Fans pick 100 books like Daughter of Mystery

Growing up in an eccentric, liberal family, as a member of the Church of England, under the shadow of the British Government’s homophobic Section 28, the messages I received were distinctly mixed. If I’d heard the word ‘bisexual’ before the age of twenty my life might have been very different. And to this day, the most common assumption is that one can’t be simultaneously queer and Christian. As I’ve discovered, and as these books show, that isn’t true – and moving beyond that assumption reveals new and fascinating horizons.

Growing up in an eccentric, liberal family, as a member of the Church of England, under the shadow of the British Government’s homophobic Section 28, the messages I received were distinctly mixed. If I’d heard the word ‘bisexual’ before the age of twenty my life might have been very different. And to this day, the most common assumption is that one can’t be simultaneously queer and Christian. As I’ve discovered, and as these books show, that isn’t true – and moving beyond that assumption reveals new and fascinating horizons.

Growing up in an eccentric, liberal family, as a member of the Church of England, under the shadow of the British Government’s homophobic Section 28, the messages I received were distinctly mixed. If I’d heard the word ‘bisexual’ before the age of twenty my life might have been very different. And to this day, the most common assumption is that one can’t be simultaneously queer and Christian. As I’ve discovered, and as these books show, that isn’t true – and moving beyond that assumption reveals new and fascinating horizons.

Growing up in an eccentric, liberal family, as a member of the Church of England, under the shadow of the British Government’s homophobic Section 28, the messages I received were distinctly mixed. If I’d heard the word ‘bisexual’ before the age of twenty my life might have been very different. And to this day, the most common assumption is that one can’t be simultaneously queer and Christian. As I’ve discovered, and as these books show, that isn’t true – and moving beyond that assumption reveals new and fascinating horizons.

I’ve adored holiday love stories ever since I was a kid watching Hallmark movies. There’s something about the magic of the holidays that makes two people falling in love even more special. That’s why I chose a contemporary holiday romance for my debut. And we see so much straight romance on TV and in bookstores, but I want to contribute to the queer community with my writing. I write a mix of sexualities; Make the Yuletide Gay features two lesbian women. All that to say, I just love queer holiday romances!

I loved books as a kid, especially fantasy books, but could never find anyone like me within their pages. I’m a lesbian Chinese writer who adores stories about messed-up, complicated queer people. I’m thrilled by the range of books available now that feature queer, messy characters. We all deserve representation, and to me that means representation that’s complex, that encompasses the ugly and the beautiful. One of my goals as an author is to make you fall in love with monsters—brutal, flawed women who may not deserve love, but who demand it all the same.

The short version: I just really love television! The slightly longer version is that, in my career, I’ve had a very unusual perspective on both entertainment and activism. My first jobs out of college were at companies like Lucasfilm and The Jim Henson company, where I saw first-hand just how important pop culture and fandom can be for audiences. And I also worked extensively on queer causes, eventually making activism my full-time job when I joined the team that brought marriage equality to the US Supreme Court. Through that work, I became more and more interested in the ways that pop culture – particularly television – has been a tool for advancing civil rights. 

As someone who’s never been allowed to drive, but gets motion-sick reading in a bus or car, I’ve been a lover of audiobooks since I had my Walkman and a backpack full of audiobook cassettes. As a queer man, I’m always looking for more immersive stories about people like me. Finding queer voices and queer narratives is so important to me as a way to offset how queer people don’t have an inherited continuance of our culture as most marginalized people do; books are a way to fill that gap. I do own a rescued husky, and there’s nothing like an engrossing audiobook to get me through those minus-forty Canadian winter walks with a dog.

I have always loved history, ever since my childhood obsessions with Boudica, Anne Boleyn, and the witch trials. I love exploring different historical periods through literature, as books can help us develop real feelings of connection and empathy with people who lived in times and places very different from our own. I like to think that, in turn, this encourages us to be more empathetic with others in our own time. Since coming out as lesbian when I was 14, I have read a great deal of queer fiction, seeking to immerse myself in my own queer heritage and culture. 

Judith Jones became an important mentor and mother figure to me in my twenties, in the wake of my parents’ deaths. Her personal wisdom and guidance, which I received both in knowing her personally and from the incredible archive she left behind, have been invaluable to me during a particularly tumultuous and transformative decade in my own life. I wrote The Editor as I was coming into my full adulthood, and the books on this list helped shape my thinking along the way at times when I felt stagnant or stuck or needed to rethink both how to write Judith’s life and why her story is so vital to tell.