Tag Archives: Books

June 17, 2019 · 1:00 am

Wombs for Rent: A Review of The Farm

I’ve decided to start reviewing more books on this blog. All of the rest of the titles I’ve set aside for this purpose for the foreseeable future are indie, but I thought I’d start off with something mainstream. The star rating below is out of a possible five stars.

Title: The Farm

Author: Joanne Ramos

Publisher: Doubleday Canada

Publication Date: May 7, 2019

Genres:  Dystopian, Contemporary, and a pinch of Science Fiction

Page Count: 326 pages

Source: I borrowed it from my local library

Rating: 3 Stars

 

 

Blurb:

Nestled in New York’s Hudson Valley is a luxury retreat boasting every amenity: organic meals, personal fitness trainers, daily massages—and all of it for free. In fact, you’re paid big money to stay here—more than you’ve ever dreamed of. The catch? For nine months, you cannot leave the grounds, your movements are monitored, and you are cut off from your former life while you dedicate yourself to the task of producing the perfect baby. For someone else.

Jane, an immigrant from the Philippines, is in desperate search of a better future when she commits to being a “Host” at Golden Oaks—or the Farm, as residents call it. But now pregnant, fragile, consumed with worry for her family, Jane is determined to reconnect with her life outside. Yet she cannot leave the Farm or she will lose the life-changing fee she’ll receive on the delivery of her child.

Gripping, provocative, heartbreaking, The Farm pushes to the extremes our thinking on motherhood, money, and merit and raises crucial questions about the trade-offs women will make to fortify their futures and the futures of those they love.

Review:

The first time I heard of The Farm was a few months ago when another reviewer compared it to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, one of my all-time favourite books. As soon as I read that line, I was hooked. Like Ms. Atwood’s famous story, this one is also about fertile, generally lower-class women being used to gestate babies for the most powerful members of society.

Unlike the characters in The Handmaid’s Tale, Jane and the other surrogates chose to become impregnated. Whether they knew what they were really consenting to is something I can’t discuss much in this review without wandering into spoiler territory. Let’s just say that the glossy description of what this job was like didn’t necessarily match Jane’s actual experiences with it.

What I would have loved to see from this book were more details. The most frightening parts of it were glossed over so much that I had to make educated guesses about how they played out. While Jane’s perspective was a limited one, it was a little frustrating as a reader to get so far into the plot only to receive the same vague hints that were contained in the blurb and early chapters.

There was a satisfying payoff for a subplot involving the woman who first introduced Jane to the idea of gestating a pregnancy at The Farm. If only the other clues at the beginning were given the same treatment. Not every dystopia is necessarily going to include a government being overthrown or other major signs that a society has gone terribly wrong. I loved the more subtle approach Ms. Ramos took with the assumptions she made about how people might respond if they couldn’t find decent paying work and selling the use of their reproductive organs seemed like the best option to make some semi-quick cash. If only she’d developed these thoughts further.

With that being said, one of the things I liked the most about this storywas how realistic it was. Yes, there were little snippets of what could be interpreted as science fiction and dystopian content in it, but everything in it is either really happening in our world today or could easily occur with a few small tweaks to how science works and what society tolerates. This is the kind of soft science fiction that grabs my attention because of how close it is to our reality.

I can sleep easily at night knowing that little green men from Mars aren’t actually ever going to invade Earth. The thought that women could so easily be coerced or enslaved into producing babies for wealthy, powerful families, on the other hand, is chilling because it has happened in the past, it is currently going on in some parts of the world, and it will almost certainly occur again in the future.

That’s frightening. Despite it’s flaws, The Farm’s no-nonsense approach to this topic is why I’ll recommend it to anyone who finds the blurb interesting.

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March 21, 2019 · 1:00 am

Spring Worlds I’d Like to Visit

Happy spring to everyone in the northern hemisphere! I’m beyond relieved to see it finally arrive as far as the calendar goes. Here’s hoping Ontario will soon see lots of warm weather and the first little green shoots popping out of the soil as well.

In the last couple of years, I’ve written about the winter and summer worlds I’d like to visit, so today I’ll be talking about the spring worlds I’d like to see.

Yes, I’ll be writing another instalment in this series in the autumn of 2019, so do keep an eye out for it later on this year.

