Suggestion Saturday: February 7, 2015

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, essays, short stories, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

A Winter’s Walk via LoraHughes7. This is one of those links that works best if you don’t know anything about it when you start reading.

If We Run and They Kill Us, So Be It. But We Have to Run Now. True stories from some of the girls who were captured by Boko Haram and escaped.

Romance Endings and Compulsory Monogamy – Is There Room for Something New? via lavinia_collins. One of the reasons why I refused to read romance novels for so many years is that I find the “which person should I pick?” trope incredibly irritating. It would be really cool to read more books that allow the protagonist to pick both (or neither!) of their love interests.

Why Kids Don’t Need a Mommy and a Daddy via Hans_Hirschi. To piggyback on the above link, I once read a science fiction novel about a society where every child had three parents. Babies were grown in artificial incubators and then two of their three parents were given injections to make them lactate. (The gender of the lactating parents didn’t matter. Anyone could do it). The parents weren’t romantically involved with one another. All they focused on was raising the child together. I still have no desire to be a mom, but this sort of arrangement makes a lot more sense to me than expecting just one or two people to take on such a huge job.

Why I Am Not a Maker. This is really good stuff.

From Foreknowledge:

I stare out over my pregnant belly, feeling awkward. Feeling irritable. “Why wouldn’t I want to know?”

“Some parents don’t want to know,” Dr. Anders says. “And we respect that.”

“It’s right there on your clipboard, right?” I point to the clipboard, and he holds it infinitesimally closer to his chest. As if he’s hiding the results from me.

“Yes,” Dr. Anders says. “Both the sex and cause of death of your unborn child are right here.”

Small: Life and Death on the Front Lines of Paediatric Surgery wasn’t exactly what I was expecting.

I assumed that the entire book would discuss the kinds of patients the author has seen over the years. While this was part of the plot, Ms. Musemeche also spent a great deal of time talking about how much medicine has changed over the years. There are many types of birth defects, injuries, and diseases that used to be certain death sentences.

This is slowly changing thanks to new treatments, better equipment, and more effective medicine. It makes me wonder what we’ll come up with next.

What have you been reading?

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