Friday, July 22, 2011

Good Lord It Is Really, Really, Really Hot Out There: Lesbian Summer Reading List, Part One



Step one: install an air conditioner in at least one room of your home/apartment. I suggest doing this during the day, before consuming a gin and tonic, as I decided to use my massive (read: pitiful) dyke strength at ELEVEN PM to carry the 100lb beast upstairs to my bedroom and install it all by myself. I broke a bookshelf. But at least it was cool. 

Step two: Make yourself one of the drinks shown above. 

Step three: Start reading these cool and/or steamy books from our very own lesbian summer reading list! (Please feel free to add your additions in the comments.)

Cool:



Times Two: Two Women in Love and the Happy Family They Made by Kristen Henderson and Sarah Ellis


"TO EVERY GOOD LOVE STORY, THERE IS A TWIST. Times Two is about two women meeting, falling madly in love, and realizing that they are so crazy about each other that they want to have a family together. The fact that they both get pregnant at the exact same time is where things start to get interesting."





Seeking Sara Summers by Susan Gabriel


"In a rare moment of taking care of herself instead of everyone else, Sara takes a sabbatical and goes on the trip to Italy she has always dreamed of taking. This search for a more authentic life leads to Julia, a friend she hasn’t seen since they were inseparable as girls, nearly 30 years earlier. They reunite in Florence and their friendship continues where they left off, resulting in an unexpected attraction to one another that threatens to turn Sara’s already shaky world upside down."


Steamy:




Conquest by Ronica Black 


"What Jude Jaeger seeks is simple. What she needs is complicated. Woman. She has one a night at Conquest, sometimes two. And she gives them what no one else can or will. Pleasure. But outside the club, Jude isn’t interested in women, keeping them at arm’s length. That is until she’s meets Mary, a woman who responds to her touch like none of the others. When Mary shows up at the college where Jude teaches, all the emotions Jude thought she could live without come rushing back stronger than ever.


Mary Brunelle is a socially awkward loner who goes to a private club and finds herself in the arms of a beautiful stranger who conquers every last inch of her and then disappears into the night. Mary tries to find her, desperately wanting to see her again, but has no success until one day in class she looks up to see that the mystery woman is there. And she’s her professor. Mary soon sets forth on her own conquest, but can she tame the ultimate dominatrix?"





Lesbian Pulp Fiction: The Sexually Intrepid World of Lesbian Paperback Novels 1950-1965 by Katherine V. Forrest


"Long before the rise of the modern gay movement, an unnoticed literary revolution was occurring between the covers of the cheaply produced lesbian pulp paperbacks of the post–World War II era. In 1950, publisher Fawcett Books founded its Gold Medal imprint, inaugurating the reign of lesbian pulp fiction. These were the books that small-town lesbians and prurient men bought by the millions — cheap, easy to find in drugstores, and immediately recognizable by their lurid covers: often a hard-looking brunette standing over a scantily clad blonde, or a man gazing in tormented lust at a lovely, unobtainable lesbian. For women leading straight lives, here was confirmation that they were not alone and that darkly glamorous, "gay" places like Greenwich Village existed. Some — especially those written by lesbians — offered sympathetic and realistic depictions of "life in the shadows," while others (no less fun to read now) were smutty, sensational tales of innocent girls led astray. In the overheated prose typical of the genre, this collection documents the emergence of a lesbian subculture in postwar America."


That should get you started for now - more coming next week! Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go chase down the ice cream truck. 

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