It turns out that there are a lot of books out there set during winter and summer, but there aren’t so many of them that are set during this time of the year. Putting together this list was a little tricky! If you have anything to add to it, do speak up. All of the authors I could think of were white, and many of them were British. It would be nice to add other voices to this list.

When I was growing up, many of my elementary, middle, and high school English teachers did poetry units in the spring. I don’t know why this pattern happened. It might have been done unintentionally, or maybe teachers are taught to give their students slightly easier* assignments for a while as the end of the school year grows closer. At any rate, I’ve come to associate this time of the year with poetry because of those experiences.

*Or at least I found them easier. I enjoy the subjective nature of interpreting poetry.

From “Easter 1916“, the title poem in Easter 1916 and Other Poems by W.B. Yeats

From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;

 

Spring is one of the two seasons of the year when the weather swings wildly between temperature extremes for those of us who live in certain climates. Here in Ontario, you could have a heavy snowstorm one day and warm, sunny 20 C (68 Fahrenheit for you Americans) weather the next.
This poem reminded me of those fluctuations, and it made me want to visit this setting for a few minutes despite the dangers of the World War I era.

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

This is one of those childhood classics that I keep referencing over and over again in various posts.

If you’ve never read it, it’s about a young girl who moved from India to England to live with a relative after her parents died. The estate her relative lived in had once been grand but were now a bit neglected. She was placed in her new home during the cold part of the year, so it wasn’t until the spring that she realized there was a secret garden on the property that had been terribly neglected.

There were so many interesting lines in this book about tending gardens and what happens to plants when no one has looked after them for a long time. Obviously, there were metaphors in there about taking care of the people around you, too, but seeing the transformation of that garden from a lonely, weedy place to what it became later on makes me smile every time I reread those passages.

Winter never lasts forever, whether we’re talking about the actual season or as a metaphor for life difficulties. I love the hopeful message there, and I’d sure like to see the Secret Garden from this tale for myself.

The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown

Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that picture books are only – or even mostly –  for small children. There are plenty of picture books out there that are honestly even more meaningful for adult readers.

The illustrations in this book are of a farm in springtime. The grass is green, tall, and strong. Wild flowers have sprouted up everywhere. The weather is beautifully mild. Since we’re talking about a fictional fantasy world here, there is no mud or spring allergies like there might be in our world.

Even without the added appeal of seeing these rabbits in action, reading about what unconditional love looks like makes me eager to visit this world. It would be such a pleasant place to spend an afternoon.

From “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” a poem from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
The speaker in this poem has lost someone he loved very much. Spring gives him hope that they’ll be reunited again somehow someday. I appreciate the hope he finds in the natural cycle of the seasons and the way that each new spring reminds him of both his love and his grief.

The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams Bianco

Confession: I’ve cried every single time I’ve reread this story.

It contains references to a world that many people have forgotten thanks to the miracle of vaccines. This was a place where epidemics ripped through communities and many families lost at least one child because of these horrific diseases.

After the main character became gravely ill, his family was advised to burn all of his toys in an attempt to stop the spread of those germs to other vulnerable people. Even his beloved stuffed rabbit was supposed to be destroyed.

The boy’s illness appeared to happen in winter or possibly early spring based on how the story was written. I liked seeing the transition he and his family went through from the long, dark days of his illness to what happened after spring arrived and he began feeling like his old self again. The changing of the weather was a beautiful metaphor for all of the other wonderful things that were happening in their lives.

Of course I wouldn’t actually want to be sick like this kid was, but it would be so interesting to see the velveteen rabbit in person and maybe even tell these characters about all of the medical marvels to come that someday were going to prevent future families from going through this same experience.

What books do you associate with spring?

 

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March 12, 2019 · 1:00 am

Top Ten Tuesday: Standalone Books That Need a Sequel

Hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl

Last year, I wrote a (non-Top-Ten-Tuesday) post about books that need prequels. Today, I’ll be talking about some standalone books that need sequels. This list is shorter than usual because of how many authors and publishers are eager to publish sequels to stories that do well. There simply aren’t a lot of books that I wish had sequels. Hopefully, some of you will have longer lists.

1. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

While I loved the ending of this book, I couldn’t help but to hope we’d hear more from Starr again. The resolutions to her problems were incredibly realistic, but they also left a lot of room for speculating about how or if they might shift again in the future. What can I say? I wanted a happier ended than the one we got, and I’m still holding out home that it might happen someday. (The film is still on my to-be-watched list, so maybe it was different? Please don’t give me spoilers if they changed the ending!)

2. Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

Melinda, the main character, had been through something so awful she couldn’t even talk about it. I loved getting to know her sweet, creative personality and slowly uncovering the cause of her pain. She was a lovely person, and I sure would like to see what she was like a few years or decades after this terrible time in her life.

Skip the sentence below this paragraph if you want to avoid all spoilers. Keep reading if you prefer to know about potentially triggering subject matter ahead of time .

This book is about rape and the long-term traumatic effects of that crime. I was caught off-guard by that plot twist, so I feel obligated to let other potential readers know about it.

3. Bridge to Terabithia  by Katherine Paterson

The friendship between Jess (the main character) and his neighbour, Lesie is something I still think about to this day. While the ending to this tale was well done, I’d sure like to see what life was like for the characters decades later. There’s so much room for growth here.

4. Catherine, Called Birdy by Karen Cushman

Imagine what it would be like if your father tried to marry you off when you were fourteen! I was a kid when I read this book, so I knew very little about the cultural norms of the 1200s in Europe (or anywhere else for that matter). Birdy’s story is something that has stuck with me for years, and I’d love to find out what happened to her after the events of the final scenes.

5. 1984 by George Orwell

1984 was about a man living in a harsh, totalitarian society who tried to figure out a way to escape it. I had a lot of mixed feelings about the ending even though it fit the tone of this tale well. It would be so interesting to revisit this universe a few decades later to see what might have changed in it.

6. Coraline by Neil Gaiman

There were so many unanswered questions about the other flat Coraline discovered. How long has it existed? Why was it created? Will anyone else ever become endangered by it?

A sequel would be the perfect place to answer these questions.

What standalone books do you all wish would have sequels?

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February 21, 2019 · 1:00 am

The First Lines of What I’m Reading

Today’s post is going to be a short one. My brain is not up for waxing on eloquently on any topic at the moment.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I rarely read one book at a time. It’s much more common for me to jump between two or three (or more) of them simultaneously. Lately, I’ve been stumbling across one great read after another.

If non-graphic references to the accidental death of a child are hard for you to read, you might want to skip the first one.

From Crystal Chan’s Bird, a young adult novel about a girl who was born the same day her brother died and who grew up in the shadow of her family’s grief:

Grandpa stopped speaking the day he killed my brother, John. His name was John until Grandpa said he looks more like a Bird with the way he kept jumping off things, and the name stuck.

 

From Melissa Hill’s Keep You Safe, a medical thriller about how two families – one who were anti-vaxxers and another whose child couldn’t be vaccinated due to a rare disease – reacted when the antivaxxer’s family caught the measles and gave it to the medically fragile child:

The bell rang out and on cue they started to approach all at once, like a stampeding herd.

From Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s Lucky Fish: Poems. This is the first fragment of The Secret of Soil, the first poem in this collection:

The secret of smoke is that it will fill

any space with walls

From Jennifer Mathieu’s Devoted, a story about a devoutly religious, homeschooled girl who begins to seriously doubt the things her parents had always taught her about what it means to live a righteous life:

James Fulton is sweating like a sinner in church. Which, of course, is exactly what he is. 

I’m hoping to write a much longer and more detailed post on Monday. In the meantime, what are the first lines from what you’ve been reading lately? Who else likes to start a new book before finishing the one(s) you’re currently reading?

 

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February 14, 2019 · 1:00 am

Why Taking Reading Breaks Can Be a Good Idea

I haven’t been reading many books lately. It started last month when I went on vacation to someplace warm and sunny. Ontario is such a dark and cold place during the winter that I wanted to spend as much time as I could in the sun during that week without getting burned or tanned.

As is usual for my vacation habits, most of the reading I did consisted of visiting social media and checking out blog posts and short articles on my RSS feed.

Now that I’ve been back home for a couple of weeks, I’ve noticed that I still don’t have the desire to jump back into my normal reading habits. That’s okay. This happens occasionally.

