Reading is for Lovers
A Reading List for True Believers
Venus of the Mind is a newsletter designed for aesthetes; for lovers of beauty and culture who like to look good and think deep. New to Venus? Start here.
The Culture List for February 2026
~ Musings on Love
~ Reading recommendations for lovers
~ A special playlist for clear-eyed romantics
~ A sprinkle of magic
~ P.S. a Valentine’s Gift
What arrives after the crush fades?
What happens when the honeymoon goes sideways?
What is left when the false god of all consuming coupledom is shattered?
Love as a collaborative discipline.
Love as a practice in co-creative discovery.
Love as a life giving action that renews each day, rising with the Sun.
This reading list is dedicated to those who believe the same.
A Reading List for True Believers
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name a biomythography by Audre Lorde
Part memoir, part myth, an elegy to love lost, a paean to love found.
Every time I read this, I can feel Audre in the room with me. It’s like she wrote it as a perpetual self-conjuring of the warmest kind.
Three Choice Quotes
“I remember how being young and Black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was pure hell. There were no mothers, no sisters, no heroes. We had to do it alone, like our sister Amazons, the riders on the loneliest outposts of the kingdom of Dahomey. We, young and Black and fine and gay, sweated out our first heartbreaks with no school nor office chums to share that confidence over lunch hour. Just as there were no rings to make tangible the reason for our happy secret smiles, there were no names nor reason given or shared for the tears that messed up the lab reports or the library bills.”
“We had come together like elements erupting into an electric storm, exchanging energy, sharing charge, brief and drenching. Then we parted, passed, reformed, reshaping ourselves the better for the exchange. I never saw Afrekete again, but her print remains upon my life with the resonance and power of an emotional tattoo.”
“Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me — so different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognize her. And in that growing, we came to separation, that place where work begins. Another meeting.”
Queer Power Couples: On Love and Possibility written by Hannah Murphy Winter & Photographed by Billie Winter
If you’re located in the DMV-area, contact Friends to Lovers Bookstore and get your copy from this queer-woman owned romance bookstore. That’s where I got my copy, as a Pride 2025 gift to myself.
Three Choice Quotes
“A queer power couple, as we saw it, is at the intersection of three things: They’re out, they’ve coupled, and they’re able to influence mainstream culture. We realized perhaps the reason this book hasn’t been made yet was because, up until the last ten years, that intersection was pretty empty. And we had to recognize that the emptiness of that intersection was intentional: the result of decades of erasure and losing a generation of elders to the AIDS crisis, and not being able to see queer people grow up and age. And that was why everyone in this book talked about sifting for scraps - searching for allusions to queerness in popular culture to find proof that we’re not alone.”
“There is an abundance of queer excellence. And the more that excellence exists in the public eye, the more maps or torches or possible selves we have. ‘If you’re out there being you,’ Jim [Obergefell] says, ‘unapologetically you - you’re a role model to someone.’”
“I’ve learned from her how to hold myself accountable to the work — treating the art like a nine-to-five — which I wasn’t very good at, at all. In the East Village, I was getting stoned all day. Things are a lot better in that way now. She’s really softened me up too. I feel like my heart, it’s just so mushy now. Which is unfortunate because I have no defenses anymore. I cry all the time now. But I had to open up if I wanted to win her, basically. And I did the work, you know? I started going to therapy, and I’ve done a lot of the work on myself. But as a result, I’m a better person. And that means I’m, you know, a little more weepy and vulnerable now.” - Musician Mackenzie Scott (AKA: Torres) on her relationship with painter Jenna Gribbon.
Found as book four of the five megillot within the Tanakh. I’m especially partial to the Tanakh translations produced by the Jewish Publication Society as they work with respected biblical scholars and with rabbis from across spectrums of observation from Reform, to Conservative, and Orthodox. I’ve linked to their translations above.
Fun fact: Many iterations-of-Ivana-ago, I spent four years deep in study for a conversion to Orthodox Judaism within a variant of the Sephardic tradition. That conversion never happened. Partly because towards the end I began to suspect (correctly) that I was a lesbian. What a plot twist.
Second fun fact: Before my unfinished conversion to Judaism, I identified as an atheist for a few years and prior to identifying as an atheist, I’d been raised as the eldest daughter of a pastor. Double plot twist.
