Episode 908: A sapphic book

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Thank you for joining us again on our book group and Reader’s advisory podcast! 

Our organization is the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange, and we work with all types of libraries. Schools, public, academic, history centers, and more! We are here to support you and to bring you new knowledge to inform your library work. 

This season we continue to explore a wide variety of book genres and topics so you can expand your reading horizons, and share more information with your library community. We are looking at the prompt from the 2022 PopSugar reading challenge this season. You can read along with their challenge, linked in our show notes, or just enjoy some different books. 

This week we are looking at sapphic books.This is a wide genre, with all sorts of books for all of us to enjoy!

As always, be sure you check out our show notes page. All the links to the books, beverages, and resources we share today will be available there for you!

Beverages:

This is, of course, a book group. And every book group needs to have beverages, so you really get the feel for your reading.

This week’s beverages come from an article on the SGN website with cocktails for Pride month, available in assorted colors. Try them all!

Apple Marsha (red)

A tart twist on a Washington state classic. Named for Marsha P. Johnson, one of the most influential women in LGBT history. As the only sweetener is the apple pucker, this drink may be a little more on the sour side. Personally, I prefer to make it with even less apple pucker so it is extra tart, almost like a sour candy. For a sweeter drink, try swapping the unsweetened cranberry juice for a sweetened version.

1 oz. vodka

3 oz. apple pucker

1 oz. unsweetened cranberry juice

Juice of one lime

Dash of aromatic bitters

2-3 oz. sparkling water

Slice of apple or lime wedge

In a glass filled with ice, combine the vodka, apple pucker, cranberry juice, lime juice, and bitters. Stir with a long spoon until well chilled. Top with a few ounces of sparkling water. Gently stir to combine, garnish with a slice of lime or apple, and enjoy!

Sapphic Sunshine Mule (yellow)

Does this count as a wellness shot? Technically no, but it does have the spicy qualities of ginger and turmeric combined with the comforting sweetness of honey. Normally, I prefer my mules quite tart, with the only sweetness in the ginger beer. However, the honey in this recipe gives an extra bit of flavor.

1.5 oz. vodka

Juice of two limes

One batch of honey-turmeric syrup (see recipe below)

Dash of aromatic bitters

3-4 oz. ginger beer

Combine the vodka, lime juice, syrup, and bitters in a glass with ice. Stir thoroughly, top with ginger beer, and garnish with a lime wedge. Who knows? You might just meet your soul mate in the Trader Joe’s produce section.

Honey Turmeric Syrup

0.5 oz. honey

1 oz. hot water

0.25 tsp.. ground turmeric

Combine the ingredients and stir until the honey has fully dissolved. If needed, heat in a microwave-safe bowl until the honey can dissolve. Makes enough for one drink.

Genre Discussion:

What are the books in this genre? An article from BookRiot gives us some clarity:  “Although sapphic and lesbian have the same root, they do have different meanings. Sapphic includes lesbians, bisexual women, and nonbinary people who align with the term. Therefore, all lesbian books are sapphic, as are all Women Loving Women (WLW) books. They can be of any genre and don’t have to include an F/F romance. A bi woman main character with no romantic interests throughout the course of the book would still qualify a book as sapphic.”

This gives us a lot of different kinds of books to enjoy this week! There are so many options for books to choose from, books in different genres within this one, different voices – there will be a lot of different things to enjoy and to recommend to your patrons. This is another genre that is filled with books you might not expect will be here, so there will be fun surprises to enjoy!

Suggested Reading Resources:

Our Book Discussion

We have our beverages, we are familiar with this week’s genre, let’s get to the book discussion! We will give you a list of all the books we share today. You can click on any of these links to go to Amazon.com for more information. If you buy anything while you are there, Amazon will give us a small percent of their profits from your purchase. Thanks in advance for helping to support the mission of CMLE – we appreciate it! 

Yerba Buena, by Nina LaCour 

Yerba Buena is the debut adult novel by the bestselling and award-winning YA author Nina LaCour, following two women on a star-crossed journey toward each other.

A Most Anticipated Book (Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, The Washington Post, Vulture, NBC News, Good Housekeeping, Parade, Electric Lit, BookRiot, Bustle, Goodreads, LGBTQ Reads, Autostraddle, Veranda Magazine, The Lesbian Review, and more)

“A love story for our time.”—Tara Conklin, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Romantics

“This book is a precious thing.”—Casey McQuiston, New York Times bestselling author of One Last Stop

When Sara Foster runs away from home at sixteen, she leaves behind the girl she once was, capable of trust and intimacy. Years later, in Los Angeles, she is a sought-after bartender, renowned as much for her brilliant cocktails as for the mystery that clings to her. Across the city, Emilie Dubois is in a holding pattern, yearning for the beauty and community her Creole grandparents cultivated but unable to commit. On a whim, she takes a job arranging flowers at the glamorous restaurant Yerba Buena and embarks on an affair with the married owner.

