Books of 2020- Installment #23

111. The Fangs of Freelance by Drew Hayes and read by Kirby Heyborne
I just love this series!!

112. A Timeless Christmas by Alexis Stanton
Time travel and Christmas! I had to give this a try!

113. Deadly Assessments  by Drew Hayes and read by Kirby Heyborne
I just love this series!!

114. Out of Body by Jeffery Ford
Man, the 70s had an obsession with astral projection and as a child of the 70s I too am interested in astral projection. This topic is not particularly interesting to people anymore so I had to read this book! It's interesting and not what I was anticipating...

115. The Ghosts of Sherwood by Carrie Vaughn

I'm fascinated by stories that we keep telling over and over again. Robin Hood is one of those stories in English, and I'm very interested in other cultures and what they tell over and over again. That's a little more challenging to always figure out but I can look at the ones we retell again and again, so I checked out this new Robin Hood story!

I've read 115 books and 82 were by woman, 28 were by men, 3 were anthologies by both women and men, 1 was by a nonbinary author, and 1 had no author listed. Additionally 10 1/2 were translations (although the book 3 American Indian Stories could be a translation as well). 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.