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.

Star Shipped

Star Shipped (publication day March 3, 2026) is Cat Sebastian’s first foray into contemporary queer romance, and it is like immersing yourself in the big warm hug that is two hot-mess actors doing the best they can and realizing that they fell in love despite themselves. Simon and Charlie are co-stars on a popular science…

by bbwesquire March 3, 2026March 1, 2026

Now I Surrender

Now I Surrender (English publication day March 3, 2026, original Spanish 2018) by Álvaro Enrigue, translated by Natasha Wimmer defies genre. It is historical fiction, set mostly in the 1800s during the Apache wars in the desert southwest where the borders between the United States, Mexico, and “Indian territory” changed often. But there are multiple…

by bbwesquire March 3, 2026March 1, 2026