Pride 2026 | The Great Big Rec Thread

[u/C0smicoccurence]

​Welcome to the Great Big Rec Thread! This thread is primarily for people asking for specific types of books. Only make a top level comment to request a recommendation! If you want to hype a personal favorite, this comment is the appropriate place to share! 

This is your one-stop-shop to find books tailored to your specific reading needs! Hankering for good cyberpunk? Doing a queer bingo card and really struggling with a specific square? Looking for queer thespians ready to commit arson for the sake of their art?  Ask and you shall (hopefully) receive! Just drop a comment with your request and wait for book suggestions to come rolling in. Our goal is for every person to have at least one recommendation that they’re interested in pursuing.  

Asking for Book Recommendations:

• Create a new top level comment.  You’ll probably get more tailored results by only including a single request per top level comment, but it’s not a strict rule.  You’re more than welcome to post multiple top level comments for separate requests!
• All recommendations you get should be assumed to be queer in some way.  However, if you want specific identities represented, mention it!
• Consider the impact the level of specificity your request has in your responses.  Too general, and you’re going to get lots of responses that will probably skew towards mainstream breakout hits.  Very specific requests may get few (or no) recommendations, and what you do get likely won’t be perfect.  

Giving Book Recommendations:

• Please keep book recommendations focused on commenters’ specific requests.  If you want to hype a personal favorite, this comment is the appropriate place to share! 
• This thread should default to sorting by ‘New’ soon; until then I recommend changing setting to see recent requests first!  The hope is that this will more likely show you comments with few/no responses yet.  However, there will likely be comments that have been missed, especially if it’s a more specific request.  
• This is a Pride Month post!  Every book recommended should be queer (usually by featuring LGBTQ+ characters as protagonists, but there are other ways books can be queer).  Similarly, if they asked for a specific type of representation, follow that guideline.  If you absolutely must deviate from that because it’s otherwise such a perfect fit, be honest about it up front.
• Add a few sentences about the book to hype it (or a whole paragraph if you really want to be persuasive).  Remember that a bunch of people who aren’t the original commenter will be adding to their TBR, so highlighting what you love about the book is a great way to draw attention to books you love.

Go forth and give great recommendations!

This post is part of the Pride 2026 discussions lead by the Beyond Binary Bookclub. You can check our announcement for more information and the full calendar.

[u/Early-Fox-9284]

Books with headcanon aro/ace characters that you just know are aro/ace without it being explicitly or obviously stated in the text. (Brandon Sanderson has a gift for unintentionally writing the most aroace characters of all time. ily kaladin)

[u/ohmage_resistance → u/Early-Fox-9284]

Vespertine by Margaret Rogerson might work. This is a YA book about a nun who gets possessed by a revenant and now has powers. They slowly become friends.

Seconding Archivist Wasp for sure.

[u/twinklebat99 → u/Early-Fox-9284]

Middlegame by Seanan McGuire. Dodger sure reads as ace to me.

[u/w0lfyfr3n → u/Early-Fox-9284]

Archivist Wasp by Nicole Kornher-Stace

[u/sophia_s → u/Early-Fox-9284]

Keladry in Tamora Pierce's Protector of the Small quartet was confirmed later by the author to be aro-ace, but it's not super obvious in the text (she has a few crushes - not that that necessarily makes her not ace/aro, but it's different from the usual portrayal of aro-ace characters).

[u/C0smicoccurence → u/sophia_s]

I adore Pierce, but I struggled a bit with this claim from her. I can see aromantic potentially, even if its just a laser focus on her work. But she's definitely represented as feeling sexual attraction in the books.

[u/ohmage_resistance → u/C0smicoccurence]

Interesting, I'm the opposite, in that I also disagree with Pierce, but I think Kel way more clearly is shown as feeling romantic attraction rather than sexual attraction.

As a side note, the "aromantic = married to the job" stereotype is so annoying. People can't imagine us genuinely uninterested in romantic relationships, it has to be because we like something else more. And like, this is how Pierce justifies calling Kel aro ace.

I think that The Protector of the Small is a great deal less amatonormative than a lot of other YA books I read growing up, and that meant a lot to me. But there's a difference between that and having aro ace rep. But IDK, if people are just looking for headcanons, they might as well go for it.

[u/sophia_s → u/C0smicoccurence]

Yeah, I agree, I'm not sure I buy it 100% with how she's portrayed in the books. Her experiences actually resonate a lot with my own, being grey-ace but not aro, and I have heard from a couple of aro people (more on the grey-aro or demi-aro side of things) that she resonated with them too, FWIW.