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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   855 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 28, 2025

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A few if my friends started a book club last year. But their taste, and the current book market even more!, is decidedly feminist/leftist.

Any counterweight recommendations? Nothing too controversial/radical to not scare the normies though.

Assuming you are American, you want to go foreign or old. American liberals have an innate respect for European writers, even more for third world writers, which will allow them much more leeway to get away with being "problematic" than they would grant a white American. And most people who think of themselves as "serious readers" know that at some point they need to tackle Austen and Tolstoy.

For recent American novels, I'd recommend The Sympathizer by Nguyen.

What kinds of books?

Do you have a few examples of what they're recommending, what might squeak by, and what would be right out?

First the viral book-tok hit „A little life“. There are good ling rants about it on reddit:

https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/g7ctg9/why_a_little_life_is_not_worth_reading

A girl I’m subscribed to made a half hour-long video about it. I saw Antoni from Queer Eye wear t-shirts with the characters’ names on them on the show. … A Little Life has been on my mind every single day for over two weeks now. At first, this was because I was in the middle of the story and was immersed in what was going on, anticipating where it would go. Then, it was because I’d finished it and was consumed by how devastating it was. Now, it’s because I’m genuinely angry that I let myself get so emotionally invested in a book that is in actuality terrible in every sense of the word.

Spoiler: This bestseller is practically emotional torture porn about a gay friend group and the gay protagonist who is sexually exploited (of course as a child also by monks) and how he collects traumatic experiences until he suffers so much that he can’t bear it anymore and suicides himself. I am terrible unfair here, but sometimes I think women have a strangely dark place in them and like to read about fucked up stuff (also why true crime podcasts are predominantly consumed by women). Bonus point: All books by the female author are about suffering homosexual men which weirds me out as a strange kink.

Then there is a fiction book with the plot that all women one day lay down on Earth (planking) in a silent strike instead of working in underpaid jobs / doing unpaid care work.

A book about a grand story of an immigrant family and the unwelcoming discriminating experiences they make over the decades in the host country full of Nazis. Though that was a little bit a submarine: The true theme was how the parents impose their backward rural-muslim culture on their kids which fucks them up. in the end an unknown trans kid which was adopted away shows up.

Then there is a non-fiction book about how in current times one can’t just live privately anymore, but must be personally involved politically against the new far right in europe.

These people seem beyond help, but Matthew Gasda's The Sleepers could be a fun cat to throw among the pigeons. It leads with the "queer romance" and only gets subversive later.

If you want to stay inside the lines but be a little subversive, maybe consider Blood Over Bright Haven. The first half of the book feels like the same trauma porn and girl power mashup that you describe above, but the protagonist has a pretty heavy heel-turn as the book progresses.

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