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Everything is so, so awful, so I escaped into gay love stories this month! Coping methods are what they are, man. (Also, queer joy is radical.)
 Netflix’s Alex Strangelove was very charming and very sweet and pretty funny with likable characters that I super enjoyed spending time with. I was a little bored with the root of Alex’s repression (and repression in general, some people don’t figure it out ’til later on and that’s FINE, it doesn’t always have to be about trauma) but overall this was a really fun, really joyful gay romcom. Daniel Doheny was very good and I loved seeing Jesse James Keitel’s character Sidney be really unapologetically visible in the face of Dell’s dumb straight boy ranting. Fun and sweet!
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 I had been very eagerly awaiting Love, Simon since I read the book way back when and had loved it pretty thoroughly and I think it translated really well to screen and was a fun, sweet watch. It was lovely to see so many characters of color and teenagers just being teenagers and also to see dumb, shitty bullies get told off and punished by an adult in a really satisfying way. Everyone was really great in this — I particularly loved the parents and teachers — and I was particularly impressed with Clark Moore’s Ethan who, in a movie made even five years ago, would have been a one-note joke.
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 Cinnamon Toast and the End of the World was a gift from the Amazon algorithm, recommended to me based on the probably pretty high volume of queer books I both peruse and buy. I really liked the writing in this one and Stephen’s inner monologue and the secondary characters we get to spend time with. I also especially liked seeing it take place in an semi-unfamiliar place and time, the 80s in Nova Scotia, and the fact that it is a real coming-of-age story, following Stephen for a good long while. This one is less happy than the the stories I tend to love (and beware if you’re particularly sensitive to violence) but it is really hopeful and kinder than a lot of books set in similar times and places. It reminded me some of Marie Sexton’s Trailer Trash, which I loved a LOT, so now I’ll probably think of them as a little gay small town 80s American-Canadian set.
And three to look forward to…
  
2017 was an awful year for me in terms of reading, so much so that I actually decided to halve my Goodreads challenge for this year so that I wouldn’t feel quite so disappointed in myself over something, uh, fairly trivial. (I haven’t completed a challenge since 2015! I’m a disgrace!) But I did like a lot of what I read and here are my Totally Top Five for 2017!
 5. Finding Audrey, Sophie Kinsella – This was my only audiobook of the year and it was a joy. A sweet story with a great reader and a nice rendering of the struggles of teenagerdom, but a version where there are institutions and people in a place to provide care for your mental health with little stigma. I had some issues with the story (there’s some med-shaming and too much emphasis placed on a romantic partner in the recovery process) but I enjoyed my time with these characters.
 4. Trouble Makes a Comeback, Stephanie Tromly – This is the sequel to Trouble Is a Friend of Mine which was my favorite book of 2016 and though it wasn’t quite as good as the first, it was just as much fun. I love these characters and the way that they talk to each other and the dubious capers in which they get embroiled and I cannot wait to read the next one.
 3. Say What You Will, Cammie McGovern – I absolutely loved the characters in this book and was so grateful to see disabled teenagers with full narrative voices living their lives and having a romance! I also really appreciated that the depiction of mental health and disability were more complex and uglier than the sort of soundbite version you often see in media, especially because it was largely devoid of pity AND inspiration porn. I also just really love a story where two people are kind of tossed together and you get to see how they fit into each other’s lives and this is an awesome version of that.
 2. The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy, Kate Hattemer – This was an absolute joy to read, funny and charming with engaging, vibrant characters who I wanted to spend lots and lots of time with. I loved the friendship in this and the dialogue and the way that characters interacted with each other. Also, I think this book genuinely has one of the weirdest, goofiest, and most unexpected Chekhov’s Gun situations in the history of, like, human language and I am better for having read it.
 1. All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders – I have a habit of buying books based on the absolute shortest blurbs or, in this case, pretty much just based on their covers and then forgetting everything I know about them before I read them. Sometimes that’s a bad thing, sometimes good, but in the case of All the Birds in the Sky it was a complete windfall because I absolutely never would have bought or read it if I’d know what it was about and I would have missed out on my absolute favorite book of 2017.
It’s weird and funny and charming and unexpected and the characters are engaging and well-developed and they grow and evolve and I am not going to tell you a single thing about it because I can’t do it justice. If you haven’t read it yet, do.
