Fans pick 62 books like Love Wins

As a professor of criminal law, I often taught the case of People v Stephenson (1932), in which the Indiana courts affirmed the murder conviction of one D.C. Stephenson after a woman whom he had brutally assaulted, sexually and physically, tried to take her own life by swallowing poison.

But until this book, I never knew who Stephenson was—one of the most powerful leaders of the resurgent Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s—nor why the courage of his victim, Madge Oberholtzer, triggered the Klan’s eventual slide back into insignificance. This book, set a century ago, delivers an ominous chill of recognition along with reasons to hope. Its motifs are men who believe that they are above the law, the ease of recruiting respectable citizens into a cult, and the difficulty women have being believed.

I have a hunger for the human stories that hide behind the technical language, historical excursions, and occasionally baffling reasoning of Supreme Court decisions. There are a few legal journalists who excel at showing us these hidden lives; Anthony Lewis of the New York Times was one of these.

This book was his masterpiece, an account of the relationships among impoverished four-time convicted felon Clarence Gideon, his lawyer Abe Fortas (later to be named to the Court), the members of the Warren Court, and the law of American criminal justice. The 1963 decision in Gideon v. Wainwright, which established that persons facing serious criminal charges must be provided with lawyers, is inspiring reading, but the larger story that Lewis tells us is both more intricate and more moving.

Fifty years ago, a federal judge in Washington State issued a decision that upended the fishing economy and culture of the Pacific Northwest. United States v. Washington, which was eventually upheld by the Supreme Court, held that treaties between the government and the tribal peoples of that region must be respected and ruled that the tribes had a right to 50% of the annual catch. 

Wilkinson, one of the lawyers who advised and represented the tribal peoples, imbues his account of the lawsuit and its aftermath with Indian values and culture. Importantly, this form of storytelling includes numerous oral histories. They could serve the right reader as a sort of spiritual guide to how to behave when you, a peaceful person, find that your rights are being violated with apparent impunity.

 I love the blend of reporting and remembering in this book, as well as the skill Iversen brings to weaving them together. In 1992, a federal grand jury indicted the management of the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant northwest of Denver. The grand jury’s two-year investigation into the safety and environmental violations at the plant also produced a detailed and damning report, emphasizing the government’s efforts to cover up the danger that the plant posed to its employees and to people who lived nearby. The latter population included Iversen’s family.

Her childhood home, organized around the need to overlook her father’s alcoholism, drove her and her siblings outdoors into what looked like idyllic, pristine Colorado outer suburbia. There, they wandered about, rode their horses, and swam in the local creeks and lakes. Reading this, I could see some of what was coming. But it still surprises—and enrages.

This is the first of a trilogy of which any book in the series is worth reading. In this farce written long before marriage equality, a gay man hatches an outlandish scheme to throw a wedding, just for the expensive gifts. What follows is a comedy that incorporates blackmail and the mafia. You read this novel for pure pleasure, enjoying the clever one-liners while the plot spirals out of control. Flamboyant, camp, and ridiculously funny.

I highly recommend this book because it is a great history lesson about the first gay marriage in 1971 when Jack Baker and Michael McConnell struggled to get a marriage license in Minnesota. They appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the case was dismissed. It wasn’t until 2013, when Minnesota made it legal for gay marriage that Jack and Michael’s marriage was finally publicly acknowledged. Two years later, in 2015, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage equality.

This story resonates with me personally because my husband and I live in Minnesota, where we were married in 2014. 

This book is for anyone whose family had open secrets—shocking, taboo, untraditional stories that could be tolerated as long as they remained unspoken. Rachel Hope Cleves thinks sometimes we should just say the secret out loud.

Shrugging off a scholarly tradition of delicacy and caution about sexuality in history, she marches into Charity and Sylvia's tiny New England bedroom and says: yes, these two women loved each other, yes, they considered themselves husband and wife, and yes, they definitely had sex. How do we know? How did their small town tolerate this? How could they have been church leaders?

I had all these questions, and Cleves answered them. Charity and Sylvia's poignant, astonishing story makes me wonder: what else is right in front of my eyes that I'm not seeing? 

This is the first book to feature gay grandfathers, an overlooked and under-represented population in the literature. It is based on the author’s actual family experience, which allows the reader to experience the real emotions experienced by the characters. The author carefully takes the reader on a journey that will be relatable to anyone with an LGBTQ+ family member. This is a story that needs to be told and Schanke and Schanke do it beautifully.

In this follow-up to Prince and Knight by Daniel Haack, our two heroes fight a dark shadow spread over the kingdom. Their love is tested when the prince saves the knight’s life from beasts and monsters. When they reach the Shadow King, the cause of the darkness,  he sees the love between the prince and knight, which gives him hope for the future. He realizes that it’s okay to love someone of the same gender.

The book has beautiful messages of acceptance, forgiveness, and being proud of your own authentic self. The illustrations are charming, like an animated film.

I view this book as an equal mix of cosmic deep-sea horror, exploration of loneliness, and marital devotion.

I really appreciate that this book follows two flawed women across multiple periods of time, on land and in the deep sea, and across the full length of their relationship. The weight of one of them disappearing beneath the ocean for months profoundly affects both of them–mentally, emotionally, and physically–in different and weird ways, but underneath everything is an enduring love.

I particularly enjoyed the slow-moving body horror in this one, plus the escalating creep of being stuck at the bottom of the ocean for months and the overarching terror of losing the one you love.