Books I wish I had discovered much earlier in life.....

The inspirations for Line & Verse and books that have inspired me personally.

Almost from the moment I learned how, I became an avid reader. In the first grade, the teacher had to start sending me across the hall to the 3rd grade classroom for reading just to keep my attention. I devoured the Hardy Boys, quickly moving on to anything else I could find. Books gave me an escape from what was otherwise a pretty boring small town. I didn't need the movie, I could easily imagine Frank and Joe tooling around in their smart convertible, solving mysteries without getting so much as a hair out of place. I was hooked.

As a teenager, I sat in High School Literature classes in the late 80s and early 90s, we studied Forster. We studied Baldwin. But not the whole story.

Forster’s Howard’s End made the syllabus; Maurice — his love story between two men — stayed locked in a drawer until after his death. We spent weeks on the Harlem Renaissance, but never touched Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, or his sexuality. Despite the fact that Baldwin was openly gay in his lifetime.

Those books weren’t missing by accident. They were intentionally left out. Anything queer was stamped “adult.” Not adult like college-level, but adult like dirty, forbidden, unfit for students. And in that time, there was no Google search, no Kindle, no TikTok queer kid telling you where to look. All I had was the state-sanctioned textbook, the school library, and silence. We read Lord of the Flies, but not these books (remember what happens to the bookish, effete boys in that one?)

So I grew up knowing half the truth. Forster as humanist, without the book he locked in a drawer because it dared to show two men choosing each other. Baldwin as novelist of race and faith, without the Paris love story he published while living openly as a gay man.

The message was clear: queerness existed, but not for us. Not for high school. Not for me. I couldn’t see myself reflected in what we were reading. Didn’t understand why the teacher was so emphatic about a two line exchange between a male and female character. If anything, this only added credibility to the feelings of shame that were already there, and forced me to remain quiet about what I was feeling.

Caleb’s Reading List is my attempt to fill in the missing half. It’s not book reviews. It’s reclamation. Each week, I’ll take one book — sometimes a classic, sometimes something more modern — and write about what it means to me now, coming out later in life.

I also hope that it stresses the importance of this work and the work that fantastic queer authors are generating now. Depending on where you live today, the situation likely hasn’t changed much in those 40 years, or at the very least, it’s under threat.

Some of these books fall into three tiers:

• The books I should have had at sixteen — Maurice, Giovanni’s Room, Tales of the City. The ones that might have made me feel less alien.

• The books I found later — Dancer from the Dance, Borrowed Time, Close to the Knives. Too raw or devastating for a kid, but life-changing as an adult.

• The books I’m reading now — Ocean Vuong, Garth Greenwell, Brandon Taylor, TJ Klune. Proof that the canon is still being written, and that I’m still catching up.

This isn’t nostalgia. It’s reclamation. It’s about the silence built into our education, and the ways we reclaim those stories for ourselves now.

If you’ve been reading Line & Verse, think of this as its nonfiction sibling. That project imagines what it felt like to be closeted in the 90s; this one looks back at the bookshelf that wasn’t available to me then, and what it means to read it now.

👉 Subscribe to Caleb’s Reading List to follow along as I build the queer syllabus I never got — one book at a time.