Sapphic Shelves: an introduction

hello hello and welcome to my new blog series: sapphic shelves! if you've been around my blog for any length of time (or follow me elsewhere online) then it will be no surprise to you that i'm a Big fan of sapphic literature.

it's my favourite pairing to read and a good 70% of my TBR is just gay girls falling for each other in a hundred different ways. i do spend some of my time shouting about queer lit (most often on my bookstagram) but i've decided to shout about it a little more because why not!

my online accounts are very much a rainbow shaped bubble - i mainly follow people who read, write and talk about queer lit and that's a purposeful decision. surround yourself by people who lift you higher and by people who provide you with a never ending list of book recommendations. however, because i live in a queer bubble i do forget that other people don't spend all their time scrolling through gay book discussions.

is that an excuse for repeatedly complaining about 'the lack of f/f books' - well, honestly no. it took me five seconds to type in a variety of sapphic books, wlw fiction and queer girl rec lists on google and get exactly what i wanted. goodreads, blogs, twitter, book riot articles. if you're already involved in any sort of bookish community online then you'll know about the existence of these. so if you don't know where to look for sapphic book lists then i really don't know what to suggest.

however. if the issue is more a case of you don't know where to start then i'm happy to help. because i've been there. i had to wade through a whole bunch of terrible goodreads pages (why can't they just update the system??) and figure out for myself what i like and don't like.

i've been reading sapphic lit for years now and like to think i have both an outstanding radar for queer books (seriously, i can read a blurb and spot an undeclared lesbian in thirty seconds) and also a pretty good eye for which sapphic books are worth my time.

i don't really talk about dnf'ing books that much because i tend to dnf them so early that i wouldn't be able to explain why other than 'the feeling' - you know when you've been carrying it around with you for three days and it's a good book but for some reason you're still not further than the second chapter? yeah. that's a dnf point for me. and the books that i do read right to the end? always three stars or more. because why would i be reading a book that i give one star? not happening. there are too many books in the world for me to be wasting my time on a book that i'm not even liking, let alone loving. and boy do i love loving books.

anyway. what i'm trying to say is that i read a lot, and the majority of it is sapphic. so, i've decided to shout into the void a little bit louder and a little bit longer with a blog series (because while talking on twitter or instagram is great, things can get buried pretty quickly - even with the use of hashtags, if you're not online in the instant that it gets posted then you might not see the giant stack of historical bisexual women or the thread of contemporary releases.)

i have a bunch of 'auto-read' authors, an entire shelf of own voice sapphic books, a never-ending list of favourites and lots of thoughts about all of them. so i'm going to share them, yell about them and just generally force them into the spotlight.

if this sounds at all interesting to you then please feel free to follow me on twitter/instagram where i'll be sharing links to all my posts!!

eloise x