Honorable Mentions
Courtney Milan, Trade Me | Kasie West, By Your Side | Diane Adams & Claire Keane, Love Is
Previously
2K12 | 2K13 | 2K14 | 2K15 | 2K16
OKAY, now that I’ve finally finished ALL MY REVIEWS of books I read in 2016, I can finally tell you which ones are in my top five! I’m sure you’ve been on TOTAL TENTERHOOKS. I mean, like everyone, I feel partially conflicted about writing about silly, joyful things when it feels like the world is being set freshly aflame every single day, but without joy, what are we fighting for, right? So let’s do this in spite of it all!
 5. Julie Murphy, Dumplin’ – Dumplin’ is only the second audiobook I’ve ever listened to (It is exxxxxtremely hard for me to absorb information aurally.) and I loved both the narration (TBH, the way that Eileen Stevens has Bo say “Willowdean” has irreversibly changed my life.) and the story. It’s fun and sweet and smart and funny. Willowdean grows, the secondary and tertiary characters are awesome, and most importantly, WILLOWDEAN IS FAT AND DOESN’T LOSE WEIGHT. There is a secondary character named Millie who is also fat and DOESN’T LOSE WEIGHT. I have read a lot of books about fat characters and even the ones who decide being fat is “okay” usually lose some weight as, like, a magical side effect of being allowed to feel human? I guess. But Willowdean is fat and thinks that’s okay and pushes back against the idea that it isn’t okay and she stays fat! She never even obsesses over food! What a gift.
 4. Andrea Portes, Anatomy of a Misfit – Anatomy of a Misfit is a book that frustrated me as I read it because it struck me as so true to the misery of high school, but in a really satisfying way. The writing is very strong and Anika is a really well-rendered teenager with complex feelings about genuinely difficult situations. She’s not particularly likable, which is always unbelievably hard for me to engage with, but she was so fully-fleshed and felt so human. Her narrative voice always felt age-appropriate without ever pandering or falling into that non-young-adults-trying-to-sound-like-young-adults thing that I seemed to encounter a lot in 2016. This is not an easy book and I don’t think it always pulls it’s weight, but it was definitely some of the best reading I did this year.
 3. Marie Sexton, Trailer Trash – I think I screamed about Trailer Trash for like, five days straight on twitter after I read it because I was so, so impressed with it. It’s a gay, teenage love story set in the 80s that manages to be sweet, emotional, devastating, and hopeful. The narrative voices feel SO of their time, while also feeling really current. It doesn’t ignore its time period at all — including the AIDS crisis — but manages to stay hopeful in spite of pain, loss, and tragedy. This book is a romance through and through, but it’s cut with real, weighty problems and real, painful experiences and full of real, complicated conversations and relationships. I read it in May and not a week has gone by where I haven’t at least thought about how much I enjoyed it.
 2. Sonia Belasco, Speak of Me As I Am – I’ve known Sonia for… more than ten years now, I think, and I have spent nearly all of those years waiting to have one of her books in my hands and man, it was so worth the anticipation. Speak of Me As I Am is beautiful and moving and lyrical and lovely. Melanie and Damon feel like real teenagers, but they’re also smart and sensitive and thoughtful. I love the weight of place in this and the way that characters who are not physically present in the story are so incredibly central and alive. There are also awesome parents in this and good teachers and secondary characters who are lively and fully-formed and worth caring about. I feel like a cheater sharing this one, since you can’t actually read it until April, but I promise it’ll be worth the wait.
 1. Stephanie Tromly, Trouble is a Friend of Mine – I LOVED THIS BOOK. I loved it so much. I love-love-loved it. I also listened to the audiobook of this one (the last one I listened to, I think) and Kathleen McInerney is GREAT and kind of sounds like Kristen Bell, which made it all feel very Veronica Mars-y. It was a fun, fast story with great characters. Nobody really sounds like a teenager, but they somehow feel like teenagers anyway. It’s a great caper-y book and it made me laugh a lot. And the end made me squeal in delight with such vigor that I traumatized Crystal while she was driving. It does have some… questionable moments with racial stereotypes and slut-shame-y-I’m-not-like-other-girls type stuff, but I have the luxury of being able to enjoy the story anyway. Such a fun read!
Honorable Mentions: Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda | Bone Gap | The Haters | More Happy Than Not | Vivian Apple at the End of the World | Dietland | Winger | My Heart and Other Black Holes
2K12 | 2K13 | 2K14 | 2K15 | WATCHING | LISTENING
I read fifty books this year! 53 of my 50 book goal, actually! Joining GoodReads (PS: BE MY FRIEND!) was super good for me! Even though I haven’t finished a book in… a while. But I am reading! Inching away at A Little Life day by day.
Anyway! Among those fifty books, I read several I loved! A lot! Because books are one of the things I love most in the entire world and you should all listen to me when I recommend them because I have impeccable reading taste.
