Stacking The Shelves (Reading Reality) and The Sunday Post (Caffeinated Reviewer) are both blog memes about sharing the books we’re adding to the shelves and sharing news of the week ahead.
New Arrivals
A ton of new (well, technically, used but new to me) additions to the shelves this week, all dealing with themes of gender that I discovered while exploring down the transgender wormhole for Pride:
- The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow: Includes a trans woman character with an arc that is said to be quietly radical.
- The Steel Remains by Richard K. Morgan: Grimdark fantasy with a gay war veteran, said to highlight a specialized caste of male-bodied Kiriath characters who intentionally adopt female presentations for deep-cover operations.
- The Pregnant King by Devdutt Pattanaik: Queer mythological fiction about a king who accidentally drinks a magic potion meant to make his wives pregnant, becoming trapped in a gender swap loop where 'he' remembers nothing of his time as 'her' and vice versa.
- Carnival By Elizabeth Bear: Explores themes of gender, politics, and colonialism through the story of two diplomats navigating a matriarchal world where men are subjugated.
- The Identity Matrix by Jack L. Chalker: A sci-fi classic about a man whose mind is continually forced into other people's bodies (often female) as part of a proxy war between two alien races.
- A Secret History by Mary Gentle: Features an incredibly detailed subplot involving the heroine's primary tactical advisor and scribe who adopts a meticulous female presentation, living full-time as a high-ranking lady-in-waiting.
- 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson: A hard sci-fi tale where humanity has diversified, formalizing a multi-gender system where characters identify across terms like intersex, androgynous, hermaphrodite, bisexual, neuter, and trans, treating the old 21st-century binary as an evolutionary relic.
- Glasshouse by Charles Stross: A sci-fi tale of a protagonist who participates in a psychological experiment, having his mind placed into a female body within a simulated mid-20th-century suburban environment, forcing an intense exploration of gender, dysphoria, and societal programming.
Currently Reading
Once again, I haven't had a lot of time for reading, and my last two books were DNF reads, so I've spent what little time I do have in a reread of one of my favorites - Raptor by Gary Jennings. Set in the 5th century, the story explores the fall of the Roman Empire through the journeys of an orphaned intersex Goth named Thorn who freely and fluidly embraces their masculine or feminine traits to be who they need to be in the moment, giving them access to experiences and viewpoints the 'other' would be denied. It's a wonderful book, full of historical detail, and the fluidity of Thorn is captured beautifully.
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