. I became a US citizen with fewer authentication steps.
This is either a system with no coherent threat model, or (far more probably), its threat model is that people will use it. This is California's answer to "a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'":
It's especially instructive to compare this process to the steps you have to take in order to "opt in" to having a data broker open a file on you and stuff it full of your sensitive, personal information, which is then sold to all comers:
Step one: Exist.
Step two: There is no step two.
It's also instructive to compare this process to the steps a data broker has to take to spy on you and sell your data:
Step one: Exist.
Step two: There is no step two.
Though there are many obvious ways this could be made better, I want to stress here that you shouldn't have to do this at all. It's entirely backwards. The process for not being spied on should look like this:
Step one: Exist.
Step two: There is no step two.
If anyone is going to be forced to jump through hoops to participate in the mass collection and catastrophic mishandling of private data, it should be the data brokers, not the people they spy on.
This kind of malicious compliance is the inevitable outcome of a process that starts by taking the obvious best measure off the table. The answer to the problem of data brokers is banning data brokers, not creating a demented hairball of form-filling that maintains the fiction that data broker surveillance is consensual.
In its own way, this process reminds me of the whole "carbon credit" fiasco. The answer to too many carbon emissions is to democratically decide to ban certain kinds of carbon emissions. But that would require states to do things, rather than simply "nudging" a process that is guided by "the market." So we end up with these junk "credits" that companies manufacture by promising not to log forests, many of which are already wildlife preserves and/or subsequently burn down:
The best critique of this whole thing came in 2021 from the Climate Ad Project, who produced a short video in which people were allowed to kill one another provided they purchased "murder offsets":
In a state of nature, murder exists. We, as a society, have decided this is bad. Rather than creating "incentives" not to murder, we just banned murder. Admittedly, we still get some murders, but when these happen, we don't treat it as "a mispricing of the anti-murder incentive" – we treat it as a crime.
The commercial surveillance industry may not be a criminal enterprise (yet), but it is the source of a torrent of crime, a flood of crime, a tsunami of crime. Every piece of your information that a data broker possesses exposes you to the risk of being victimized by a criminal. For this reason, I strongly believe that you should go through the tedious, performatively difficult DROP process:
https://consumer.drop.privacy.ca.gov/
But let's not pretend that this is good – or even adequate. There is no demand for being spied on. There is no basis for taking such enormous care in making sure people aren't maliciously removed from surveillance databases. If these databases exist at all (they should not), then we should make spies go through all this paperwork, to prove that you do want to be spied on, and unless they manage it, then spying on us should be treated as the crime it is.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
This is why I’ve been saying internet law is behind the times. So very, very behind the times. There was a time when we didn’t know what the outcomes of this or that business type would be. We know now, and it’s time to knock this nonsense off.
Book!Crowley is Cool, but he’s also so so afraid and so stressed and so nervous all the time, and that’s actually what makes him so Cool.
I keep coming back to glibly describing the Ineffable Husbands’ arcs in the book as something along the lines of“Aziraphale gave up on an Eternal Heaven for interesting books and fine wine, Crowley faced Hell’s Wrath for good food and long naps”. The exact Earthly Delights aren’t important, there’s plenty of intersection anyways, but their relation to their respective sides is.
Book Aziraphale’s arc is about disconnecting himself from Heaven ideologically. He was already somewhat jaded about Heaven and aware that they’re Not So Different from Hell in some areas (“You'll be amazed at the kind of things they can do to you, down there.” ”I imagine they're very similar to the sort of things they can do to one up there.”) and disobeying his side obviously cannot be easy or safe for him - but the thing that's most important to his arc is that he did still keep insisting Heaven is fundamentally Good on some level, that Heaven’s victory in the Final Battle is assured and it’ll bring about a better world.
