i was annoyed because i felt like lgbt+/queer book rec lists tended to skew hard towards YA and memoirs, neither of which i have any interest in reading, and i wondered if that feeling was accurate or if it was just a false impression i had due to having a disproportionate dislike of those genres, SO i collected 648 LGBT/Queer Book Recommendations from 28 different recommendation lists and made a spreadsheet about it that i've been working on for a bit.
specifically i'm only looking at general LGBT+ or Queer Book Recommendation lists, excluding more specific lists limited by time or genre or representation ("best LGBT/Queer books of 2022", "best queer/lgbt YA", "best LGBT/Queer scifi", "best lesbian books" "best trans books" etc etc etc). also excluding databases and other lists that aren't explicitly recommendations, because i'm interested in what people are recommending rather than simply what books are known to exist.
SO here are some genre + medium breakdown pie charts! in chart 2 the too-tiny-to-see slices are: 18 comics/graphic novels, 4 manga, and 4 plays.
the top 10 most recommended books (currently):
- Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin (12 recs)
- Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz (12 recs)
- Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters (11 recs)
- Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (11 recs)
- Red, White, and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston (11 recs)
- The Color Purple by Alice Walker (8 recs)
- Less by Andrew Sean Greer (8 recs)
- The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (8 recs)
- The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith (8 recs)
- Heartstopper by Alice Oseman (8 recs)
i don't know if anyone besides me really finds this kind of thing interesting, but i figured it is the kind of thing one can post on one's blog. i enjoy this kind of thing so probably at least one other person somewhere does as well?
i'm planning to make some more charts and add more types of information to my spreadsheet (date published would be interesting, since i think there's a significant recency bias and am curious how much; how many books use the phrase "coming of age" in the summary; author & character demographics would be interesting but a huge pain in the ass to collect since it requires a lot of cross-referencing and research so i Might do that but maybe not) and i'm still on the hunt for more lists to add since there's a bunch of books i KNOW i've seen recommended a lot previously that weren't mentioned as much as i expected in the lists i found.
if you have a general lgbt/queer book rec list you've used or if you see one, i'd love for you to send it to me so i can add it to my spreadsheet....! any format is fine.
BOY WAS I RIGHT!!! i haven't finished adding dates published to all the books on the list, but here's the breakdown of the 276 i did before i got tired and went to sleep last night. wowza! it's even more intense than i thought! this is definitely partially because of there being more lgbt+ books to choose from in recent years, but not entirely; none of the books, manga, and comics i read growing up have been recommended so far, so i know for a fact there's more out there than is getting talked about lol.