 5. Courtney Milan, The Duchess War – As part of my 2015 “Be more open-minded and less of a dick” campaign, I also decided to try out some romance novels! I read some really very bad ones, but I also got introduced to Courtney Milan because I am friends with people with very good taste! I can’t express how much joy this book brought me and how unbelievably good (and hot! and playful! and fun!) it is. Such a good surprise! The sex scenes are great (SO GREAT!) and the characters are engaging and likable and interesting and you fully believe that they are attracted to each other which is preeeeeeetty important for a romance. Also, it doesn’t fall into that trap where the conflict exists solely because two people won’t just TALK TO EACH OTHER which is one of the things I find most infuriating in romance-y type stories. I mean, there’s some of it, but you also kind of understand why these two wouldn’t just talk to each other already. I also really liked the prequel novella The Governess Affair and I will definitely read the rest in the series. I love that the non-romance stories are just as interesting as the romance and that the romance is funny and sexy and kind. Consent and tenderness are so, so key to her sex scenes and I live for them. Too good.
 4. Maggie Stiefvater, The Dream Thieves – The first book in this series, The Raven Boys, was my very favorite book I read last year and I loved the follow-up as much, if not even more. The placemaking is phenomenal, the characters are awesome (Even the new ones! That can be so rare for a series!), the mythology is fun and expensive, and the characters and the relationships between the characters continue to develop in ways that are engaging and exciting. Stiefvater is a pro at exploiting the female gaze which is not only enjoyable, but refreshing, and writes dialogue that sounds real without actually emulating how teenagers talk. (Have you actually listened to teenagers talk? It’s mostly a nightmare.) I love everyone in these books, even when I don’t love them the way the author wants me to. I love the tension and the magic and the physical agony of anticipation. I love the villains in these damn books! I didn’t love the third book quite as much as the first two, but it didn’t dampen my enthusiasm for the series or make me any less overly amped for the next one. I love these books and I cannot wait until they get made into a terribly-casted monstrosity of a movie that I can scream about on the internet.
  
3. I finally read Bossypants this year and then I also read Yes Please! And Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? and I really, really loved all three. I made a conscious decision to try to read more books written by women and people of color this year and it has 1. introduced me to a ton of really good books and 2. probably made me a better person tbh. I thought I was going to love Yes Please more than I did and I don’t normally love Mindy Kaling, so I expected to not like it, but I actually think I loved her book the most. Surprises! All three kept me engaged (often while stationary biking which is a hard place to keep me interested!) and laughing and even moved and I’m so glad that, even with the things I didn’t love (Comedians love problematic garbage sometimes! It’s awful! Do better, guys!) I took the time to read all three of them this year. I also read Miranda Hart’s Is It Just Me? which I also loved and regularly quote. I read Kelly Oxford’s book too (Women! Comedians! I was having a time.) but it was awful, so.
 2. Rebecca Stead, When You Reach Me – This book emotionally devastated me and I had to curl up in the fetal position and cry for like a half-hour after I finished reading it. Everything about it just felt so true and authentic and real, characters and setting, and it is so, so important to have that grounding in something science fiction like this. I have a hard time articulating why I loved this book so much, but I think it’s really because the entire time I was reading the story, I was just entirely inside of it. The world was so real and so emotionally resonant that it was almost overwhelmingly absorbing. This book not only made me want to write (always a sign of a really good book) but also made me miserably jealous that I didn’t write this actual book. Let me be Rebecca Stead! I read one of her other books this year as well and didn’t love it like When You Reach Me, but her writing was still wonderful and I will seek out lots more of her work in the future!
 1. Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry – I absolutely loved The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry and though I loved When You Reach Me pretty much just as much, I did not expect to end up liking Fikry at all, so it gets the edge. When I say “didn’t expect to like” what I really mean is, “REALLY ABSOLUTELY HATED A LOT FROM THE JUMP” but then it just… It course-corrected in all the right ways without invalidating the things I didn’t like and it was just so good. I don’t ever enjoy media about unlikable characters and I was really worried that this book would end up as just another on a pile of books I ultimately felt were a waste of time because I couldn’t connect to their protagonists, but Zevin did some masterful character evolution in this without it ever seeming unjustified or forced. There are great secondary and tertiary characters in this (Lambiase!!!!!) and women who are awesome and real and fleshed. When we were considering having a reading for our wedding (We did not, ultimately.) a passage from this is the only thing that came up for serious consideration. So, so good.
Honorable Mentions: Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half | Gail Carriger, Etiquette & Espionage | Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers
Totally Top Five 2K15: Listening | Watching | Stuff & Things
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