The morning Emilie and Sara first meet at Yerba Buena, their connection is immediate. But the damage both women carry, and the choices they have made, pulls them apart again and again. When Sara’s old life catches up to her, upending everything she thought she wanted just as Emilie has finally gained her own sense of purpose, they must decide if their love is more powerful than their pasts.

At once exquisite and expansive, astonishing in its humanity and heart, Yerba Buena is a love story for our time and a propulsive journey through the lives of two women trying to find somewhere, or someone, to call home.

Fiebre Tropical

You Exist Too Much, by Zaina Arafat    

On a hot day in Bethlehem, a 12-year-old Palestinian-American girl is yelled at by a group of men outside the Church of the Nativity. She has exposed her legs in a biblical city, an act they deem forbidden, and their judgement will echo on through her adolescence. When our narrator finally admits to her mother that she is queer, her mother’s response only intensifies a sense of shame: “You exist too much,” she tells her daughter.

Told in vignettes that flash between the US and the Middle East, Zaina Arafat’s debut novel traces her protagonist’s progress from blushing teen to sought-after DJ and aspiring writer. In Brooklyn, she moves into an apartment with her first serious girlfriend and tries to content herself with their comfortable relationship. But soon her longings, so closely hidden during her teenage years, explode out into reckless romantic encounters. Her desire to thwart her own destructive impulses will eventually lead her to The Ledge, an unconventional treatment center that identifies her affliction as “love addiction.” In this strange, enclosed society she will start to consider the unnerving similarities between her own internal traumas and divisions and those of the places that have formed her.

You Exist Too Much is a captivating story charting two of our most intense longings – for love, and a place to call home.

Hold Still, by Nina LaCour (some graphic novel elements)

That night Ingrid told Caitlin, I’ll go wherever you go. But by dawn Ingrid, and her promise, were gone.

Ingrid’s suicide immobilizes Caitlin, leaving her unsure of her place in a new life she hardly recognizes. A life without the art, the laughter, the music, and the joy that she shared with her best friend…. But Ingrid left something behind. In words and drawings, Ingrid documented a painful farewell in her journal. Journeying through Ingrid’s final days, Caitlin fights back through unspeakable loss to find renewed hope.

Hold Still is the indelible debut that launched Nina LaCour, the award-winning author of We Are Okay. LaCour’s breakthrough novel brings the changing seasons of Caitlin’s first year without Ingrid to the page with indelible emotion and honesty.

Fresh, by Margot Wood

Some students enter their freshman year of college knowing exactly what they want to do with their lives. Elliot McHugh is not one of those people. But picking a major is the last thing on Elliot’s mind when she’s too busy experiencing all that college has to offer – from dancing all night at off-campus parties, to testing her RA Rose’s patience, to making new friends, to having the best sex one can have on a twin-sized dorm room bed. But she may not be ready for the fallout when reality hits. When the sex she’s having isn’t that great. When finals creep up and smack her right in the face. Or when her roommate’s boyfriend turns out to be the biggest a-hole. Elliot may make epic mistakes, but if she’s honest with herself (and with you, dear listener), she may just find the person she wants to be. And maybe even fall in love in the process…. Well, maybe.

When Katie Met Cassidy, by Camille Perri

When it comes to Cassidy, Katie can’t think straight.

Katie Daniels, a twenty-eight-year-Ho Kentucky transplant with a strong set of traditional values, has just been dumped by her fiancé when she finds herself seated across a negotiating table from native New Yorker Cassidy Price, a sexy, self-assured woman wearing a man’s suit. While at first Katie doesn’t know what to think, a chance meeting later that night leads them both to the Metropolis, a dimly lit lesbian dive bar that serves as Cassidy’s second home.

The night offers straight-laced Katie a glimpse into a wild yet fiercely tight-knit community, one in which barrooms may as well be bedrooms, and loyal friends fill in the spaces absent families leave behind. And in Katie, Cassidy finds a chance to open her heart in new ways. Soon their undeniable chemistry will push each woman to confront what she thinks she deserves–and what it is she truly wants.

The Soft Landing Collection: Sapphic Fantasy and Science Fiction Stories, by Jacquelynn Lyon

Visit worlds with mermaids trapped in zoos, floating continents that block out the sun, curses that sprout flowers from your skin, astronauts on dying spaceships, and forests haunted by hungry bog witches. Five short stories that revolve around the love between women and the fantastical world they inhabit.

