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Classic sapphic books (Sapphic Book Bingo #11)

June 10, 2022May 26, 2022

For this week’s Sapphic Book Bingo category, read a book that is considered a classic sapphic book—one of the trailblazing books published in the 20th century or before, at a time when most mainstream publishers wouldn’t publish LGBT+ literature and sapphic characters often didn’t get a happy ending.

Today, we are lucky to live in a time when more sapphic books are published every year than most of us can read, across all subgenres, and we owe it to these amazing authors who blazed the trail for us.

For the sake of this reading challenge, I would considered any sapphic book that was first published before the year 2000 a “sapphic classic.”

Sapphic books that includes safer sex (Book Unicorn #5)

September 6, 2022May 19, 2022

For this week’s Book Unicorn post of the Sapphic Book Bingo, read a sapphic book in which the characters practice safer sex. Maybe there’s a scene in the book in which they talk about safer sex, or we find out they’ve gotten tested for STIs (sexually transmitted infections) before sleeping together, or we see them use dental dams or condom-covered sex toys, etc.

As I mentioned in a blog post that I wrote for the Ylva Publishing blog a few years ago, sapphic romances and erotica rarely depict safer sex practices. The characters never seem to worry about contracting sexually transmitted infections, even if they have only just met and don’t know each other’s sexual history.

I get that it can interrupt the buildup and flow of a steamy scene, but as an author, I try to find a way to incorporate it, especially if I’m writing a story in which one of the characters had a lot of one-night stands in the past.

sapphic books out of your reading comfort zone

Sapphic book that is out of your comfort zone (Sapphic Book Bingo #10)

July 20, 2022May 12, 2022

For this week’s Sapphic Book Bingo category, read a sapphic book that is a bit—or a lot—out of your reading comfort zone.

It can be a genre or subgenre you don’t usually read, a trope or topic you normally avoid, or a format you don’t usually read. If you stick to reading novels most of the time, you could try a short story, a biography/memoir, poetry, nonfiction, or a graphic novel. If you normally read ebooks, you could read a paperback or try an audiobook. If you mostly read contemporary romances, you could try a historical romance, a paranormal romance, a mystery, or book of another genre.

If there’s a certain point of view that you usually avoid, you could search out a book written from that point of view for this category–that’s what I might be doing.

Below, I’ll give you some resources and suggestions.

Sapphic books featuring an established couple (Sapphic Book Bingo #7)

March 6, 2023March 31, 2022

This week’s Sapphic Book Bingo post features sapphic books with an established couple, meaning the main character needs to already be in an established romantic relationship at the beginning of the book.

There aren’t that many “established couple” books within the romance genre because, by definition, the plot of a romance novel revolves around two (or more) characters falling in love. The central question is whether they’ll end up with getting their happily ever after. But while the “happily ever after” is the end of a romance novel, it’s not the end of the couple’s story. Sometimes, readers would love to see how the couple handles problems life throws at them or whether they start a family.

So for this category, read a book in which the characters are already together at the start of the book. The book can be part of a series, with the characters getting together in an earlier book, or it could be a novel that isn’t a romance at all.

Sapphic book by a full-time writer (Sapphic Book Bingo #6)

March 6, 2023March 17, 2022

For this week’s category of the Sapphic Book Bingo, read a sapphic book by an author who writes full-time. Not a lot of authors are able to support themselves with their writing, especially not in a niche genre such as sapphic/women-loving-women fiction, so I thought full-time writers of sapphic fiction deserve a category of their own.

I put together a list of full-time writers below. Some of these authors retired from their day jobs; others gave them up to write full-time, as I did in 2013, and now make a living off their writing.

Sapphic books about faith and religion (Book Unicorn #3)

March 6, 2023March 10, 2022

It’s time for another Book Unicorn category of the Sapphic Book Bingo. This week’s post features sapphic books about faith.

For this category, read a sapphic book in which faith, religion, or spiritual experiences plays an important role. It could be any faith or religion, including Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Bahá’í, Shinto, Jainism, or Zoroastrianism. You could even read a science fiction or fantasy novel with a fictional faith.

The main character could embrace religion as a positive influence on their life or end up rejecting it.

Sapphic books – author’s pick (Sapphic Book Bingo #5)

March 6, 2023March 3, 2022

This week’s Sapphic Book Bingo post features a special category: author’s picks.

For this category, choose an author and have them suggest one of their books to you to read.

You can either email the author of your choice and ask for their pick, or you can choose a book from the list of 185 authors I asked for you. You’ll find the list below.

Sapphic sports romance (Sapphic Book Bingo #4)

February 17, 2022

This week’s Sapphic Book Bingo post features sapphic sports romances.

A sports romance is a book with a main character who’s an athlete or otherwise involved in a sport, e.g., a coach, physical therapist, etc.

In order for the book to count for this category, the sports setting needs to be essential to the book, not just be mentioned in passing a couple of times.

It can be any sport, from the more well known, e.g., soccer, baseball, tennis, etc., to lesser known ones such as curling, lacrosse, or ultimate frisbee.

Character is in therapy (Book Unicorn #2)

February 10, 2022February 10, 2022

It’s time for the second Book Unicorn post, and this one features books with a main character who’s in therapy–and when I say “therapy,” I mean psychotherapy.

If you find a book where the therapy sessions feature prominently in the plot, that’s great, especially if therapy is portrayed as something positive that the character is doing to take care of their mental health. But the book counts for this category even if we don’t see the character in a therapy session, as long as it’s stated at least once in the book that the main character is going to therapy.

Sapphic disaster books (Sapphic Book Bingo #3)

September 16, 2022February 3, 2022

This week’s category of the Sapphic Book Bingo features sapphic disaster books. Of course, not the books themselves are the disaster; their plots reolve around a disaster.

It can be a natural disaster such as an earthquake, a hurricane, a tornado, a volvanic eruption, a flood, an avalanche, a wildfire, a blizzard, etc., or it could be a man-made disaster that results from technological or human error, e.g., a plane crash, a shipwreck (think Titanic), a train accident, or an explosion, etc.