Rogan Shannon

Hello, I’m Rogan and welcome. This is my very belated announcement, because ADHD. I’ll also tell you what books I plan to read in this month! This is round 11, and the sixth year of doing this. As always, Kathy and I are co-hosting this and as always, we have a guest co-host. This round, it’s Rachel of ReadsWithRachel! Go check her out, and each of us have our own announcement videos if you want to see those too.

If you are interested in being a co-host in the future, our criteria are that you yourself are queer and you caption your videos, because accessibility is important. It’s so many more people than just deaf people that benefit from them, so please caption! Get in touch with us through @queer_lit across all socials.

This year, it will be happening the whole month of June. Even more time to read all the queer books! As we do every round, we have sixteen challenges for you to choose from. We have a beautiful bingo board of all the challenges. [insert graphic] This is just for fun, and perhaps to help you narrow down what to read. You can do a bingo, a X, whatever. You are allowed to use one book for multiple challenges. But really, if you read anything queer, you’ve participated in this. I like to try for a full blackout of the board, same as Kathy, but that’s just us. Of course, all of these must have a queer main character or revolve around queer topics. I’ll go through the challenges rapid fire, then do my TBR separately.

• Banned Books.
• Group Read. This round, we have two to choose from. All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson and Finna by Nino Cipri.
• Trans Joy.
• ???: Choose Your Own Category. It can be anything you want! Let us know what that is, and it may end up as a future category on the board.
• M-Spec. This stands for multi-attraction spectrum, which includes bi, pan, omni, and any sexuality that has attraction to more than one gender.
• History. It’s up to you how to interpret this – historical fiction, memoir, non-fiction history, etc.
• Host Recommendation.
• Memoir.
• Crime. This can go a lot of ways, like the History prompt! It can be non-fiction, or many other genres that overlap with crime.
• Nonbinary Author or MC.
• Intersectional. In the context of this readathon, it means queer and any other marginalized identity.
• Folklore.
• Continued. This can mean continuing a series you already started, or reading more books by the same author, or more on a specific subject.
• Short Stories. It can be either a single short story, or a whole collection of them.
• Sapphic.
• Queer Friends.

There are sure to be a few challenges you’ll love! If you have trouble finding books that fit any of these challenges, we have a massive document of all previous recommendations that I’ll link below. Also, we are currently posting recommendations from each host on our Instagram, @queer_lit, for each challenge. Now, for what I hope to read this month! Many of these books will overlap, so I’m just going to say what I’m specifically choosing them for.

• Of course, I’m going to read one of the Group Reads, and I’m going with Finna, since I haven’t read it yet. It’ll also hit Host Rec.
• I pre-ordered and absolutely want to read it sooner than later, Ander and Santi Were Here by Jonny Garza Villa. This will hit Trans Joy and Intersectional.
• Self-Made Boys is written by Anna-Marie McLemore, a Nonbinary Author, and it’s a retelling, which is my Choose Category.
• I loved Last Night at the Telegraph Club, so I’m going to read A Scatter of Light by Malinda Lo, and it’ll cover History and Sapphic.
• I really want to read Being Seen by Elsa Sjunneson, which is a Memoir, and Sjunneson is bisexual and DeafBlind.
• I love everything that Becky Chambers writes, so I’ll be reading The Galaxy, and the Ground Within which is number four in the Wayfarers series. That will hit Continued, and it’ll also cover Queer Friends.
• Then for Short Stories, I’ll be reading Out There: Into the Queer New Yonder, which is the third anthology of the Out trio, all futuristic short stories from queer YA authors.
• This Is Why They Hate Us by Aaron H. Aceves, a bisexual Mexican-American writer, and a story about M-Spec attraction.
• Finally, I’ll be reading The Witch King by H.E. Edgmon to cover Crime and Folklore. It might not be the most conventional way to cover those prompts, but I think they work. If not, I have a whole month to read something else!

The final challenge I haven’t mentioned is Banned Books. The majority of the books on this list have already been banned, and if they aren’t already, they’re likely to be. I want to make a couple of honorable mentions for what else I might reach for during this month. I would like to read another of McLemore’s books, Lakelore, and I would also love to re-read All Boys Aren’t Blue. I have a few other queer books that overlap or don’t fit into these prompts as well. I often manage to get my list down to seven books or so, but since we have a whole month, I decided to be more lax. Also, I wanted to try and stay within the books I already own, because I really need to read more of my own rather than borrowing from the library! As of now, the only book I’ll be borrowing is Finna, which is not bad! I know I am very privileged to be able to own so many, but I also am on a book buying ban for the most part, soooo.

See anything you like? Let me know! All of the hosts are posting our TBRs today, so those will be linked below for you! When you post anything related to this readathon, you can tag us on Instagram and Twitter using @queer_lit and use the hashtag #QueerLitRead. I know this is a lot of information in one post, which is why you can find all of this information PLUS a FAQ here: roganshannon.com/queer-lit-read/. Be sure to go check out Kathy and Rachel for their videos! We have a group on GoodReads and an official reading challenge on StoryGraph. Both will be linked below for you to join if you want to do that. We also have a Discord server, so that’s there if you want! That’s all I have for this post, and I hope to see you joining us!

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