Reading While Fat

Welcome! I’ve published nearly 300 reviews of the books I’ve read since 2021. You can skip to the bottom to search books by tag or just keep reading. They are not all fat-positive, but I do note if there is any significant anti-fat bias. Thankfully, most of what I read is at least weight-neutral.

Have you ever been annoyed by a description of a fat character in a book and wish the author did better? Have you been thrilled to find a fat character that isn’t trying to lose weight? Less often, but it does happen.

In this blog, I’ll review the books I read and report whether I found anything fat positive, anti-fat biased, or weight neutral, but I’ll try to avoid repeating the worst of the anti-fat bias. I’ll focus on fiction, with an emphasis on diverse and queer-friendly authors. In 2025, I published over 70 reviews, and I plan to do the same in 2026 as well, generally published on Sundays, but reviews of new books will happen on publication day Tuesdays. If you subscribe, you’ll get reviews in your inbox whenever I publish one, but no more than that, I promise. My 2026 goal is an average of a review every week on Sundays and one new book an average of every other week.

Click on the tags in the cloud at the bottom of this page to filter by topic, or for book cover thumbnails leading to my latest reviews, click here. The list of my 2025 reads, an analysis of my 2025 reading year, and older annual summaries and other content, including my views on fat acceptance, my journey to becoming a single mother, dealing with breast cancer and life afterwards, and my coming-out story are at bbwesquire.

No Fats, No Fems

No Fats, No Fems: A Guide to Queer Empathy and Unpacking Prejudice (publication day May 19 2026) by Max Hovey is a decent introduction to anti-racist, feminist, trans-positive, and body positive concepts for gay white men who may never have been exposed to those ideas before. The title comes from a common phrase found in…

by bbwesquire May 19, 2026May 17, 2026

A Perfect Hand

A Perfect Hand (publication day May 19, 2026) by Ayelet Waldman is my favorite kind of historical fiction–where actual historical figures make an appearance as characters! Set in the late 1800s in England, the story centers on Alice Lockey, a lady’s maid who grew up in a village, daughter of a farmer, and entered service…

by bbwesquire May 19, 2026May 9, 2026