Books of 2020- Installment #20

96. The Death of Sitting Bear by N. Scott Momaday and read by N. Scott Momaday

This is a delightful poetry collection and my first time to listen to an audiobook of poetry. It might just be my new way of consuming poetry. It's quite lovely to hear an expert poet read to you!

97. Battle Ground by Jim Butcher

This is the second part of Peace Talks and so it was great to finally feel the closure of that portion of the Harry Dresden journey. But the short story at the end of the book, Christmas Eve, slayed me!

98. Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse and read by Cara Gee, Nicole Lews, Kaipo Schwab, and Shaun Taylor-Corbett 

I love Rebecca Roanhorse and this book is a really interesting mix of familiar and new. She creates a fantasy world by blending magic and various cultural aspects of different groups. In particular you can feel the indigenous influences woven throughout this book. It's the first book and we shall see where she is taking us in time. 

99. Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots and read by Alex McKenna

I love this book!! I love how Natalie Zina Walschots examines the power dynamics between "heroes" and "villians" and their relationships and how they impact the rest of us. She looks at what it means to be evil and good when the world has people with superpowers. It's beautiful! And makes me think of Duke from the TV show Haven. He said something like, "They're not powers that's why we call them troubles."

100. A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher

So this is my first fantasy novel of T. Kingfisher's and it is a delight!! Love it!!! She takes a lovely notion, what happens with those with small magical powers, and examines it in this sweet and engaging short novel. The main character, Mona, is a young baker with what people believe to be a small magical power. She can manipulate baked goods. You won't believe where this takes Mona!

I've read 100 books and 77 were by woman, 19 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.