100 Books Like Yours for the Taking

From the first page, this story felt intimate and infinite all at once.

It’s written like a love letter and a battlefield, all at once. What I loved most was how it turned connection into an act of defiance, how two people trapped by duty and ideology choose to reach across time anyway.

Every line feels deliberate, like poetry disguised as science fiction. I was completely undone by how much humanity could fit into such a small space.

It reminded me that love, friendship, and understanding don’t need to make sense to be real; they just need to be chosen, again and again.

I view this book as an equal mix of cosmic deep-sea horror, exploration of loneliness, and marital devotion.

I really appreciate that this book follows two flawed women across multiple periods of time, on land and in the deep sea, and across the full length of their relationship. The weight of one of them disappearing beneath the ocean for months profoundly affects both of them–mentally, emotionally, and physically–in different and weird ways, but underneath everything is an enduring love.

I particularly enjoyed the slow-moving body horror in this one, plus the escalating creep of being stuck at the bottom of the ocean for months and the overarching terror of losing the one you love.

This book is utterly un-put-downable. I read it one, feverish sitting. It’s about a boy, Owen, who is literally born with a bird in his chest. She talks to him, and she’s quite funny and sometimes snarky. Owen is known as a Terror, and his mother does everything she can to try to protect him from the Army of Acronyms, aka doctors, nurses, social workers, and anyone who wants to study him and expose him.

Although this speculative premise plays a prominent role in the book, the heart of the book for me is this tender, queer, coming-of-age story about a boy trying to accept himself and let others accept and love him, too. It’s beautiful, smart, and aches in all the right places. 

Witches and women and underground societies? Yes, please! I love this book, which explores the idea that the very qualities that often make women so special—their sensitivity, empathy and ability to connect to nature and others—is often seen as a threat by men in power.

Disagreeable, independent, outspoken women have long been called witches—what would it look like if they actually were? That kept me reading until my eyes were red and sandy and rooted for the protagonist who fears her own power as much as she craves it.

In a list of dystopian futures, Mackintosh’s book sits a little unsurely. It’s a dreamy, otherworldly novel, and we’re never quite sure when or where it’s taking place. Three sisters live in isolation with their parents, avoiding an outside world ravaged by contagion – but is the threat real or imagined?

I love this book for its strangeness: it’s an uncanny fairy tale, partly set in some kind of decrepit Victorian seaside retreat for lady hysterics, partly set in the woods where wolves (or men) may prowl.

Mackintosh builds layered dystopias, where both the diseased, brutal world of male violence and the claustrophobic, emotionally manipulative "care" of home and family threaten the sisters’ security. This hazy fever-dream of a book stayed with me for a long time after I finished it. 

As a huge fan of George Orwell’s 1984, I approached this book with trepidation. I was concerned that a retelling from Julia’s perspective may not work. I had nothing to worry about. The author does a great job of filling in gaps and expanding the story. There is much from a woman’s perspective that Orwell might never have considered. 

I loved this book at first because there are so many familiar threads to 1984, yet the feminist perspective brings the story even more to life. Julia, no longer a side character, breathes new, colorful life into a story I knew so well. Part of me wanted to re-read 1984 immediately to compare details. Then I realized, there was no need, it stands alone perfectly well.

This science fiction and mystery story is about an astronaut from a world without men crashes on Earth and blows all our minds… except we’re also reading a story about a woman living in our 1970s, and a parallel Earth where WWII never happened… it gets a little confusing, in a really fun way.

Russ uses this engaging, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic multiverse story to explore topics of sex essentialism and gender fluidity in a way that still feels bracing and mind-expanding today.

You could say this is as much a philosophical treatise as a novel but that makes it sound like it isn’t any fun, when in fact it’s a blast. If you’re open to a far-out read you will not be disappointed.

This book is so expansive, Audre Lorde invented a whole new genre for it. She terms it “biomythography,” bringing together autobiography, mythology, fiction, poetry, and other forms of writing to tell her story of queer life.

I fell in love with Zami in college back in the day and have been re-reading it ever since. From her childhood in 1930s and 40s Harlem to her coming out as the self-proclaimed fat black lesbian “warrior poet,” who would come to shape black feminism in the late 20th century and beyond, Zami charts the life, loves, and transformative ideas of one of our most important writers.

Zami is both muse and guide, showing us how the iconic feminist writer came to be, and how pleasure, power, creative expression, and community are indispensable to our own freedom today.  

This book was published by Lollipop Power Press, an iconic feminist publishing house formed in 1969. I have a soft spot for old-school one-color illustrations (these ones are forest green against an off-white background). Emily is raised in an intentional community of four women. One mom is studying to be an electrician. Another is a healer. Vicki drives a school bus. Annie Jo is a carpenter who loves to cook. No one at school believes that Emily has so many mothers, but that all changes when she falls on the playground and her amazing parents get called into school. Suddenly it's très cool to have so many moms. I want this book to have a revival. It’s so good.

Beginning with O came out in the 70s, when a feminist or lesbian poet could fill an auditorium, and often did. Broumas's poems are physical, compelling, and intelligent, like this one, which reaches for a forgotten language from a time when women were whole and unafraid of their power.

Again, let me get out of the way and quote: “I work / in silver the tongue-like forms / that curve around a throat // an arm-pit, the upper / thigh, whose significance stirs in me / like a curviform alphabet / that defies // decoding, appears / to consist of vowels, beginning with O, the O- / mega, horseshoe, the cave of sound. / What tiny fragments // survive, mangled into our language. / I am a woman committed to / a politics / of transliteration, the methodology // of a mind / stunned at the suddenly / possible shifts… show more.