Hey Reading Rainbows! May is AAPI Heritage month and today we’re featuring 24 Queer AAPI books to add to your TBR! Anytime is a great time to pick up a Queer AAPI book and find a new favorite. These books include a multitude of age categories and genres. We’ll have more recs for your TBR soon!
Have you read any of these? Do you have any others we missed? Add the title & author in the comments so we can find new favorites too! If you enjoy this type of list let us know what others we should do in the comments!
Speaking of indie books, if you are an AAPI author with a queer story: we want your books! Please consider adding your book to our submissions via the link in our bio so we can review your book for a future special edition printing! PSA: Indie means small press AND self-published books. We’re looking for both!
Books listed above their respective graphic.
📷: Thanks to @/BottomOfTheBookShelf on IG for the cover photo!
ID: A post of five slides. Slide 1: A photo of The Magic Fish and its art print spoiler card. The book sits on a gray blanket. The background is a dark wooden desk. Around the book are flowers, books, succulents and a coffee cup. Overlaid is a gray-purple circle that reads “24 Queer AAPI Books to celebrate AAPI Heritage month” in white text with a black outline. Slides 2-5 has an intersex pride progress flag with a transparent white square with a thin white outline overlaid. Each slide displays six book covers in two rows of three book covers. At the top of the slides it reads “Featured in RC”, “Staff Favorites”, “Even More”, “Even More” respectively. End ID.
Featured in RC:
The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen
Darius the Great is Not Okay by Adib Khorram
I’ll be the One by Lyla Lee
Not Your Sidekick by C.B. Lee
Obie is Man Enough by Schuyler Bailar
Beating Heart Baby by Lio Min
ALT
Staff Faves:
Forget Me Not by Alyson Derrick
If They Come for Us by Fatimah Asghar
Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki
Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More by Janet Mock
Phoenix Extravagant by Yoon Ha Lee
Summer Bird Blue by Akemi Dawn Bowman
ALT
Even More:
Bruised by Tanya Boteju
Chasing Pacquiao by Rod Pulio
The Empress of Salt & Fortune by Nghi Vo
Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden
I want to share something for those of you who are teaching and want your conservative students to be more open-minded to liberal ideas that you’re presenting.
I grew up in a conservative family and a conservative town, and like most conservative kids, had been told that colleges were hotbeds of liberalism, so I was already defensive politically when I started college. My first semester or two I was really skeptical of everything political that my professors presented me with.
And then I took a women’s studies course (required at my college). And on the first day, the professor said,
“You don’t have to be a feminist. There are days when I’m not a feminist. But we’re going to discuss feminist ideas in this class, and you might find that you agree with some of them and disagree with others, and that’s fine.”
And that took the pressure off. By telling me that I didn’t HAVE to be a feminist, that I didn’t HAVE to agree, that professor started me on the road to becoming a feminist. I particularly remember her giving us information about what a huge percentage of the housework was still done by women, even in [hetero] couples where both the man and woman worked outside the home. And after that I remember saying, “I’m not a feminist, but I can see where they’re coming from.”
Within 5 years, I was claiming the term and coming out to my mom as a feminist.
So when I taught college writing, I assigned politically liberal essays to my students, many of whom came from conservative backgrounds. And before they read the first one, I would say,
“The reading for the next class–I want you to know that you don’t have to agree with it. You don’t have to agree with anything that your professors teach you in college. But the point of a college education is to have your mind opened to other points of view. So you’re not required to agree, but you are required to approach the reading with an open mind. You might find that you agree with some things the author says and disagree with others. And that’s cool! We WANT you to use your critical thinking and decide for yourself what you think about things! But to do that, you need to give people the benefit of the doubt and be open-minded to what they have to say.”
And I have to say, it worked really well for me! I remember in particular that after I assigned the essay “Black Men and Public Space”, one of my students wrote in her reading reflection,
“I was taught in school that racism in America ended with Martin Luther King. I am appalled to discover that this is not true.”
Priming your students to be open-minded, while also encouraging them to use critical thinking, can help to break down some of the automatic defenses against new ideas that students are often taught. Approaching your students’ comments during discussion with an open-minded view yourself, validating their experiences while also making gentle counterarguments, can do a lot as well.
I think a lot of liberal/progressive people, of which I am one, resent having to even entertain what we feel are harmful ideas, ignorant or selfish or bigoted ideas; we resent dealing with the people who have them. I live in a red state, and I know I feel angry a lot. Sometimes I sit in a room, it could be any room, full of people who might feel very aggressive towards me if they knew who/what I really am.
