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One of the first articles I ever wrote for TFR was a bookshelf tour in my last apartment. I released that back when I had barely over 100 followers, so only about as many people have ever read that article; and, well, a lot has happened since then!
I’ve now moved from Philly to Ottawa, which forced me to leave behind more than two thirds of the books which appeared on my first bookshelf tour. Moreover, my collection of trans books has grown astronomically – back in last September, I would estimate that around 20% of my collection was from transfeminine authors, whereas now it’s probably closer to 90%. With such drastic changes in both my life and my library, I thought it would be a good time to make a new bookshelf tour to talk about what’s changed and how I’m adjusting to living in a foreign country for the first time.
The first thing that you’ll probably notice about my shelves right now is the empty space. When we last left my bookshelves, I had enough books to fill all the shelves.
Now I don’t.
By the time I left Philly, I did not have nearly enough space on my shelves for all of my books, and it had begun to seriously impede the functionality of my living space. I had huge haphazard piles of books strewn around my bedroom and desk. It was, in short, a total mess. Even though the shelves were the perfect size at first, it turns out that being a working literary critic tends to accumulate a lot of books, which means that it’s important to have space to grow.
More to the point, however, I think this wide shot of my shelves really hammers home just how much I had to leave behind. In the last article, I talked about how I collected special editions of literary classics – virtually all of those are sitting in my childhood bedroom in the closet. I left behind my entire philosophy collection, all of my history books, my reference books, the vast majority of my writing books, and most of my non-trans fiction. I left behind childhood favorites, and books I always meant to read but never got around to (looking at you, Proust).
It’s not gone. I could have my dad send it north, if I really wanted to. But I don’t, in truth. I don’t mind that I don’t have as many books as I used to, that my books don’t present that perfect BookTok aesthetic, that I’m not lining shelf-to-shelf with a trendy melange of special editions and hardbacks.
My bookshelves have always been a representation of me, in their way, and right now I have the shelves of a woman starting from studs.
Oh, and obviously you know I had to bring Oshapott along with me 🥰 He is a proud Canadian immigrant now.
While it may look like I have a lot fewer books than I used to, it becomes pretty quickly obvious once you compare to last year’s tour how much my transfeminine collection has grown.
In 2025, I have more transfeminine fiction – almost entirely novels – in my library than I had trans books total when I did my bookshelf tour last year.
One major shift is that I’ve stopped keeping my TBR books separate from my read books. There are two reasons for this – firstly, it’s easier to keep track of everything in my collection (which helps me to avoid buying books twice), and secondly, I simply have more books on my TBR than I can feasibly read. Between the constant inflow of books from new releases and my P.O. Box, I currently acquire books faster than I’m able to read them. At the worst of my TBR stack, I had more books in my TBR pile than I did on my shelves! It’s not sustainable, so onto the shelves they go.
If a book was on last year’s tour, I’m not gonna talk about it here, but let me give you a quick glimpse of the major highlights ♥
One of the coolest things I’ve started collecting is some of the OG transfeminine fantasy from the 20th Century. I’ve acquired Gael Baudino’s entire Dragonsword trilogy (and reviewed Book One on my Patreon), as well as her standalone novel Gossamer Axe and The Swordswoman by Jessica Amanda Salmonson. Obviously the crown jewel of this collection would be an original copy of Rachel Pollack’s classic novels, but I have unfortunately not gotten my hands on them yet. A hunt for another day!
I love searching used bookstores for hidden transfemme gems – especially with pulp genre fiction, books like these can sit on a shelf for literal decades without anyone noticing by simple virtue of the obscurity of the authors. If you know what you’re looking for – which is obviously the hard part – it is always worth taking a fine-toothed comb over the fantasy and sci-fi section for any random goodies.
A couple people have asked for tips on how to look for these types of books, and I’m afraid I don’t have any easy advice. You can read through my Masterlist or other major databases for starting points, but at the end of the day, you’re not gonna find anything unless you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and do a shitton of research.
A few months ago, I had the delightful chance to catch one of Jeanne’s readings on her tour for A/S/L, so of course I took the opportunity to get her books signed! I adore signed books, they’re such a fun way to add personality and history to any library, so every time I get a chance, you already know I’m gonna leap for it.
And yes, I promise I’m going to read A/S/L soon 😭
In addition to my trio of Thornton signatures, I’ve also got a couple of other signed copies that I picked up through various means over the last few months.
