While I was in rehab, I read a lot of books, some were really good, some I wasn’t really feeling.

First one was great, a book called 2 Trans 2 Furious, a collection of poems, essays, stories, and art about Fast and Furious made by trans people. I could not stop laughing at this book the entire time, the sense of humor was on point. I had never seen Fast and Furious before this, and it made me love the movie when I did eventually watch one (I watched 4, wow it’s so gay. Family.) The book has unexpected emotional moments, some decent body horror, and a lot of comedy. Would recommend. The cis people at my rehab wanted to burn it when I talked about it, so you know it has to be a good one. Check this out if you’re trans and love a good high effort shit post

Second one I read was also great. Normal Sucks by Johnathan Mooney. This book really changed how I viewed the world. It’s part personal narrative written by a person with ADHD and Dyslexia, part history lesson on the way normal came to be, part stories of the disabled. There’s a lot in this book, and it’s fantastic. I will warn, the author does use the r***** word a few times in the book, but in the context it’s being used I don’t find it offensive. Check this out if you want to be a nicer person.

Third book I read was Bible Belt Queers, a collection of art, poems, personal narratives and other such things from well queers from the Bible Belt. I was so so on this book, I found the essays and personal narratives to be really strong, but I didn’t really care for the artistic side of the book. Some of the poems were good, but most of them seemed to drag a bit, and a lot of the art didn’t really catch my eye or was too cluttered for a book page. Maybe I would have felt different about some of these if I saw them on a computer screen or a canvas, but wasn’t a fan of the art in the book. Your mileage may vary though, check it out if it sounds interesting.

Fourth was Fast Time in Palestine by Pamela Olson. The library I was at was fairly conservative, so there weren’t a lot of picks for books on Palestine that weren’t Zionist, so I picked up this one. My biggest criticism of this book is it’s written by a Midwestern American and it often shows, but as she spends more time in Palestine she seems to understand the local’s positions more and more as she sees the oppression they’re under. It’s split between her personal narrative and the stories of horrific violence her Palestinian friends had witnessed, with occasional bits of information about how the genocide is enabled by the rest of the world interspersed throughout. This book is a good read to anybody who isn’t 100 percent sure about what’s going on in Palestine, definitely one I’d hand off to lib friends, not sure if anybody here would really care for it though.

Fifth and final book is A Land with A People, a collection of essays, poems, and art from Palestinians and Jews confronting Zionism. This was a much better read than Fast Times, diving much deeper into the problems of Zionism, into its history, its effects on both a wide scale and a personal scale through both art and essays. This book is really high quality, albeit a bit hard to read as a monolingual English speaker (I was in rehab, I couldn’t Google the anglicized Arabic words, give me a break) but even with the occasional linguistic problems I still got a lot out of this book. I wouldn’t give this book to libs because it goes hard on terms like settler-colonialism, but I appreciated it actually tackling that so much. 10/10 would read again.

What should I read next? What have you read recently that’s interesting?