But for the sake of his individual hedonistic pleasures, he started working against this abstract ideas of a 'better world' and Heaven's ideas of 'goodness'. Because what's the point of an ideal world if it has no sushi restaurants or CDs? Gradually also getting more rebellious and morally disillusioned with his 'Side' and doing more 'unheavenly' and morally-gray things, until he was disparaging Heaven openly through the mouth of a preacher and passive-aggressively challenging the Metatron's authority at the Airfield.
And Crowley... well, the difference here was clear from the Beginning.
Aziraphale's worries about doing 'the wrong thing' seem to be mostly about... how he wants to make the right decisions because the right decisions are good. I'm sure he's got more practical worries about disobeying orders, but the focus is on the internal conflict between Heaven's orders and his personal sense of morality. Crowley however... doesn't want to have done the 'right thing', because it can get him into troubles.
Crowley always knew he’s working for ‘the Bad Guys’. He’s not totally ideologically disconnected from Hell either (‘“But it nearly worked," snapped Crowley, feeling he should stick up for the old firm.’) but he’s fully aware of what it means to be a Demon working for Hell tempting people into Evil deeds so that their Souls can be sent to Eternal Damnation. And he's got layers upon layers of rationalization and justifications for it, and he has found genuine passion and pride in his unique modernized form of sin-spreading that feels more mischievous than outright harmful, but underneath it all, Crowley just knows he's gotta keep pleasing Hell, or else.
His cool, confident, laid-back attitude is not exactly a façade, but it serves for a good counterbalance to what happens whenever he has to interact with his higher-ups (lower-ups?). Where even if he tries to still play it up like he's Cool Guy Crowley and he's totally chill and smug with higher-raking Demons, like Hastur and Ligur, the moment they break away from the area he feels is 'safe' (his MO as a tempter, in which he already proven himself to the Management) and shift to the End of Days, he clamps up and becomes nervous and 'haunted'. The narration, when describing his POV, sometimes tries to underplay it as just annoyance or frustration, the way that it tries to underplay his guilt in meddling in the affairs of Humans before the M25 and Adam plop that guilt right in front of his face, the way it tries to underplay his relationship with Aziraphale as a reluctant Arrangement of convenience despite all evidence to the contrary, but…
But Crowley’s fears about Hell are the most overt, probably because, well, his entire part of the plot is about being forced to accomplish a Very Important Task for his bosses (unlike Aziraphale, who until his ‘summons’ to the Final Battle, was perusing a personal side-quest no one in Heaven gave a shit about), and so they’re pretty much always breathing down his neck.
That’s what this whole ‘a Demon can’t have Free Will’ thing is really about. It’s less about him being Ontologically Evil, and more about, well, the Cold War Spy metaphor, he’s forever stuck in a shitty morally-compromising job, that despite all of the perks that allow him to live his affluent and effortlessly cool life, he could not leave, escape, disobey or fail at without suffering horrible horrible consequences.
But when faced with the prospect of losing Earth, and all of the experiences that come from living on it, even the most basic ones like a long sleep after a heavy meal, he tries anyway. He knows the consequences, he feels helpless and terrified, but he still risks Hell’s Wrath for food and naps.
...Well, his first plan is one that he convinced himself is relatively ‘safe’. An underhanded, cowardly trick worthy of one of Hell’s best tempters, but also informed by his very Earthly understanding of how the world works. If he performs his job as the Antichrist’s ‘Godfather’ as exemplary as he’s expected to, but places Aziraphale in to ‘thwart’ him then Armageddon could fail without Hell being able to place the blame on him. Probably. Hopefully.
And when it all falls apart and Hell does start coming for him. Well, first of all, it’s important that it’s in the same sequence that introduces us to Crowley’s idea of indoor gardening, which within the context of the book is absolutely him venting what he feels about the way Hell treats him…
And Crowley keeping that thermos of Holy Water in his flat shows that he’s been clearly paranoid of something like that happening for a while now. It’s a fear that’s been growing for longer than just the eleven years of the plot. And now it’s coming true. And Crowley has no choice but to face it. And he succeeds. Like, that’s part of what’s important about...