Sagas of a mermaid fascinated by the enclosure next to hers. A genius young woman trying to reach a stranger in the sky. A bog hag threatening to eat a princess that can’t seem to stay away from her. Astronauts conversing as one hurtles into Jupiter’s atmosphere on a doomed voyage. A woman cursed to grow flowers from her skin when kissed and the knight that promises to save her.

Inspired by fairy tales, folklore, classic science fiction, and more. Love is all around us—and more magical than ever in these tales of overcoming the obstacles that keep us apart.

She Drives Me Crazy, by Kelly Quindlen 

After an embarrassing loss to her ex-girlfriend in their first basketball game of the season, seventeen-year-old Scottie Zajac gets into a fender bender with the worst possible person: her nemesis, Irene Abraham, head cheerleader for the Fighting Reindeer.

Irene is as mean as she is beautiful, so Scottie makes a point to keep her distance. When the accident sends Irene’s car to the shop for weeks’ worth of repairs and the girls are forced to carpool, their rocky start only gets bumpier.

But when an opportunity arises for Scottie to get back at her toxic ex―and climb her school’s social ladder―she bribes Irene into an elaborate fake- dating scheme that threatens to reveal some very real feelings.

Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead , by Emily Austin

In this “fun, page-turner of a novel” (Sarah Haywood, New York Times bestselling author) that’s perfect for fans of Mostly Dead Things and Goodbye, Vitamin, a morbidly anxious young woman stumbles into a job as a receptionist at a Catholic church and soon finds herself obsessed with her predecessor’s mysterious death.

Gilda, a twenty-something, atheist, animal-loving lesbian, cannot stop ruminating about death. Desperate for relief from her panicky mind and alienated from her repressive family, she responds to a flyer for free therapy at a local Catholic church, and finds herself being greeted by Father Jeff, who assumes she’s there for a job interview. Too embarrassed to correct him, Gilda is abruptly hired to replace the recently deceased receptionist Grace.

In between trying to memorize the lines to Catholic mass, hiding the fact that she has a new girlfriend, and erecting a dirty dish tower in her crumbling apartment, Gilda strikes up an email correspondence with Grace’s old friend. She can’t bear to ignore the kindly old woman who has been trying to reach her friend through the church inbox, but she also can’t bring herself to break the bad news. Desperate, she begins impersonating Grace via email. But when the police discover suspicious circumstances surrounding Grace’s death, Gilda may have to finally reveal the truth of her mortifying existence.

Milk Fed by Melissa Broder

Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of existential control, through obsessive food rituals, while working as an underling at a Los Angeles talent management agency. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine. Rachel is content to carry on subsisting—until her therapist encourages her to take a ninety-day communication detox from her mother, who raised her in the tradition of calorie counting.

Rachel soon meets Miriam, a zaftig young Orthodox Jewish woman who works at her favorite frozen yogurt shop and is intent upon feeding her. Rachel is suddenly and powerfully entranced by Miriam—by her sundaes and her body, her faith and her family—and as the two grow closer, Rachel embarks on a journey marked by mirrors, mysticism, mothers, milk, and honey.

“A ruthless, laugh-out-loud examination of life under the tyranny of diet culture” (Glamour) Broder tells a tale of appetites: physical hunger, sexual desire, spiritual longing, and the ways that we compartmentalize these so often interdependent instincts.

We Were Promised Spotlights, by Lindsay Sproul 

Hopuonk, Massachusetts, 1999

Taylor Garland’s good looks have earned her the admiration of everyone in her small town. She’s homecoming queen, the life of every party, and she’s on every boy’s most-wanted list.

People think Taylor is living the dream, and assume she’ll stay in town and have kids with the homecoming king–maybe even be a dental hygienist if she’s super ambitious. But Taylor is actually desperate to leave home, and she hates the smell of dentists’ offices. Also? She’s completely in love with her best friend, Susan.

Senior year is almost over, and everything seems perfect. Now Taylor just has to figure out how to throw it all away. 

Ophelia After All, by Racquel Marie

Ophelia Rojas knows what she likes: her best friends, Cuban food, rose-gardening, and boys – way too many boys. Her friends and parents make fun of her endless stream of crushes, but Ophelia is a romantic at heart. She couldn’t change, even if she wanted to.

So when she finds herself thinking more about cute, quiet Talia Sanchez than the loss of a perfect prom with her ex-boyfriend, seeds of doubt take root in Ophelia’s firm image of herself. Add to that the impending end of high school and the fracturing of her once-solid friend group, and things are spiraling a little out of control. But the course of love―and sexuality―never did run smooth. As her secrets begin to unravel, Ophelia must make a choice between clinging to the fantasy version of herself she’s always imagined or upending everyone’s expectations to rediscover who she really is, after all.

Conclusion:

Thank you so much for joining us on Reading With Libraries! 

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Bring your book ideas, bring your beverages, and join us back here on Thursday!