Books of 2020- Installment #9

41. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson and read by Bernadette Dunne

 This is such a famous story and the last one ever published by Shirley Jackson. It had been on my TBR for a billion years but didn't get bumped up to my currently reading list until my friend said she just finished it and wanted someone to talk to about it. Well, sign me up! The library had the audiobook, so that's what I did. First of all, the kitty on the cover looks like my baby and that was a huge plus!

42. The Worst Best Man by Mia Sosa
This is a sweet romp through a wedding planner's love life. In the acknowledgments Mia Sosa talks about how hard it is to write a romantic comedy when the world is on fire. Yes.I imagine that's true. It's certainly hard to find that thing you want to read when the world is on fire. This book helped. That's a great compliment.

43. Waking Gods by Sylvain Neuvel and read by a full cast
This is the second in a trilogy that I started in 2018. When I saw the audiobook was available I decided to continue the series. I have to say, it was a great way to go! This book is written in the form of documents/transcripts, but listening to it as dialogues and audio files really brought it alive and I think kept me focused when I don't think I could have if I were reading it.

44. Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth
The premise of this book is what happens to the Chosen One after the apocalypse is averted. Of course, is the apocalypse ever really averted? Maybe it's just delayed.... I want to say more but the things I really want to talk about don't happen until about halfway through the book and that seems unfair to talk about here. So if a book about what a chosen one or rather 5 chosen ones go through after defeating the big bad sounds good to you, pick this up!

45. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson and read by David Warner 
Shirley Jackson has been having quite the moment and I've jumped on the bandwagon in great part because a friend has been reading some, so why not read them together? This is a time for doing things together and reading is a great social-distancing-appropriate activity! There are things that I loved about this book. The creepy house being central. There are things I hated about this book namely the way people teased each other in this book. Unfortunately I think it was fairly accurate teasing. I'm glad I don't hear much teasing like that these days... From the get-go it's clear the house is alive in its own way and will have its own way... (BTW if you've watched the Amazon TV series- it bears very little resemblance to the book....)

I've read 45 books and 37 were by woman, 6 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 the world is going through a pandemic and state sanctioned murders in the form of police brutality with a horrible man still at the helm and supported by horrible men in the Congress. In short this year has been really rough. What will this global health crisis leave us with? What changes will we make, not only in terms of the huge inequities of our health system where people of color and the poor (which let's face it- the system works really hard to ensure that people of color, especially black people, are poor) are more than extremely disadvantaged, but also all the other ways in which our society, our systems, actively damage people of color? Only time will tell. But I hope it is a greater sense of community, a need to care for one and another and support each other, not just people with the same colored skin as ourselves, not just people with the same sized wallet as ours. I hope all of this isolation leaves us wanting to lift each other up and not hold others down.