Books of 2018- Installment #5

21. What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah 

I learned about this book from LeVar Burton on his podcast, LeVar Burton Reads. He reads a story oh so well, and this story was so compelling, I decided to read the collection. I'm not sure why it took nearly a year for me to get to it, but much as way leads on to way, book leads on to book. At any rate, now that I've read it, I would say the best word to describe it is haunting. There's a lot of trauma in this novel, and it's hard for me to take.

22. Amberlough by Lara Elena Donnelly

I'm not sure how I heard about this book, but the cover is gorgeous! As I read it, I kept thinking of it as ArtDecoPunk. I don't think such a thing exists, but if it did, I think this would be an example of it. It's a fictional land that feels to me like a fictional Europe of the 1930s. There's intrigue and decadence. The cast of characters is pretty male-dominated and that is not what I was hoping for when reading a book by a female author, but there you go. This land is on the cusp of a governmental change that seems fascist, which cuts to the bone for me now. As I watched the country descend into this more fascist regime, I felt it as history, fantasy, and present moment. A bit overwhelming...

23. The Best American Science Fiction Fantasy (2016) edited by John Joseph Adams and Karen Joy Fowler

I knew I wanted to read this book when I first saw it, but alas it takes a long time to get to books sometimes. Which is why I stopped adding books from the library to my TBR because books I own keep getting backburnered for the library books. And this book is no exception. But I love John Joseph Adams anthologies, so here we are!

Some of my favs are (in order of appearance in the anthology):

• Interesting Facts by Adam Johnson (2015) 
• Planet Lion by Catherynne M. Valente (2015)
• By Degrees and Dilatory Time by S. L. Huang (2015) 
• Tea Time by Rachel Swirsky (2015)
• No Placeholder for You My Love by Nick Wolven (2015)
• Ambiguity Machines: An Examination by Vandana Singh (2015)
• The Great Silence by Ted Chiang (2015)

24. Those Who Watch by Robert Silverberg

I saw this at our local comic bookstore and felt compelled to get it. It doesn't take much to make me want to read a book! It is a first contact story written in 1967. There's even intergalactic species sex, which for whatever reason made me think of Star Trek. Maybe the reasons for that aren't so mysterious... Anyway, the back jacket says, "It is also the most unusual love story ever told." So i wasn't alive in 1967 but this isn't a love story in my book.

25. Killing Gravity by Corey J. White
I got this book free from Tor.com ages ago and decided now was the time to check it out. I didn't want to read another male writer, so I almost didn't read this. But I really like All Systems Red and Killing Gravity seemed like it might share a sensibility with ASR. And then I noticed that they were talking about voidwitches in different blurbs about it. That struck me as being like Truthwitch, which I also got from Tor.com. That sold me! And then the story grabbed me with its opening sentence! And it doesn't hurt that there's a cat like creature, named Seven, crawling around inside the space suit of the main character, Mars. Love it!!