Bristol Reads
We created our Bristol Reads collection as a space to allow our library members to develop and grow the love of reading for pleasure. Bristol Reads holds 100s of books and is a collection developed to foreground diverse writers. The collection celebrates a variety of works from international fiction to graphic novels, contemporary poetry and non-fiction books covering cooking to mud-larking to environmental protest.
The Joy of Reading!
Reading for pleasure can improve mental wellbeing and has many physical benefits. Putting time aside to read for pleasure can help ease stress as it can lower ones blood pressure and heart rate, this also means that reading before bed can aid in readiness for a goodnight’s sleep. With the potential to widen vocabulary, improve brain connectivity and increase understandings of empathy, reading is considered to improve wellbeing on so many levels.
Bristol Reads Locations
It can feel difficult to allow time for reading in your down time while studying so we have made space for the Bristol Reads collection in four of our libraries; the Arts and Social Sciences Library, Education Library, Chemistry Library and the Wills Memorial Library. It is now easier to pop in to pick up your next read while travelling across campus or browse during a study break!
Libby App
Listen to audiobooks and read eBooks for free with the Libby App! Simply download and login with your university details to access contemporary fiction and non-fiction from prize winning, BAME and LGBTAI+ authors.
Have Any Recommendations?
We want to keep our collection current and of interest to all, so if you have any suggestions for additions to the Bristol Reads collection please let us know by suggesting a purchase.
Recommendations from Library Staff: LGBTQ+ History Month edition
Queer Intentions: A (Personal) Journey Through LGBTQ+ Culture by Amelia Abraham
Queer Intentions is an author’s personal journey through LGBTQI+ culture; it documents Abraham’s travels through various countries and conversations with LGBTQ+ people from all walks of life. Discussions cover a wide breadth of themes, including politics, religion, spirituality, capitalism, education and exploitation. This is an immersive, accessible and thought-provoking book with curiosity, good humour and a disarming openness.
A Natural History of Transition by Callum Angus
A Natural History of Transition is a collection of short stories that disrupts the notion that trans people can only have one transformation. Like the landscape studied over eons, change does not have an expiration date for these trans characters. The collection blends emotional, humanistic tales with magical realism, in doing so Angus works to normalize gender transition and appreciate the nuances of human identity.
None of the Above: Reflections on Life Beyond the Binary by Travis Alabanza
In None of the Above, Travis Alabanza considers seven phrases people have directed at them about their gender identity that have stayed with them over the years. Some are deceptively innocuous, some deliberately loaded or offensive, some celebratory; sentences that have impacted them for better and for worse. This work of reflection speaks to the broader issues raised by a world that insists that gender must be a binary.
Cursed Bread by Sophie Mackintosh
From the Man Booker-nominated author of The Water Cure comes an elegant and hypnotic new novel of obsession that centers on the real unsolved mystery of the 1951 mass poisoning of a French village, when the small town of Pont-Saint-Esprit collectively lost its mind. In this erotic fable of transformation and lesbian desire, Mackintosh creates an atmospheric, complex and hypotonic historical read.