Crowley was outnumbered against two more powerful Demons. He was scared and he was underpowered and he faced one of his constant nightmare scenarios and he won. He outsmarted these two technically-more-powerful Demons with a little bit of foresight and a goofy pop-culture reference and a clever use of his natural Demonic abilities but mostly his natural (and very Human) cunning and knowledge of then-modern technology and his ability to play it cool even when he is scared and then he WON.
And from here on out, his road to Tadfield, to trying to stop the Apocalypse openly and directly, is basically him doing increasingly brazen and brave things, increasingly facing even more of his fears now that he's already got Hell pissed and after him. First trying to find Aziraphale at the burning Bookshop (clearly not as dangerous to him as it would be to a normal Human, but I won't say there was no risk of Discoporation), and then resigning himself to sacrificing the Bentley, and then crossing through the M25...
Like, the reason why this famous quote is so important...
Is because Crowley's optimism is truly 'underneath it all'. It's absolutely not self-evident. His inner monologue is always full of anxiety and fears and worst-case scenarios leaking through, thinking about how he can do nothing to stop Armageddon, thinking about how screwed he'd be if Hell finds out he fucked up Armageddon, thinking about how screwed up he is now that Hell found out that he fucked up Armageddon. One of the lines proceeding this one is literally "All was black, gloomy and awful. There was no light at the end of the tunnel-or if there was, it was an oncoming train." For the most part he might seem like a total pessimist, but he just... keeps going. He's cynical (that's his job!) and he's terrified and he just keeps going!
It's, y'know, layers. On the surface Crowley is this confident, laid-back and cool Demon that loves excitement and is costing through life not worried about anything, traffic cops chasing him around for speeding is just good fun so he can dunk on them. Below that, he's stressed out and scared, fretting about what will happen to him if he falls out of relative favor in Hell. But below even that, he is an optimist. A confident and utterly cool optimist.
And then he makes it to the Airfield, in the coolest way he possibly could, and... like, there are so many little character moments during the Airfield Climax. His insistence, with 'fatalistic gloom' that Adam stopping Armageddon wouldn't make a difference, but then his glee when he realizes that Aziraphale had found an out and joining him, even though it's clear how afraid he is of Beelzebub and that he is pissed with him... And then Satan comes.
Aziraphale's decision to stay and fight Satan is about his ideological disillusionment arc. Sure, fighting Satan might technically seem Angelic, but he makes it clear that he does it to 'make up' for all the troubles he caused Humanity as a representative of Heaven, explictly putting his 'Job' and Crowley's 'Job' as equally problematic, with no attempt to make himself morally superior. But for Crowley, when Aziraphale asks him to stay and help him fight, Crowley realizes that with all of his greatest fears already realized, all of his worst-case-scenarios having already come true, with nothing more to lose (well, I suppose he's still got Aziraphale to lose, but since the Angel already made up his mind to try and fight the Adversary, it's not like Crowley can do anything to stop that)... He is actually 'free' now.
Crowley realizes that deep down, he can and he wants to do such a brave and selfless thing.
Well, at the end, he doesn’t actually need to, but, like, it’s the thought that counts, right?
I think there’s a tendency in Fandom to treat characters with a seemingly self-contradictory nature as either just one side of their character or the other. Either flattened to their surface-level characterization or people do notice their hidden depths, but treat everything around it as a false facade and not another essential element of their character (this happens to poor Book Aziraphale as well). Book Crowley isn’t just the laid-back, confident demon he seems on the surface, or just a terrified nervous wreck pretending to be cool and confident, he is both. His ‘Cool’ attitude helps him cope with his fears and he is so utterly, utterly Cool not despite of, but because he’s so afraid.
so i don't remember if ive ever shared this but an incredible consequence of reading Sherlock Holmes as a kid was me imagining them as even gayer than they are in canon.
