NEW in 2025: Queer Book Club!
A fresh new book club is coming your way in the New Year! Get ready to for Queer Book Club beginning in January 2025. This club is founded and led by our bookseller and shop supervisor Lane. Read on for more behind her motivation for beginning the club, and save your spot at the inaugural meeting now! - Ally
In the year after I first came out, I struggled to reconcile my newly claimed identity with my existing sense of self. Everyone in my life was straight and it felt like I had nowhere to turn and no one to help me. It’s a terrifying thing to feel so lost within oneself.
I wasn’t much of a reader at the time, but I’d heard on a podcast that a great way to connect with yourself is to do things you enjoyed as a child. Feeling desperate, I took the advice and pulled up Google Maps. I didn’t know where to start when I first stumbled into the cute little bookshop on the waterfront, but even in her infancy, Old Town Books made it easy.
“Since then, I’ve fallen in love with reading and with myself. Books have brought me comfort, pride, and community and I know many of you relate. ”
Among the shelves of books and little notes from the staff, I found a literary fiction novel which an employee had written was “spooky and fun.” That sounded like just my type of story, so I took it home without even reading a synopsis hoping maybe this would be good for me. That book was Plain Bad Heroines, which centers on a cast of five women who each experience and externalize their queer identity in their own way. None is portrayed as better than the other, none as the “right” way, they’re simply different. These women are just themselves, being queer in the way that feels true to who they are. It couldn’t have been more serendipitous if it were written in its own novel– the book and the hobby I picked up that day in 2020 began to heal me.
Since then, I’ve fallen in love with reading and with myself. Books have brought me comfort, pride, and community and I know many of you relate.
“I’m excited to be starting the Queer Book Club at Old Town Books because it gives me a chance to celebrate and give back to this community that has built me up so strongly. ”
Join Queer Book Club!
Register now and buy your book in store or online for 10% off.
As a bookseller, I’ve had the pleasure of talking with so many of our incredible customers who have similar stories. Reading queer stories is euphoric and validating. Whether it’s the healing power of seeing yourself on the page or the empathy that grows when reading from the point of view of someone who does not hold your same identity, we are made better the more we read.
I’m excited to be starting the Queer Book Club at Old Town Books because it gives me a chance to celebrate and give back to this community that has built me up so strongly. Each month, we will have a chance to gather and chat about books from across genres, written by authors who hold various LGBTQIA2S+ identities. We will delve into the full spectrum of queer life from romance and found family to fear and longing. It is my hope that this space we build together will be a collective source of joy, safety, and growth for many years to come. I can’t wait to see you there.
Much love,
Lane