But the way I try to think of it is, do you want to sit there being right in your rightness, or do you want to make change? And I think that’s the flip side of what OP is saying (I’m agreeing). In my experience, when I talk to people around me about current events—that is my way of making change, however small—gentle approaches are what get results. “I don’t coddle bigots,” you might say. Well, and that’s truly your right. You need to protect yourself first, and sometimes I stay quiet because I don’t feel safe, as a progressive and a queer neurodivergent woman in a state where a police captain said Biden voters should be shot for treason. And BIPOC often say they are exhausted from racism; I’m white, so I did a lot of “gentle” talking during the long year of 2020, because they shouldn’t have to. Maybe people who aren’t queer, or neurodivergent, or disabled, and who have the energy, can pick up the conversations I can’t have.
But when it’s only a conversational matter of principle, “l could engage this person’s ideas but I shouldn’t have to,” I think OP’s approach actually can make the world a little better, however gradually. I’m not approaching things gently to spare anyone’s feelings; I’m doing it to succeed, to make things a little safer for me and for others. I’d like to think I’ve made a difference that way.
well, Clarkesworld and other short fiction magazines like it are about to get another swift kick in the dick: Amazon is discontinuing their magazine subscription service (and replacing it with a new service that pays creators much, much less). of the very little money made in the short fiction market, most of it was coming from Amazon.
as Clarke points out in his editorial on the subject, “While there are plenty of people happily reading, listening to, and writing short fiction, a very disappointingly small percentage of those same people are actively paying for it.”
short fiction is not dead. the existence of subreddits like r/NoSleep and blogs like @writing-prompt-s proves that. if you value these stories and you want to help writers get paid for their work, please consider checking out (and subscribing to) some of the following publications:
many of these publications charge less than $5 USD per month for subscriptions, so if you’ve just dropped Netflix and have an extra $10/month lying around, you can instead support two fiction magazines full of interesting, original, well-written stories.
(feel free to reblog with your own favorite publications!)
hi im short fictions number one weirdgirl (lie, this title goes to probably like idk kelly link or cat valente or something, im short fiction’s number 152 weirdgirl) and heres A GUIDE FOR WHICH MAGAZINE U MIGHT LIKE (based on what i read):
Analog and Asimovs: These are PRINT MAGAZINES! you can BUY THEM IN STORES! They go more Scifi scifi, regular ass scifi (appreciative). the Big Boys
F&SF: Also a print magazine!! as the name suggests - fantasy and science fiction! one of the Big Boys.
Clarkesworld: mostly science fiction, literary/experimentalist bent, lots of stories you read and go “well i suppose it is time to think about that forever now!” (think kij johnson, cat valente, sam j. miller, peter watts) - updates monthly, with podcasts, AND pays authors the most out of all the mags rn.
Apex: sf&f with kind of a gothy (appreciative) vibe, reminiscent of neil gaiman maybe? its good i prommy - also has podcasts!!!
Lightspeed: sf&f with a ??? bent - not particularly married to a style other than Weird and Interesting and Very Quality - lots of stuff that makes you go huh?? If you’re a fan of the weirder sort of fanfic (you know what im talking about, the one weird fic in the fandom that you cant stop thinking about) this is for you. I like it lots. also podcasts!!
Fantasy: Lightspeed’s sister magazine - just fantasy! not a ton to say here other than generally really enjoyable shit. (The EICs are so nice also)
Nightmare: HORROR! oops all horror! I don’t read this regularly but one of Lightspeed’s sister magazines. (and if you end up liking Nightmare - the Dark is also a good magazine)
Uncanny: mostly fantasy, some scifi (in my experience). Lots of big names in this one, so the work is usually very quality. believe they also do podcasts.
Escape Artists (Podcastle, Escape Pod, Pseudopod): this is a PODCAST NETWORK! If ur like audio THESE R FOR U. if you liked the magnus archives, fuckin peter lukas (aka: his va) DOES run these, fun fact. As name suggests - these are split into genres (fantasy, sf, horror).
and more specifically:
if you like DEATH, check out THE DEADLANDS !
if you want to support diaspora fiction, read KHOREO!
anyway not to be tumblr about this but rly, think about it like sending ur favorite fic writer a kofi, or donating to ao3.
all the magazines run on shoestring budgets but also produce some of the most interesting experimental shit on a tighter timeline than the novel publishing industry - and there’s a side benefit that if you support these magazines, you’re supporting essentially a sff incubator. a lot of the people writing short fiction at point x end up writing a crazy novel at point y. (taz muir is a good example of this)
I think I found my new favorite rabbit hole. This voice actor does Shakespeare scenes in a southern accent and I need to see the whole damn play. Absolutely beautiful
if you’re not from the us american south, there’s some amazing nuances to this you may have missed. i can’t really describe all of them, because i’ve lived here my whole life and a lot of the body language is sort of a native tongue thing. the body language is its own language, and i am not so great at teaching language. i do know i instinctively sucked on my lower teeth at the same time as he did, and when he scratched the side of his face, i was ready to take up fucking arms with him.
but y'all. the way he said “brutus is an honourable man” - each and every time it changed just a little. it was the full condemnation Shakespeare wanted it to be. it started off slightly mock sincere. barely trying to cover the sarcasm. by the end…it wasn’t a threat, it was a promise.
christ, he’s good.
the eliding of “you all” to “y’all” while still maintaining 2 syllables is a deliberate and brilliant act of violence. “bear with me” said exactly like i’ve heard it at every funeral. the choices of breaking and re-establishing of eye contact. the balance of rehearsed and improvised tone. A+++ get this man a hollywood contract.
