Books of 2020- Installment #19

91. Constellations by Sinead Gleeson

This book is a thoughtful meditation on what it means to be a woman inhabiting her body. What it means when your body is not well. It was truly wonderful to read and she really made me think about things. Not always what you want during a pandemic but at the same time illness is on my mind.

92. Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq and read by Tanya Tagaq

I don't know what the hell that was. It was utterly mesmerizing and I have no idea what could possibly have been written on the page for great swaths of this. I can tell you some broad strokes. She's young and indigenous living in the northern tundra of Canada. She explores her sexuality. She talks about her people and consumerism. But that tells you nothing about this book if you ask me.

93. Halloween Boo by Sarah Spade

This is a quick and dirty romance that centers on a haunted apartment leading to love. I'm a sucker for ghost stories and during this pandemic, novellas are right up my alley!

94.  Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones

This horror novella is disturbing!! It's not gory but man, it's dark! The premise has many different ways it could go and I think that gets your mind churning adding to the discomfort!! A group of high school friends found a mannequin in a river a long time ago, and they decided to pull a prank on a friend's boss at the movie theater. What ensues is... dark, as dark as a movie theater with nothing but the exit light illuminated. 

95. The Season of Styx Malone by Kekla Magoon and read by Sullivan Jones

This book is a really interesting look at growing up and making relationships and finding your way in the world. A pair of young brothers give away their baby sister for a bag of firecrackers and this sets them on a path that leads to learning who they are and what they want from life and how they are the same and how they are different.

I've read 95 books and 74 were by woman, 1?7 were by men, 3 were anthologies by both women and men, 1 was by a nonbinary author, and 9 1/2 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. My naive? hope is all of this isolation leaves us wanting to lift each other up and not hold others down.