It’s Pride month, and you know what that means: It’s the perfect excuse to buy a bunch of new quirky books. To get you started, I’ve highlighted seven weird books that check out the 2026 Read Harder Challenge tasks, including a non-fiction book about the resistance, a recent Gothic novel, a fabulist book, a book about a cult, a book set in space, a horror novel in translation, and a book by an African author.
Task #5: Read a non-fiction book about resistance
our work is everywhere by sian rose
Reading this beautiful collection of oral histories and interviews feels as if you’re sitting down with some queer and trans artists, practitioners, and activists, and listening to them talk about the things that inspire them, anger them, excite them. The art is truly unique – each page feels like its own work of art. Here you’ll find stories about ancestral wisdom, the power of queer tarot, mutual aid organizations, community gardening initiatives, radical wealth redistribution, and more. This is an inspiring book full of LGBTQ+ talent and creativity. -Laura Saxton
Task #6: Read a Gothic novel published in the last ten years
rescue By Anbara Salaam
In this Sapphic Gothic novel, when marine archaeologist Marta Khouri is called to a remote Scottish island to explore a recently uncovered Victorian shipwreck, she expects the salvage to be the most interesting thing she finds. Instead, as the Cuban Missile Crisis erupts halfway around the world she becomes trapped in the ice and becomes convinced that a shadowy figure is following her every step, even as she searches for artifacts from the ship, which has mysteriously disappeared. -Rachel Brittain
All Access members, read five more weird books that check out the 2026 Read Harder Challenge tasks.
#14: Read a work of magical realism or fabulism
thirty names of the night By Zen Joukhdar
Filled with ghosts and birds, Joukhdar’s poetic novel shifts between two timelines. In contemporary New York City, a Syrian American trans boy mourns for his mother who died in a strange fire five years earlier, and an illustrated magazine published in Little Syria reveals the mysterious life of Laila Zed, a Syrian American bird painter who wrote “B” about America and disappeared half a century ago. Honored with the Stonewall Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction, this hopeful story of ongoing conversations with loved ones highlights art, community, ornithology, personal history, and resilience. -Connie Pan
#17: Read a book about a sect or cult
Simplicity By Matty Lubchansky
Established in 2081, Simplicity It’s about a trans man scholar who sets out to research a cult living outside New York’s dystopian walled city – but soon, he starts having hallucinations, and then cult members start disappearing. The blurbs for this are absolutely brilliant. One from Alissa Nutting says it is “the hottest, most satirically dazzling, heartbreakingly brilliant ecosexual call to action you will ever read.” -Danica Ellis
#20: Read a book set in space
Mosed in space By Rebecca Thorn (July 7, 2026)
best selling author of Treason cannot be written without teaA cozy Sapphic fantasy romance novel is back with a new cozy story set in space. I love cozy sci-fi, so you better believe I’m looking forward to reading this book. The moss-covered spaceship Torian just purchased is her ticket to her new life, and it’s definitely not a terrible idea, no matter what her former captain Amelia has to say about it. But when she tries to fix it, she discovers that the moss is actually a sentient biological computer, holding a grudge against the creator who left it. Even if Torian hates to admit it, Amelia may have been right in this case. -Rachel Brittain
#21: Read a book of a genre (SFF, horror, mystery, romance) in translation
ice and salt route By José Luis Zarate, translated by David Bowles
This cult vampire novel becomes available in English translation for the first time An IndieGoGo campaign led by Innsmouth Free PressA micro-press owned and operated by World Fantasy Award-winning author Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Originally published in 1998, ice and salt route It is the story of the ship that carried Dracula to England, told from the point of view of the ship’s captain. Zarate writes a Gothic novel that explores classic Gothic horror, queer desire and its repression, while considering the ways that labeling and destroying monsters can be applied to the real-world horrors of homophobia and oppression.
Content warnings: Homophobic violence, body horror, Gothic horror, self-harm, suicide, internalized homophobia, sexual assault. -Leah Rachel Von Essen
#23: Read a book by an African author
Fairy tales for lost children By Diriye Osman (Somalia)
Diriye Osman is a British Somali writer whose genre-oriented debut collection highlights the lives of young queer Somalis both in her home country and in the diaspora. His characters grapple with family, relationships, identity, and what it means to belong or not to a place or country. Osman is also an artist, and his paintings appear throughout the collection adding another layer. -Laura Saxton
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