Books like Adam — picked by fans

It took me months to pick up Carry On after it initially caught my eye on the bookshelf. It was everything I could have wanted.

It is a less problematic Harry Potter, if Harry and Draco ended up getting together. It shows a really authentic representation of unrequited queer love and recognizing one’s own queer identity. It is character-driven, but also full of fun magic adventure. I love a book that knows how to give you exactly what you want.

I adored this book from the moment I read the first page of the first graphic novel! I fell in love with Nick and Charlie and related so hard to the struggles that they were going through, even though I’m older than they are. It brought me back to how I felt in high school.

Charlie’s eating disorder, especially, really struck a nerve, and I thought it was handled with such beautiful rawness. Note: I read it before watching the TV show, which I also love. 

This is the story of two young men, one rich, one homeless but it’s not a simple rescue me type story. Laurie and Sasha reach out desperately to one another from their different worlds, and against all odds begin an affair, hidden in the attics of Laurie’s sumptuous home and on the bleak moorland of a Romani encampment. For Laurie, it’s a delicious sexual awakening, and Sasha returns his affections, opening up to him a whole new world of freedom. But Sasha has secrets, and a murky, violent past. 

I’ve reread this book countless times. Harper Fox’s writing is breathtaking and it’s so comforting to read characters you can’t help but adore falling in love and finding their way through conflict to a safe and happy ending.

Many books have kissing in the forest, but how many are about kissing the forest itself?

Fenton has watched countless hunters enter his forest to claim a wish by killing the white-tailed stag. Each hunter has taken: a sip from the stream, a flower from the vine, wood to light a fire. Each hunter has subsequently died.

Prior is different; he takes nothing, instead asking for a god’s assistance in waking his sister from her sleeping sickness. Fenton—who is the forest and the white-tailed stag and a son of Old Nan and also, definitely, a god—decides to pack up the forest and help Prior out.

Where I come from, that sort of thing will get you a little kiss or two at the very least.

As a pastor’s kid, this light, lyrical book about a church community gathering awakens my earliest memories: the bells and banners, candles and choir, warm greetings, and toddler wiggles. This community offers something many of us lacked: “A church for all!” From the first image of a mixed-race queer family waking early for church to the assembling “Weak and healthy/ Neat and messy/ Poor and wealthy/ Plain and dressy” chatting and worshiping together—this brightly illustrated book captures a true spirit of inclusion. Like many queer people, I had to leave my first faith community. Later I was amazed to find houses of faith like this one. I even married a pastor. Young me couldn’t have imagined living out, opening a service with a book like A Church for All.

I discovered this compilation of many well- and lesser-known interviews when I began working on Baldwin in the year 2000. I love it as it gives us the writer in his own words, tracing his artistic development and views on his craft, exile, race, gender, and sexuality, as well as US politics, culture, and national identity. We follow Baldwin’s journey from 1961, with the famous Studs Terkel interview introducing “the young Negro writer,” to the “Last Interview” with Quincy Troupe, conducted in 1987, just days before Baldwin’s death in his beloved house in southern France. In between, we get a kaleidoscope of moments from his life and career and fascinating insights into his literary imaginary and humanistic philosophy. 

I have to admit, although I know a lot about gods, I haven’t spent a ton of time reading about folkloric creatures, like faeries, brownies, and selkies. This book, set in a gothic old house in the English countryside in the 1850s, definitely made me feel my neglect of the topic; luckily, I got to learn alongside magician John Blake and Lord Thornby as they investigate the spell that’s holding Thornby trapped.

One remarkable thing about this book is the intriguing and clever magic system. The romance is great. And the twist at the end—well, I didn’t see it coming.

Holiday Fauxmance—i.e., fake dating for the holidays—is a peppermint-scented novella catnip for me. Sasha’s family can be a bit much over her being single, which she knows comes from a good place but is relentless, so she makes up a girlfriend, which works until her eldest sister tries to call her bluff and dares her to bring her “girlfriend” home for the holidays.

Enter neighbor Kennedy, who is beautiful, available, and—bonus—she’s also an actress and in need of a gig. This book is sweet and cute and the couple drew me in from the start, and I can’t express how much I loved the low-angst content. Their connections came from genuine emotions coming out of the pretending and the scene where they eventually come clean about the deception. I could not stop laughing.

I can’t resist a book set in Oakland, very near to where I live.

I also love a novel that tells deep truths, and Nightcrawling does that, showing the horrors of police abuse and the failures of the justice system. However, this book isn’t “trauma porn.” On every page, protagonist Kiara owns her story, drives her agency, makes the best choices she can in the moment, and loves with a huge heart.

The way she finds her way to queer love is organic and beautiful.

A Beauty and the Beast retelling, set amid the upheaval of the Second World War, in which the Beast is a dragon and the protagonist is a person who doesn’t see why his daughter should take the rap for her father’s misdemeanour. Humane and compassionate, this story isn’t afraid of exploring the theology of sexuality, but it never gets bogged down in details, and it maintains its fairy-tale atmosphere while remaining grounded in time and place. I loved it.