Two things happened in late 2017 that contributed to a boost in my book consumption: I bought a Kindle Oasis (while drunk at 1 a.m., might I add), and I moved into an apartment where, for the first time in my life, I didn’t have a TV. I stopped whiling away fruitless hours in front of old Simpsons reruns and bad ‘90s rom-coms (well, mostly), and started devouring books again the way I did when I was a nerdy, overachieving third-grader. Ah, bliss.
Being a sex writer, I tend to apply a sexuality lens to almost anything I read: “Okay, that’s interesting, but what does it say about how humans fuck?!” For that reason, I found these 5 excellent books sexually illuminating in one way or another, even if that wasn’t strictly their aim…
High Heel by Summer Brennan
This is ostensibly a book about shoes, but really it’s a book about gender, history, beauty, morality, and fairy tales. Each page made me want to either never wear heels again or wear them every day from here to eternity. More to the point, this book made me think more critically about my own self-presentation, the places where it cleaves to what’s expected of me and the places where it noticeably, deliberately doesn’t. I think this short tome would be a revelation for anyone with a gender and a pair of feet. And probably even people without those things, too.