If you’re personally mailing me a book, I would totally encourage you to sign it! Both of these signed copies came to me through my P.O. Box (which is closed at the moment, I will notify when I get one in Canada), and it really makes me grin every time I open the cover.
Also, can we talk about the unbelievable drip of having a custom-printed sticker for your signed books? Like hot damn okay.
Another place where I’m trying to grow my collection is French-language transfeminine fiction. French is my second language, and a lifelong struggle for me; but now that I’m living next door to Quebec, it’s become more useful than ever to practice my skills. I’ve started both La fille d’elle-même and Havre de paix, but my reading speed in French is probably about a tenth of my speed in English, so I’ve yet to finish either. While reading is my strongest suit with foreign languages, I do have to pause once or twice (or more) a page to google vocabulary, so it seriously crimps my ability to power through on a blog-focused timeline.
Another annoyance – over the last year, I’ve majorly decreased my reliance on Amazon to access transfeminine literature, but that’s had the effect that I almost never order a book off the internet. It’s impossible to find Francophone transfeminine lit in American bookstores, and basically the only book you can reliably access in Canada is La fille d’elle-même, cause, yknow, Quebec is gonna rep any French-language writer they can get, which means that the only way to get most French books is ordering online or ebook. And French ebooks get prohibitive because taking in-line notes is the only way I can actually force my brain to do reading comprehension.
The obvious solution to this is to suck it up and just find a proper French online bookstore to do a big batch digital Trans-Atlantic order from, but I’m probably going to try and finish some of these first before I keep adding to the pile lol.
If anyone has book-buying tips for Francophone transfeminine lit, please feel free to share them.
I went to Italy this spring, and much to my delight I found myself an Italian edition of Nevada! Not even a hot take that the cover is sooo much prettier than the 2021 English printing.
I may try to collect Nevada in as many languages as it can, cause that sounds like a fun sidequest. The book has also been translated into French, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, and Czech (and there may be others not listed on Goodreads), so it’s definitely no small task!
Okay, that’s most of the notables for my transfeminine fiction section. Some general observations: I keep my fiction section alphabetized, and I keep my English fic separate from my foreign language fic. Taking a brief survey of the shelf, about 48 of the 105 novels I have in hardcopy remain unread, which means that I’ve read about 54% of the books in my transfeminine fiction section! Not bad, but I’ve definitely got some work to do.
This doesn’t even begin to account for my astronomical TBR for e-books, but we’re not even gonna talk about that today.
Let’s keep going.
Under my substantial collection of transfeminine novels, which is obviously my primary research interest, I have a couple smaller collections of trans books that aren’t non-fiction. I have a handful each of graphic novels, poetry collections, zines and other paper paraphanalia, and trans books not by transfeminine authors.
Both graphic novels and poetry fall into the same general trap for me, which is that I read them too damn fast lmao. Seriously, I will sit down with a graphic novel and be done less than half an hour later – and given how expensive they can get, it’s usually pretty hard for me to justify spending a lot of money on them. Poetry is more generally the black sheep of the literary world these days. It’s not a money-maker for bookstores, so it’s just generally harder to find the editions.
This part is especially exciting because it lets me shout out a bunch of local authors! So in no particular order:
It may not be personalized like the others, but I did manage to snag myself a signed copy of Galaxy: The Prettiest Star by Jadzia Axelrod at the Barnes and Nobles in downtown Philly, which I talked about a while back in this article. Jadzia is a Philly native, so I must have gotten lucky enough to catch the tailwind of one signing event or another.
I spend a good portion of my spring at my dad’s in DC, which meant that I had the delightful opportunity to sit in on a workshop for new writers run by Lilac Peril and Nic Anslett! Lilac Peril won last year’s TFR Award for Outstanding Publication, and I was super excited to get hooked up with a physical copy of their debut edition, which is just such a lovely product for a new literary journal. If you’re in DC, I would highly recommend attending some of their workshops – it’s a great way to build transliterary community in your area.
One much newer acquisition is Summer Shade, a novella by local Ottawa author and journalist Lee Pepper, who I had literally never heard of before I found them in the zine stack at Venus Envy. Apparently they’ve been writing since 2013! I may be new to the area, but I’m super excited to learn more about local trans lit, so finds like this always make me happy.
