Books of 2019- Installment #7

31. The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa and translated by Philip Gabriel
This is a sweet book about a man and his love of cats and two cats in particular. He adopted a stray and then years later can't keep the cat anymore, so he takes Nana (Seven) to different friends to see who would make a good home for Nana. My favorite part is Nana's narration!

32. The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo
A novel told in verse! I had to check it out. It's really good but sad!! My year of reading women throws into stark relief the universal experience women have of being boxed up, told to be this, that, more, less, better, different, less, less, less. This is a heartbreaking experience to have to go through. To have it happen to so many of us, over and over and over again, is wrenching. To have your parents be the one giving you the message is devastating.

33. The Paragon Hotel by Lyndsay Faye
I have never heard of Lyndsay Faye and have no idea about her, but man, oh, man, the book sucked me in with its first words. Oh, how I wanted to savor this book!! And I did... I did... It's good. It is good, but there are things in this book you don't want to savor, things you want to be over, to be firmly in the past since we can't undo them. Oh, to have never had a society like this, that would be grand. But to have them happening anew! Horrifying! Horrifying!! And sadly all to real and omnipresent.

34. The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick by Mallory O'Meara
I listen to a podcast called Reading Glasses, and one of the hosts is the author of this book, which is how I learned about it. Ostensibly this book is about Milicent Patrick, but it's also about women in the film industry that also didn't get any recognition. Another group of hidden figures!

35. Famous Men Who Never Lived by K. Chess
I kinda hate the title because so what, but the book is really good! Basically an Earth has some horrible cataclysm and around 150,000 people from that Earth come to another Earth (very similar to ours but not necessarily ours...) It is a one-way trip and the ultimate refugee experience. I was asked if there is really any sci-fi in this book or if it really is just a refugee story. That's such a challenging question to answer. For me it had plenty of sci-fi. But the sci-fi drives the refugee storyline.

I've read 35 books so far and 24 were by women, 8 by men, and 3 anthologies with both female and male authors two of which were mostly female authors. My year of reading lots of women is still going strong!!