the books i'm reading for pride month 🏳️‍🌈 from YA to fantasy to manga

hello my loves it's monica and happy pride today i am so excited because i'm gonna be sharing with you all the books that i am planning on reading this june even though it is very distressing to me that it is somehow already june i am still very very excited to talk about and share these books with you all because they just all sound so good and i'm so excited to read them this month i also am going to be sharing a few books i recommend you guys check out this month if you're looking for additional books to build out your own pride tbr before i dive into all of my pride picks i do want to give a big thank you to this video sponsor which is book of the month book of the month is a popular and fast growing online book service for readers their mission is to promote new and emerging authors and help readers discover books they love their team that's hundreds of books each month and gives readers their choice from a curated selection of new and early release titles so you can spend more time reading and less time researching this month i was so excited to see malibu rising by taylor jenkins read as one of the june picks this is a historical fiction set in 1970s hollywood from the beloved author of evelyn hugo and i'm seriously so excited for so many of the books this month we have a new arthurian fantasy from laura sebastian a new romance from nicola yoon so yeah they have a lot of really amazing picks for june but if there happens to be a month where you're just not feeling any of the picks they make it super easy to skip a month without being charged i also love book of the month because they have the best price for new release hardcover fiction we love some hardcovers and you can also get your first book for just 9.99 with the code monica so yeah thank you so much to book of the month for sponsoring this video and now on to my pride picks so these first couple of books i am already in the midst of because i am uploading this a couple of days late i hope you can forgive me but yes i'm absolutely loving both of these so i had to talk about them the first one is the chosen and the beautiful by naivo this is a great gatsby retelling and i think we're going to be seeing a lot of those since the great gatsby is now in the public domain but i'm particularly or at least the most excited for this one of all the ones that i've heard about because this one really feels like a proper retelling basically we are following jordan who if you are familiar with the great gatsby jordan was daisy's friend and she was more like a side character in the book in this book she is queer asian and a magician and i am about a hundred pages into this book so far and the writing is so lyrical and magical i am really loving just falling into it and i'm loving reading from jordan's perspective we're really re-exploring this story that we're already familiar with and re-exploring these characters we already know from this whole new fresh perspective and i love that so yeah i'm really enjoying this one so far then i'm also currently listening to one last stop by casey mcquisten on audiobook and i'm really enjoying this one so in one last stop we follow august who her whole life has basically been helping her mom try to hunt down and find her uncle who has been missing since the 70s but at the start of the book she's in her 20s and she's kind of just over having her whole life be dictated by this so she ends up moving to new york city to kind of start a new life and she's starting off at a new college and making new friends and during her commute into school she ends up meeting this girl jane and jane is kind of she's like stuck on the subway and that's all i really want to say um but this one features um august who is bi and i am just loving her sort of like relationship as it's being built with jane i'm definitely already rooting for them even though i'm not very far into the book but i really i've recently discovered that i really like the sort of sub genre of contemporary books that have like a little dash of something like weird or supernatural going on you know like i really enjoyed christine's book again but better which has that's a contemporary but there's that dash of something supernatural landline by rainbow rowell again a dash of something supernatural and now this book and yeah i feel like this is a recent discovery for me that this is a sub genre or like trope i don't know what it would be considered that i'm really into so i'm kind of on the lookout for more books like this so if you have recommendations definitely let me know um but yeah i'm really enjoying one last stop and obviously casey mcquisten is famously known for writing red white and royal blue which is a much beloved book all over the book trinette so i definitely had high expectations for this one and so far they are definitely delivering so yeah really enjoying that one also so now moving on to the books that i haven't started yet the first one is the magic fish by trung and in this book we follow taehyun who is gay and his parents are vietnamese refugees and they're struggling to learn english and he's struggling to find the words to come out to them in vietnamese and so he ends up turning to fairy tales in order to tell his story and i have just heard nothing but brilliant things about this book from everyone i know who has read it even when i bought it at the bookstore the bookseller just like gushed about it and was so excited that i was buying it which always like makes me really excited uh so yeah i've been really hyped to pick this one up and i've been saving it specifically for june so i'm really hyped to dive in and i just realized i forgot to mention this is a graphic novel so yes the next book i want to pick up is a manga and that is my brother's husband in this book we follow yaichi who is a single dad in tokyo and one day his estranged twin brother's late twin brother's husband arrives and he's canadian and he basically has come to try and just learn more about his his late husband's like life before they were together he ends up moving in with them and this book is really supposed to explore a lot of like japan's current culture of what it means to be a gay man in japan and again this is one i've heard just really brilliant things about i know that there are a couple volumes of this one out so far and i've been really meaning to pick it up so that i can start this series then i am definitely planning on picking up last night at the telegraph club by melinda lowe i recently read ash and really loved it so this book takes place in 1950 san francisco and our main character is a chinese-american girl who is a lesbian and it just follows her experience of what it means to be a lesbian teen in chinatown during this time period um and from my understanding i think it also is exploring a bit like the red scare during this time so yeah i'm i've been really excited for this one ever since it was announced like for months months and months and months so again been waiting for pride to pick this one up because felt apropos really excited to do so because again this is one that i just heard so many