Third fun fact: I was a nauseatingly boring teenager. My form of requisite adolescent “rebellion” looked like skipping Sunday service and spending the afternoon inside a Books-A-Million across the street; where I treated the store as my own personal library and the booksellers kindly let me do so. My favorite book to leaf through which I eventually read cover to cover? Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, because evolution went against creationism and to Little Ivana that was just so edgy.
Three choice quotes from Ecclesiastes.
“Go, eat your bread in gladness, and drink your wine in joy; for your action was long ago approved by God. Let your clothes always be freshly washed, and your head never lack ointment. Enjoy happiness with a woman you love all the fleeting days of life that have been granted to you under the sun — all your fleeting days. For that alone is what you can get out of life and out of the means you acquire under the sun. What is in your power to do, do with all your might. For there is no action, no reasoning, no learning, no wisdom in Sheol, where you are going.” (9.7-10)
“I have further observed under the sun that the race is not won by the swift, nor the battle by the valiant; nor is bread won by the wise, nor wealth by the intelligent, nor favor by the learned. For the time of mischance comes to all. And a man cannot. even know his time. As fishes are enmeshed in a fatal net, and as birds are trapped in a snare, so men are caught at the time of calamity; when it comes upon them without warning.” (9.11-2)
“How sweet is the light, what a delight for the eyes to behold the sun! Even if a man lives many years, let him enjoy himself in all of them, remembering how many the days of darkness are going to be. The only future is nothingness!” (11.7-8)
Deep Soulful Gospel House: Liner Notes on a Black Sapphic Romance by Amber J. Phillips of the newsletter, Toxic Femininity.
THE BEST KIND OF TRUE STORY
Three Choice Quotes
“She managed to still be present in the same poised power stance I had grown to always experience her in during these run ins. By this time, I had become frustrated with seeing her and not speaking. So I decided to completely ignore her when I knew without a doubt that we saw each other. That would surely smother the spark that I was growing inside of myself for her.”
“My final straw was her art. I heard her play. Few things are more risky than witnessing a hint of a romantic crush be in their artist practice. If it’s bad, the lushful purr silences itself and I’m freed from the grip of sapphic limerence. But if it’s good, god forbid great, all of sudden I’m fully locked in and must see the storyline through.”
“There comes a point where you must get active around finding out if a crush is actually viable. And I was at that point. I alerted my trusted friends to help me gather second opinions, oppositional research, and backstory.”
true lovers are sent from hell by Nairy Fstukh of the newsletter, soft moon rising.
When I first experienced Nairy’s writing, I was reminded of this one time where I wasn’t paying attention to my selected psilocybin capsules and accidentally macro-dosed instead of micro-dosing. During that unplanned trip, God casually spoke to me on a Thursday afternoon as I tried my best to get through some household chores. In other words, this linked essay, and everything from soft moon rising, is POTENT. Only for those who relish learning from their shadows and kiki-ing with the Universe.
Three Choice Quotes
“Venus in place of Pluto can be a defensive posturing against erotic love and its tendency to highlight ugly qualities. Where Venus desires what’s most pleasurable, Pluto reflects what’s most hidden and painful—the places we’ve contracted our identity and capacity for intimacy as a result of big and small traumas. The parts of us that haven’t seen the light are ugly, messy and undignified before they are anything else.”
“Confusing Venus with Eros creates heartbreak. We do this by finding value in someone’s affection for us only when they distract us from the messiness of healing and becoming our most vital selves. Should they reroute us to our darkness, we imagine them to be the devil. And, well, it’s true.”
“Some folks have built entire personalities on feeling unworthy.”
Hijab Butch Blues: A Memoir by Lamya H.
Lamya H. is a queer Muslim immigrant writer and community organizer who’s written a memoir that reads like a poetic offering of love to all the intersecting experiences, people, and places that made her. Lamya’s commitment to communing with humanity and with the divine is so deeply woven into the text that reading this book feels like reading a collection of psalms.
April through December, I facilitate an in person Sapphic Sunday Book Club at Friends to Lovers Bookstore, this was our August read last summer. I’ll forever stay thinking about Lamya’s memoir and I’m already re-reading it again.
Three Choice Quotes
“God knows that sometimes you need to destroy the cycles you’re caught in, that sometimes you need to wipe the slate clean and start over. So God sends Nuh a flood. Opens the gates to the heavens and lets it rain, and dear God, does it rain. The streams swell. The valleys flood. Water pours from the sky and doesn’t let up until the world is covered.”