Oh, yeah, and I put out a zine too lol. Shoutout to the wonderful anonymous soul who formatted this for the general use and then blinked out of digital existence, I love you, I hope you’re doing well. If you want to download the zine edition of the Trans Literature Preservation Project, there is a free and printable edition in this article.
That’s it for Shelf #1, onto the middle shelf.
Not as much to say here – this addition gives me a solid place to keep some of my bulkier bookshelf items, like my printer and my Trans Studies Readers. I also have all of the cis books that made the move on the right side: the top cubby is English books, the bottom cubby is French books.
Yes, I do also play guitar – not particularly well, certainly not well enough to be in a band. At this point, it’s mostly something I occasionally pick up to play some nostalgic camp songs in my downtime.
Another fun fact: I was a competitive School Scrabble player for a few years! Competitive Scrabble is such a weird little world, and I take a lot of amusement out of the fact that there’s a relatively big Youtube channel that covers it now. Occasionally I see friends from school on there and I’m like, ‘holy shit I know them!’ and then I remember that people also know me, and it gives me a whole existential crisis lol. It’s one of my party tricks – you can play me in Scrabble, but chances are that unless you’re really good at the game, I will whoop your ass.
Oh, and the Torah, obviously.
Next!
I’ve broadly split my nonfiction into five categories – memoir, self-help, theory, history, and general. Obviously memoir and theory take up the bulk of the books here, but it’s nice to see that I’ve got a growing selection of transfeminine nonfiction that doesn’t fall into the basic ‘explaining transness’ pitfall.
Some of the absolute weirdest books I’ve picked up over the last year have come from this section, so let me give you a little sampler.
First up, we’ve got this trio of incredibly obscure memoirs that I only know exist because I happened to stumble on them at queer booksellers. Breaking Free and Holding on by a Thread both came off of the trans display at Glad Day in Toronto, where my close friend and I briefly stopped a few weeks ago in between Chinese food and drinks.
Stefonknee Wolscht seems to have made tabloid headlines a decade ago for being publicly involved in ABDL subculture (link but major TW for transphobia and ageplay), which, good for her, I guess? I’m more bothered by the fact that she spells her name ‘Stefonknee.’
As to the third title, I was pleasantly surprised to run into some of the folks at Jessica Kingsley Publishing at Philly Pride this year, where I found Uncomfortable Labels, another memoir I had never heard of. I’ve had some, uhhh, not so great experiences with their titles (looking at you, Trans Power and To My Trans Sisters) but the folks at the stall were lovely, and I’m very curious about a book that’s focusing on the autism/trans intersection.
Finally, my most recent interesting find came just this weekend!
I’ve been searching for Jan Morris’ classic travelogues for a long time, and I finally stumbled on the jackpot last weekend in the back basement corner of Black Squirrel books last weekend. I am so unbelievably excited to have found these in print. Sultan in Oman may have originally been printed in 1957, but this particular edition is from 2008 – the real gems here are the other two, which both date back to the 80s.
Oh, and one final nugget – I may only have this book in digital, but while we’re on the topic of bizarre nonfiction I’ve read this year, I just have to mention the #1 strangest book of all, which is too funny to remain in complete obscurity.
The crown jewel of Amanda Valentine’s Transgender Women Etiquette Trilogy is the aptly-named Dating Rich Men for Transgender Women, which is exactly what it sounds like. Yes, ladies – have you ever wanted to be a golddigger, but have been trapped beneath the oppressive yoke of a transphobic class system? Well now you can find your way into a rich and conventionally attractive businessman’s heart (and his wallet, obviously). I know that I personally have been yearning to become a golddigger since I was a little boygirl, so it’s just so empowering to know that there are trans women out there who are just like me and living the dream!!!!
Seriously, I died laughing from reading this, it’s a riot, 2/10.
Anyway, on that note, that’s all I’ve got for the moment! Lots of shelves to fill, lots of books to read, and a really exciting beginning to a new literary chapter in my life. I’ll be releasing my first review to the public from my Patreon this Sunday, so definitely keep your eyes peeled for that 👀
Cheers, Beth
LAST WEDNESDAY: #11 – Ranking Every TG/TF Subgenre on Fictionmania
NEXT WEDNESDAY: #13 – Showcasing the Transfeminine Nominees for the Lambda Literary Awards
The Transfeminine Review 
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