amazing things about and i really loved melinda lowe's ash so yeah i feel like i already know that i love her writing so i'm definitely excited to read something new by her especially something that is so different from anything else i've read at least in terms of like setting um i don't think i've read any like san francisco historical fiction so that'll be really exciting for me i used to live in san francisco um and chinatown is definitely one of my favorite areas um in the city chinatown and japan town my two favorite areas in san francisco so i'm really excited to like just learn more about the history of that area then a book that is coming out soon that i really wanted to pick up in advance i think i'm going to do like a full reading vlog for this one because it is my most anticipated book of the year that isn't like a sequel or by an author that i already love um and that is she who became the son by shelly parker chan and this book has been billed as the song of achilles meets mulan which every time i think about that my brain gets a little overloaded at the idea of something being that epic and amazing and i've heard from a few people who have read this one already that they legitimately that it like lives up to that and that it's legitimately amazing which is terrifying for me because like i don't want to overhype this book for myself but i kind of am but i'm trying not to but i'm really excited for it and i i try i'm trying to remember that like though that comparison like is a hard one for any book to live up to no matter how good so i'm trying to take it with a you know grain of salt um and just go into it with like lower expectations but i'm really really excited for this one but yeah this one is a bold queer and lyrical reimagining of the rise of the founding emperor of the ming dynasty from an amazing new voice in literary fantasy i love literary fantasy i love historical fiction i love getting more queer asian books all these things are things that i love so put them all together i'm really excited for this one that is for sure um i don't know the exact identities of the characters in this book but once i do i'll be sure to update you guys um in a future video when i have finally read this one and then the last book that i'm hoping to read for pride is in deeper waters by f.t lukens so this is a book that features pirates and princes and it just sounds so good this cover alone is so fun basically we follow tal who is a prince and he's going on his coming of age trip that all the like rich kids back then apparently did and he is very like stressed about this because unlike his siblings who are able to go on this trip and like have fun and let loose he is he has to be like very careful about not revealing the fact that he has magical abilities but during the first few days of his trip his ship ends up rescuing this like mysterious prisoner from another boat and they and he like kind of begins to have feelings for this prisoner but then he just jumps off the ship and that's the beginning of the story um obviously we're gonna assume that he survives and that hijinks ensue but yeah i've been really excited for this one it just sounds really cute and fun and then i had a couple of books that i wanted to recommend to you all so the first one is the library of the unwritten and this one i wanted to specifically recommend because the main character is pan and i know that finding characters in books that are pan can be really difficult so i wanted to shout this one out i would definitely recommend this one to anyone who really enjoyed good omens um i can only speak to the show unfortunately i haven't read the book at omens but if you like the show good omens i feel like you'll like the library of the unwritten basically we follow a librarian who works at a library that is set in hell and in this library there are billions of books and each of the books sort of encompasses or encloses uh a novel or story that never got written that was sort of like an idea or just sort of like the forgotten stories the unwritten stories hence the title um and sometimes the characters from those books come out of the come out of the books and the librarian has to track them down and just sort of like keep everything in its place and so that is what this book is about and it has a really good cast of characters a bit of a found family trope and again a pan main character which i love so i wanted to recommend that one another one that i want to recommend is the first sister this is a really solid sci-fi novel and in it i feel like every character in this book is basically queer in some capacity but one of the main characters is hiro and they are non-binary and asian specifically japanese and i loved hiro and also in the audiobook they got a narrator who is also non-binary and japanese to narrate all of hiro's parts which i particularly appreciated so yeah i really wanted to share that one because it's again it's just such a solid good fantasy i mean sci-fi like it features intergalactic politics and intrigue and there's like these two countries that have very different like ethos that drive them and they're kind of constantly at each other's at war with each other and i just really enjoyed how the author built out that world especially because it's like a pretty short novel but it felt very grand so yeah i really love that one obviously i recently read ash by melinda lowe and that's why i wanted to read last night the telegraph club i loved ash it's a cinderella retelling featuring a lesbian main character i would say if you like like katherine arden or holly black like a sort of like fairy very lyrical stories definitely recommend checking out ash if you haven't yet i know it's like a classic and then lastly by the same author as in deeper waters ft leukens is the rules and regulations for mediating myths this one features um a male male romance i believe one of them is by and one is gay and in this one the best comparison i could give to this book is like if you took simon vs the homo sapiens agenda and mixed it with buffy that is this novel it is indie published and um so i feel like it it doesn't get enough buzz as i think it deserves but it's just so fun and good basically follow this kid who's in high school and he ends up getting a job after school job where he helps this guy who's just trying to like avoid having all these different like mythical creatures be discovered by everyday people so that is that book a really fun one definitely recommend checking it out so those are all my recommendations and my tbr for the month of june very excited for pride i'd love to hear from you all what are you reading for pride what books would you recommend other people check out for pride let me know in the comments down below and then once again thank you to book of the month for sponsoring this video all the information about them is in the description box below and i will talk to y'all next time bye

Channel: monica kim

Views: 7,481

Rating: 4.9701862 out of 5

Keywords: book, books, read, reads, reader, reading, booktube, booktuber

Id: gMQLshIFoTA

Length: 15min 33sec (933 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 08 2021