This is a delightful collection of short stories based on famous stories or about famous authors. Stories about Alice, Dorothy, and Guinevere or Poe and Dickinson- to name a few.
2. Rules of Magic by Alice Hoffman
It's been a tough time for me
lately. Between the Trump presidency and the Me Too movement things have been
hard for me recently. Reading can be a lovely journey somewhere else, far from
what's happening in your life, and reading can be a reflection of exactly what
is happening in your life now. This book is set in the '60s, and while Alice
Hoffman doesn't make the '60s out to be some utopia, the book is filled with
magic. Part of what makes reading a journey away or a journey inward is how you
see it. What you bring to the book helps define what it is. This book is many
things, but one of the things that it is is a commentary on how women are
treated. The main characters are witches, descended from a witch tormented
by John Hathorne.
So here we are in the Time's Up phase of the Me Too movement and this is the
quote that sits with me because I am a difficult woman. And nevertheless I
persist.
“They didn’t understand why a
brave, independent woman had been so brutally treated. Many of them began to
wonder why they themselves often feigned opinions rather than speak their
minds, no matter how clever they were, for fear they’d be thought of as
difficult.” - The Rules of Magic
But there is another really
good and appropriate one for our current time...
3. Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey
I've been hearing about how awesome The Expanse is for awhile now, and finally decided to get the books, or at least the first one, and see how they are for myself. The podcast Imaginary Worlds was actually the catalyst for checking them out... It was an amazing book! Completely gripping!!! They do an amazing job of creating these different human enclaves, of contrasting life in the different places- Earth, Mars, and the asteroid belt (the Belt). The action is primarily in space or on an asteroid, which is fascinating. I absolutely adore Miller, who is a detective. He has a great arc and he went from being a cop in my mind to my favorite character. He has a epiphany in this story that shifted his entire perspective and made me love him.
With that said, though, I have to mention that I really, really, I mean really, hated how often the word "whore" was used in this book, and how many of the women in the story were prostitutes (and they were never or almost never called anything but whore). Yeah, okay, they weren't main characters, but they were omnipresent in the background, and women with other jobs were not. I can't think of one woman in the novel that had no lines that wasn't a prostitute. Some of that was because of the locations they were found in... there's lots of poverty in this novel. But I will say, if that remains in the following books, I won't be able to continue the series despite all the things I really like about this book.
4. The Churn by James S. A. Corey
This is a little novella set before Leviathan Wakes and so I had to check it out! It is set on Earth and guess what! Lots of whore and prostitute used in it. Sigh... However, this book was set in a crime syndicate in Baltimore so...
5. The Wind's Twelve Quarters by Ursula K. Le Guin
When I started this book, Ursula K. Le Guin was still alive. Now she is not. It gives me great pain to be reading a book as an author dies. I don't know why. They say that an author lives as long as their books are read. Well, I am doing that, but it feels like not enough for while there are many stories for me to discover of hers, she will not tell us anymore.
"At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go to see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two, and then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl man or woman. Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas."
They go alone. They go on. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us...
