This was such an engrossing thrilling book!! I devoured it!!! A group of college friends go through some upheaval when one of them goes missing. Our narrator believes she's just doing this for attention but the others believe she's passed. And that's just the first couple of pages. What happens next kept be gripped and reading!!
32. To Be Taught if Fortunate by Becky Chambers
Becky Chambers does so amazing science fiction and this novella is no different. This book follows a group of astronauts explore a handful of planets and that was interesting in of itself, but Becky Chambers manages to take this somewhere I didn't foresee and loved and by the end when the title suddenly becomes clear, I was in tears! So moving!
33. Finna by Nino Cipri
This novella shares some DNA with Grady Hendrix's Horrorstor, but it is not the same. It was a delightful portal story. A grandma disappears into a wormhole that opened up in a IKEA-esque store and two employees, the least senior employees, are required to go through and try to bring her back!!! What follows is a great adventure with some commentary on our society in general and capitalism in particular! Loved this!!
34. The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune & read by Daniel Henning
This story was a delight and since I finished it, I have missed the characters!! This is the highest compliment I can give a book!! I'm missing them so!! This is a novel follows a case worker for a bureaucratic group that overseas magical youth and he's assignment to investigate a specific orphanage for a small group of extremely unique magical youth. It starts out pretty dystopian since it's in this depressingly bureaucratic organization that reminded me of the movie Brazil, but once he's out of the office and with the magical youth, it is magical! A delightful breath of fresh air and hope!! And I loooooooooooooooved how Daniel Henning read it!!
35. Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
This is an amazing nonfiction book about our relationship with nature. The author is an indigenous scientist, mother, and American citizen, so she draws on these aspects of her identity to address these issues. It's deeply interesting and thought provoking. I had to take this book out from the library twice in order to be able to finish it because I needed to sit with her thoughts. I couldn't zoom through it. But it is a fantastic read and I have been recommending it to people. I think it is especially beautiful to read now during the pandemic. She talks about caring for each other (and by each other so most definitely also means the other inhabitants of the Earth both large and small, both mobile and seemingly immobile.
I've read 35 books and 29 were by woman, 4 were by men, 1 was an anthology by both women and men, 1 was by a nonbinary author, and 3 were translations. My year of reading lots of women and at least 12 translations is going well in that I've read mostly female authors, but as the world is going through a pandemic, it's not going that well. I can't complain about my personal situation, but it is rough going out there. And I look forward to the day that people stop hoarding, but maybe that day won't come again. I don't know. I think of all the people in the US that have a fridge with a freezer and another fridge and how they are always full. It seems like a leftover of the Great Depression.What will this global health crisis leave us with? Only time will tell. But I hope it is a greater sense of community. I hope all of this isolation leaves us wanting to reach out more.
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