We have a very very very special announcement today
We’ve taken a very bold step in the past few couple of months and have decided to adopt and revise
Mo Dao Zu Shi (Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation) Audio Drama.
For doing so, I talked with the admin, @kittykat2010 of Suibian Subs, and we agreed on using the group’s translations as the
base on which we have done considerable revisions. I wish to express my
sincere thanks to her for the co-operation.
🙏
🙏
🙏
The main purpose of this project is to be able to re-share this
fantastic AD with added polishing on the translations and overall
presentation. This is a passion project for us. And I hope you all can also enjoy the
files shared here. The plan is to first revise and share the main
episodes for all three seasons. Once this is done, we’ll move to
revising and sharing the extras and minitheatres.
So, for launching this project, today we bring you Mo Dao Zu Shi Audio Drama S1 Ep 1 + ED Song- Nameless
These can be accessed via our discord server. To
request an invite to the server, please fill up this >> request form<<
1) Please use >> VLC Player << to play the file. It is available for a large range of operating systems as well as devices.
For advanced users, I’d recommend >> K-lite codec pack + MPC-HC player << Standard version or above. The player is included from the standard version onwards.
2)
Please avoid sharing these files on YouTube and other video streaming
platforms. If you wish to share our subbed files, please just reblog
or link this tumblr post.
3) Copper Coins, Global Examination, Panguan, Qianqiu, Mou Mou, and Mo Dao Zu Shi Audio Dramas are paid dramas. So please consider
purchasing these audio
drama if possible in order to support the original content creators.
Links to a guide for purchasing the audio drama via an IoS device and to the original CN audio only ADs have been given in the
>> projects << page
for ease of navigation.
As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse. It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms
As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable. As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.
Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.
⁂
Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.
www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.
www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.
https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.
www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.
http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.
www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.
www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.
www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free
Do you design a lot of characters living in not-modern eras and you’re tired of combing through google for the perfect outfit references? Well I got good news for you kiddo, this website has you covered! Originally @modmad made a post about it, but her link stopped working and I managed to fix it, so here’s a new post. Basically, this is a costume rental website for plays and stage shows and what not, they have outfits for several different decades from medieval to the 1980s. LOOK AT THIS SELECTION:
OPEN ANY CATEGORY AND OH LORDY–
There’s a lot of really specific stuff in here, I design a lot of 1930s characters for my ask blog and with more chapters on the way for the game it belongs to I’m gonna be designing more, and this website is going to be an invaluable reference. I hope this can be useful to my other fellow artists as well! :)
This project arose out of a conversation on the R/Modaozushi Discord server. I’ve been frustrated with the quality of the English subs for CQL, and I want everyone who likes the show to be able to share in the wider context and nuances within the dialogue.
which one of u was going to tell me that tea tastes different if u put it in hot water?
y- you were putting it in cold water?????
Radish. Answer the question radish.
yeah??? i thought for like. 5 years that ppl just put it in hot water 2 speed up the tea-ification process didn’t realize there was an actual reason
You dont have the patience to microwave water for 3 minutes???
[ID: Tags reading “u think i have the patience to boil water wtf ?????” /End ID]
why are you. putting it in the microwave to boil it
Do you think I have the patience to boil water on the stove
Its takes less than a minute
Bestie is ur stovetop powered by the fucking sun
How long does it take you to boil a cup of water on the stove
Like seven minutes
Just stick the mug on top of the stove on medium heat n it boils in like two minutes… less than that is u use a saucepan…
Crying you’re putting the whole mug on the stove ???? On medium heat???? Ur stove is enchanted
Every single person in this post is a fucking lunatic
Yet another post that reads like four shakespeare characters who come out in the middle of the play to talk about something completely unrelated for comic relief
(Enter RADISHN’T, MOTHMAN MISATO, BOIMG FROG and CATS'N RAINCOATS, stage left. They are having a HEATED DISCUSSION.)
RADISHN’T: Prithee, which one of you had planned to tell
Of diff'rent flavours gained by simple act
Of brewing tea with water hot, not cold?
MOTHMAN: Egad! you poured the water cold? Wherefore?!
FROG: An answer from you, Radish, I must beg.
RADISHN’T: Indeed I did, dear friends - why does this shock?