“At first our calls are all business, strictly our time to talk about the Quran. But as the weeks turn into months, our conversations expand. Something begins to shift in our friendship; we share more about our lives than we ever have before. Between discussing verses, she talks to me about difficult things: her parents aging, friend breakups, sex. It’s hard for me to share the difficult things in my life, but I try too: I turn my travails into funny stories so I can slip in the tragic amid the comic…We were always friends, but through reading the Quran together, we become family.”
“I hope that my story helps you to see that we can turn toward our differences instead of away from them, that our differences can actually help us to build community, love more deeply, and live in a way that feels true. I hope that on these pages, you will see and come to love how messy faith can be, and how that messiness makes space for us to grapple with the contradictions that make us human. Messiness is — at its best — generative, it allows us to ask ourselves the truest, most important questions about what it means to be alive.”
100 Black Voices: The Schomburg Centennial Reading List
I consider the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture to be an intellectual Mecca of the Black diaspora. Named after Harlem Renaissance thought leader and Afro-Puerto Rican scholar Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, the center is currently celebrating 100 years of preserving, celebrating, and protecting Black intellectual heritage for the public. That it stands today, 100 years into successive political regimes dedicated to our erasure (since at least 1526 onward), is a testament to the enduring power of cultural stewardship. Such stewardship is a labor of love done with hope in a future that the stewards don’t get see but can sense is possible.
100 Black Voices features 100 books from the center’s collection that were — per the center’s website — “personally selected by some of today’s most celebrated Black writers, artists, and luminaries.” Linked within the list are 20 titles immediately available for online reading, as well as books in other various accessible formats, and more information available about the Shomburg Centennial.
Zami: A New Spelling of my Name is listed. :) Along with other personal favorites like Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, and Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation.
Looking to be regaled with a lovey-dovey story?
Then let me take you to Italy. ⬇️
Thinking about how to hold space for a love of beauty in dire times?
I wrote this for you. ⬇️
A Playlist for the Homies Rising in Love
We’ve got some range here ¡mi gente! Ana Tijoux to Lauryn Hill, Wynonna to Flying Lotus, Mercedes Sosa to Mahmood, Chely Wright to iLe and more. Plus some la-dee-da bee-boo-bop instrumentals.
It’s giving AN ADVENTURE.
Listening is another form of reading.
The first time you listen, pretend it’s a burned CD meant to tell a story.
Play it in order! Afterwards, shuffle all you want.
🌀✨🌹
Theresa Reed’s Tarot for Kids Deck features my favorite interpretation of The Lovers card and its teacher card, The Devil. Reinterpreted here as the more accessible archetypes of The Best Friends and The Bully.
Per esoteric scholar Mary K. Greer, these two cards #6 and #15 respectively in the major arcana, represent the intersecting principles of relatedness and choice.
The center picture above was fancily arranged with my own Tarot for Kids deck. The pictures on either end were taken from a general internet search because my own specific cards of The Best Friends and The Bully are missing from my deck!
These are two of my favorite cards and I often pull them (on purpose, not shuffled) for individual study, so I wasn’t too surprised to find they weren’t with the rest, but I can’t ADHD remember where they are. A true tarot mystery. They’ll most likely reappear when I’m not looking for them and in that moment I’ll gasp out loud to myself half serious half silly, “¡AY no me lo creo! A message from the Universe?!”
Dear Aesthete,
For us true believers, wouldn’t you say that everyday has the potential to be Valentine’s day?
I say yes.
💖,
Your Gallivanting Facialist
P.S. a Valentine’s Gift
If you’ve been enjoying Venus of the Mind and have received value in its writing whether through education, perspective, new recommendations, or a bit of whimsy, consider accepting this Valentine’s offering of 15% off an annual or monthly subscription.
Paid subscribers love writing that takes them deep, where reels, tiktoks, vlogs, and ai can’t: straight to the marrow of desire that drives us toward the pleasure and pain of everything beautiful.
Should you accept the offering, your gifted rate is forever. When your subscription renews it’ll be locked in at 15% off and will not change.
The offering link is good through February 28th.🌹
In the Works…
See you next Sunday!
Let’s meet on a bridge “between starshine and clay.”✌🏾
Reading this was such a delight, Ivana. And I love a good plot twist or two ;). My copy of Easy Beauty just arrived - looking forward to your book club in April!