so here's the deal, when i'd asked my mother what a "dressing gown" was, she explained to me that it was basically a bathrobe. so, my knowledge of bathrobes being 'clothes you put on your naked body after a shower as a comfortable alternative to a towel', my mind of course conjured Holmes and Watson walking around their flat in nothing other than a dressing gown on. like this:
and kid me went "huh, that's awfully intimate. theyre definitely SOME sort of great friends." I am honestly pretty ashamed to admit i only realized they actually wore normal clothes under their dressing gowns when i started searching for Sherlock Holmes fanart and saw people drawing it. oops.
OP, would it make you feel better or worse to know I also read Holmes as a kid and thought a "dressing gown" was the item of clothing I now know was actually called a shift? Which was exclusively worn by women?
You wear a dressing gown over, like, your pajamas, or possibly a shirt and trousers. If a gentleman is getting dressed to actually go outside, or see visitors in the parlor, he's going to wear an actual fitted jacket instead. So you aren't naked underneath it, but you aren't properly clothed either.
I mean, I know that NOW, but I didn't when I was ten.
Also given how often visitors look at Holmes like "?????????" because he meets them in his dressing gown, I'm going to say he very well may not have been appropriately dressed under it, either.
You know what I hate about booktok romance? The idea that the male love interest being disrespectful is sexy. Take out all the context of 50 Shades and the gross misrepresentation of BDSM which persists, why would a man calling me names and taking away my freedom be sexy? That's so depressingly unsexy. Every booktok male sounds like an incel to me.
so jane austen was inspired by much ado when writing pride and prejudice and of course she’s brilliant and i love her version of the plot and her very original characters. i mean it’s almost unrecognizable because it’s so original. which is why i love her. she took inspiration from the bare bone plot of much ado with the two couples, and then rooted all their problems in her own time period. it would have been so modern and fresh to read it right when it was published!!
but anyway what i’m trying to say is that i would love to live in a universe where i could see jane and bingley play pranks on lizzie and darcy in a hero and claudio type style. it’s just comedy gold.
Sorry for the rant OP, but this is one of my FAVORITE lit crit topics:
I have written on here many times how much I LOVE that Pride and Prejudice is an adaptation of Much Ado in a kind of stretchy, fanfic-AU sort of way. Austen definitely used the same characters and their dynamics with one another, but she actively adapted the story by giving them all interesting, English Regency versions of their Renaissance Tuscany/London challenges.
My favorite thing is that you see similarities in a) the scandal of an affair with the heroine’s unwed family member, and b) the willingness of the heroine’s “bitter rival” (Benedick/Darcy) to go far beyond what’s expected of him to save her family’s reputation, even when it might hurt his own
In her adaptation, Austen proposes that even if Beatrice/Elizabeth’s family member DID have an extramarital affair, Benedick/Darcy would still be morally obliged to help the family. This differs from Shakespeare, where Benedick believes that Hero is innocent. Sex scandals are therefore key elements in both plots, but Austen really pushes the original narrative to explore what the characters would do if the family member wasn’t innocent and the sex scandal was real. Would Benedick still have the same sense of duty to remedy the situation at great inconvenience/loss to himself? Would that duty be based in his love for Beatrice, or in his sense of ethics? Would Beatrice and Benedick have even fallen in love without their family’s interference?
So like, not only is P&P a wonderful (and very funny) adaptation of Much Ado, it’s also a refreshing, explicit exploration of the themes and issues Shakespeare clearly wanted to introduce to his 16th century audience. P&P doesn’t get to the violent, verbal extremes of “eat his heart in a marketplace” and “kill Claudio,” but it does push the character of Benedick to much more agency and responsibility as a privileged person in relation to Beatrice’s own (lack of) power. And to me, that makes it an exceptionally challenging and effective Regency adaptation of Much Ado.