Without the guide of others I assumed
That heat was merely added for the sake
Of expediting this solution’s brewing!
Half a decade I have spent, or more,
Not questioning this worldview I had made.
In fact, I am myself a bit surprised
That you might think that I, your dearest friend,
Might have a patience of sufficient stock
To wait until a pot of water boils.
FROG: Three minutes overtaxes patience so?
The microwave will beep when it is done!
CATS'N: My friend, this answer vexes me the more!
Can it be true that thou dost boil by nuke?!
FROG: Are you in turn, my friend, so shocked to know
That I have not the patience, like our Root,
To boil upon the stove our favour’d drink?
CATS'N: It takes less than a minute!
FROG: On what plate?
Perhaps your dinner cooks atop the sun?
CATS'N: How long can take your stove to fill the task
Of boiling but a single cup alone?
FROG: In minutes?
CATS'N: Yes!
FROG: I counted seven, once.
CATS'N: Perhaps you ought to have your timepiece checked!
If on a middle heat you place the cup
You soon will have the scalding drink you crave.
Two minutes, in a mug upon the plate
Or even less, if you should have a pot.
FROG: You cause me tears - is this how thou dost live?
You place upon the iron stove a mug?
A mug, ceramic, filled with water cold?
How do these flames, though medium in height,
Not shatter like a glass this fragile thing?
Surely, then, your kitchen is bewitched
With magicks far beyond the mortal ken!
(The FOUR realise they have wandered into the THRONE ROOM. The ROYAL COURT watches with fascination.)
KING: Ev'ry single person in this group must be a fucking lunatic, it seems.
DID YOU JUST CREATE A SHAKESPEAREAN TRANSLATION TUMBLR SHITPOST - IN FULL IAMBIC PENTAMETER??
Every year at about this time (…very approximately) I post a reclist of 10 short stories I particularly enjoyed reading in the last year, all of which can be read online for free. Here’s the latest list, and I hope you enjoy them as much as I did!
1. Sestu Hunts the Last Deer in Heaven - MH Cheung Beautiful and odd. A story of what happens after you’ve killed the gods, the unexpected realities and the things you have to live with. I love stories about after the climactic things traditional fantasy narratives are about, and this one excels!
3. Two Hands, Wrapped in Gold - SB Divya This is a really cool retelling of the classic fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin from the Rumpelstiltskin character’s pov, building out the world and his background and making him a sympathetic character with a specific history. Haven’t seen a fairy tale retelling quite like this before and it’s great! And I say that as a connoisseur of fairy tale retellings.
4. A Farce to Suit the New Girl - Rebecca Fraimow A troupe of Jewish actors in Russia, in a time of political upheaval. This story has such a good and powerful feeling of activity and forward momentum, and of the way a community supports people even if things are weird or complicated! I love every single character and how firmly they are themselves.
5. Sheri, At This Very Moment - Bianca Sayan The sacrifices you make to spend time with the ones you love - a snapshot of one brief visit together, out of two lives that only rarely get to align. Made me teary the first time I read it!
6. Spirochete - Anneke Schwob An engaging second-person pov story about possession and identity. It has such a great sense of timing! And the last line GOT me even on second read when I hypothetically knew what was coming!
7. To Embody a Wildfire Starting - Iona Datt Sharma Ahhhhhh this story is so good at embodying the horrible complexities of the choices people make in the worst of situations, that good and bad and divine and evil and just plain personness can all reside in one being. Also it’s about a dragon society and the revolutionary humans who tried to make everyone into dragons, and also about parent-child relationships, and also about a bunch of other things. God it’s good.
8. Obsolesce - Nadine Aurora Tabing Is it really me if I don’t have at least ONE story about robots in my rec lists? (actually I just went back and checked and in multiple previous years I inexplicably didn’t, maybe it wasn’t me writing the reclist in those years lol) ANYWAY who wants to have sad feelings about robots again! I know I always do! In a world where anyone who has a physical body instead of having their consciousness transferred is more and more obsolete, no matter if your body is human or robot, what do you hold onto? This one has a real good melancholy tone.
9. Letters from a Travelling Man - WJ Tattersdill ….does what it says on the tin. Letters to a dear friend, from a man travelling for the first time to the unfamiliar part of the world that friend comes from. I love the sense of place you get from the letters, as well as the deep and abiding importance of this friendship in both their lives. Another one I cried over!
10. Texts from the Ghost War - Alex Yuschik Another epistolary one, but this time in text messages instead of letters, and between characters who start the story antagonistically! About mech pilots in a ghost war, and making connections, and finding things to care about, even when stuff sucks. I love them!! (also, I am inescapably me, whoops, it took me until I read some fanfic of this story to realize that almost certainly the story was meant to be canonically shipping the two leads, I never notice romance unless there’s anvil-sized indications.) Anyway this is a really good story!
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