Our Bookish Lives: a bookstore blog

Need to buy presents for the LGBT+ bookworm in your life? We've got you covered! Stan Lee loved Heretic to Housewife by Rahne Alexander. It's an essay collection by Baltimore-based trans writer Rahne Alexander. In ten essays, she connects the dots between her conservative Mormon upbringing and her emergence as a queer, feminist performer. New, $9.99. I think he likes it because Rahne gave him head scratches the first time she met him, and he's a complete attention hog. Buy it here. Trouble and Her Friends by Melissa Scott is perfect for the artsy lesbian in your life. India Carless,...

I started reading The Dragon Keeper by Mindy Mejia a couple weeks after rereading The Hunger Games. Despite the title, it's not about the kind of dragons you see in fantasy novels. Rather, it's about a reptile zookeeper at the Zoo of America and a Komodo dragon, a kind of reptile originally from Indonesia. Initially, the main character of The Dragon Keeper, Meg Yancy, reminded me of a grown-up version of Katniss, the main character from The Hunger Games. Both are kinda grumpy with other people. Both have a hard time making friends and have a way of pissing off mentors and...

The Crows of Beara by Julie Christine Johnson was something both Stan Lee and I loved. In fact, Stan Lee liked it so much he couldn't keep his paws off it, and I had a hard reading my copy because he'd lay on it and read the book by osmosis every time I tried to read it. Annie's life is falling apart when she travels to Ireland for work. She recently got back from rehab, her marriage is on the rocks, and her career is on the line. However before entering rehab, she was a well-regarded PR person at her company,...

Veganism and vegetarianism are having a bit of a moment right now, so I wanted to highlight my favorite book on the subject: a novel named The Green and the Red, by Armand Chauvel. It's set in small-town France- specifically, Rennes and is about Lea, the owner of a struggling vegetarian restaurant, and Mathieu, the marketing director for the town's pork producer. The pork producer wants to put Lea's restaurant out of business, because it's prime real estate and they have big plans for it. Lea and Mathieu meet under false pretenses, when he visits her restaurant to scope out...