Books of 2020- Installment #25

121. Waste Tide by Qiufan Chen (陈楸帆), translated by Ken Liu , and read by Ewan Chung

This story is very much about the consequences of our consumerist impulses and our desires not to deal with our trash. It's a future where a society has grown up in the electronic waste of the world but especially the US. I had just finished this book a couple of weeks before Rose Eveleth's Flash Forward episode on waste. These two are a beautiful combo! 

122. Catherine House by 

I picked this book up because I heard the author talking about her book at a webinar this year and it was really interesting listening to her. This book is atmospheric and somewhat oppressive. The Catherine House is an exclusive college that doesn't charge its students tuition so obviously a lot of the students are drawn to the school because of the doors that it will open to them. But everything has a price...

123. The Fourth Island by Sarah Tolmie

This short novella was really interesting to me. When I was in sixth grade, my teacher told me about Irish fishing sweaters, that these sweaters had a person's name in it. Now that was a long time ago and maybe I don't remember what she said accurately but this book talks about this concept! Okay, so that's not the thrust of this book, but with novellas it's hard to say the right amount about it. It's good. I like it!

124. Pet by Alwaeke Emezi and read by Christopher Meyers 

This children's book is amazing! I would have loved this book as a child! I love the examination of right and wrong and what is a monster.

125. The Stolen Letter by Paige Shelton

I just love this Scottish bookstore series and was excited to dive right back in. This book filled me with anxiety in a way that none of the others in this series did. I couldn't figure out if that was because of the plot of the book (the bookstore is in danger of being closed down) or if it was really just the pandemic getting to me. I still don't know but think it was the pandemic magnifying the fears of the bookstore's potential closure.

I've read 125 books and 89 were by woman, 30 were by men, 3 were anthologies by both women and men, 2 were by nonbinary authors, and 1 had no author listed. Additionally 12 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.