(But ignore my meta-izing. Let’s talk about what’s really important: Austen preserving the comedy GOLD of suggesting that Benedick/Darcy is painfully in love with Beatrice/Lizzy from the very beginning, and also fucking furious with himself about it)
Obviously it's not one to one, but if we consider the Hero/Claudio storyline, Austen split it into two couples and made it way more realistic (in my opinion)
Jane and Bingley represent the Hero/Claudio "love at first sight" and "separated by machinations" sections, but come to a much more satisfying conclusion because Bingley's folly is based on modesty. He never turns on Jane, as Claudio does, instead he leaves her, but out of a belief that she doesn't love him and therefore wouldn't be harmed by it. Their happy ending is happy to (most) of the audience.
The defence of honour plot, Claudio doing wrong by Hero leading to her social doom and her being defended by Benedick, is all transferred to the trickster, Wickham (Don John?) and his victim Lydia (the other half of Hero). The solution still is marriage, but we are not left with this ambiguous nagging wonder if it's ever possible for Hero/Claudio to be happy, we know Wickham/Lydia is a bad marriage, but that Elizabeth & Jane will help their sister and she'll be okay.
I think if Much Ado About Nothing does have a flaw, it's that Claudio doesn't have his heart eaten in the marketplace. That flaw exists in Pride & Prejudice too, to be honest, but Claudio as Wickham doesn't get what he wanted. He has his ambitions of a wealthy match ruined by Darcy. For me, the ending isn't as uncomfortable, because no one is trying to pretend it's a happy one.
“Classic Literature is just a bunch of boring old white guys?”
First of all, how dare you! Genuinely HATE this take because it’s not even close to being true.
For Pride Month, I present to you a short list of recommended (by me!) queer classic literature.
1. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) - Oscar Wilde
You already knew this book was going to be on this list.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is a Gothic novel about a beautiful, young man who remains forever youthful and leads a life of self-indulgence, whereas a portrait of him ages and reflects his sins. The original manuscript of the novel had 500 words deleted by the editor prior to publication including Basil's confession that he felt a "romance of feeling" towards Dorian and had never before loved a woman. So while the novel is not explicitly queer, the intention is definitely there. Also, Oscar Wilde himself was sent to prison for 2 years for "gross indecency with men". So....subtext is everything.
2. Giovanni's Room (1956) - James Baldwin
There's no subtext in Giovanni's Room. James Baldwin was an openly queer man and had relationships with both men and women. The main character in his novel does the same. David is a gay (or bi?) man who struggles with his sexual identity, outright denying it at times. He is engaged to a woman, but spends the majority of the book trying to come to terms with the fact that he is actually in love with Giovanni, a man he is having a sexual affair with. Very poignant novel about homosexuality, repression, and internalized homophobia in mid-century Paris.
3. The Well of Loneliness (1928) - Radclyffe Hall
When a book gets banned, I immediately have to read it. The Well of Loneliness was banned from publication in the UK for being "obscene" and only allowed to be published in the US after years in court. There is nothing sexually explicit in the book, but a novel about a butch lesbian written by a butch lesbian in 1928 is going to cause a little social panic. It's also a beautiful book. The main character, Stephen (a woman) falls in love with a nurse named Mary and though they start a happy relationship, they have to navigate the social rejections of their families, friends, and wider community.
4. Goodbye to Berlin (1934) - Christopher Isherwood
The inspiration to one of the greatest musicals of all time, Cabaret. And also semi-autobiographical as it was based on Isherwood's time in Berlin. Isherwood was a gay, American writer who spent much of his 20s exploring queer spaces in Berlin before the rise of the Nazi party in Germany. One of these spaces is the avant-garde, gender bending Kit Kat Club. Ultimately, Isherwood has to flee Germany when Hitler gains power, and we're left with a sad ambiguity about what happens to all of the friends he made in Germany.
Noah's Book Hoard @noahsbookhoard - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