You see, I spend a great deal of my reading time in the science fiction and fantasy genres. The interesting thing about staying so closely connected to a couple of genres like that is how easy it is to spot and predict patterns in them after a while. There have been multiple times when I’ve been able to correctly guess what the entire course of a story will be after finishing the first scene in it.

Part of this is due to the fact that readers expect certain things from their favourite genres. If a character mentions the existence of a long-lost magical amulet on page one, any writer worth his or her salt is going to make sure that amulet shows up again  later on in the storyline.

I’ve spent so much time in these genres that I’ve become well-versed in the numerous tropes that exist in both of them. I also know how their various types of storylines generally flow and can pick up on authors who decide to buck those trends pretty early on.

These are all things I’m saying with love for the science fiction and fantasy genres. This happens in every other genre out there, too, and it’s not a bad thing. There’s something reassuring about knowing that, unless you’ve stumbled across one of those rare authors who has put a lot of work into purposefully disrupting these conventions, the chosen one is going to prevail in the end no matter how dire his or her predicament may seem right before the climax.

The nice thing about reading breaks is that they give you a chance to step away from these patterns if you also tend to stick to the same genre(s) with every new title you pick up. Sometimes my breaks are short and punctuated by a stack of non-fiction books about history, food, medicine, or other topics I find appealing. Other breaks find me not reading any full-length books at all or visiting portions of the library that I typically skip over altogether.

Some of the book-lovers I know have never talked about their need to take breaks from reading. I don’t know if this is because they’re always interested in starting something new or because they simply don’t mention it when they wait a while between finishing one book and starting the next one.

It would be interesting to somehow gather statistics on this, don’t you think? Oh, the things I could do with that data in Numbers. There would be more pie charts and graphs floating around in there than you could shake a stick at.

Fellow readers, do you ever take reading breaks? If so, how often do they happen? What do you do when you’re not immersed in your favourite genre(s)?

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January 3, 2019 · 1:00 am

What I Read in 2018

In January of 2013, I began blogging once a year about everything I’d read that previous year.  This tradition began when my dad asked me how many books I’ve read in my entire lifetime. I couldn’t begin to give him an answer to that question, but it did make me decide to start keeping track from that moment forward. The previous posts in this series are as follows:  2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, and 2013.

Over half of the books I read in any given year are for a review site that I volunteer for under a pseudonym. I always omit those titles from this post for obvious privacy reasons, but I am able to talk about everything else that tickled my mind since the last post in this series.

Once again, most of the science fiction and fantasy I read was for that review site I mentioned earlier in this post. This section of the list was much longer than it might appear.

The young adult genre remained a popular one for me. There’s something nice about reading stories that are (generally) a bit more cheerful than the ones written for serious adult audiences.

My poetry consumption was way this year. I made a concerted effort to read more of it after noticing last year that it had been a long time since I dug into this genre.

I finished fewer biographies than normal in 2018. While I started quite a few of them, I found it a little trickier to keep reading this year than I normally do.

It will be interesting to see if all of these trends continue in 2019. If any of my readers have decided to join me in keeping tracking of what you read, I’d love to see your lists for the past year!

Biographies, Autobiographies, and Memoirs

“A Forever Family: Fostering Change One Child at a Time” by Robert Scheer

“Marjorie Her War Years: A British Home Child in Canada” by Patricia Skidmore

“Educated” by Tara Westover

Fiction

“Marilla of Green Gables” by Sarah McCoy

“Caroline: Little House Revisited” by Sarah Miller.

History

“Runaway Wives and Rogue Feminists: The Origins of the Women’s Shelter Movement in Canada” by Margo Goodhand

“Children’s Homes: A History of Institutional Care for Britain’s Young” by Peter Higginbotham

“Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, and Criminal in 19th Century New York” by Stacy Horn

“The Bedroom: An Intimate History” by Michelle Perrot

Mystery

“The Broken Girls” by Simone St. James

Poetry

“Collected Poems” by Chinua Achebe

“Copper Woman and Other Poems” by Afua Cooper (Poetry)

“How Lovely the Ruins: Inspirational Poems and Words for Difficult Times” by Annie Chagnot

“Cartography and Walking” by Adam Dickinson (Poetry)

“Love & Misadventure” by Lang Leav (Poetry)
“A Bedroom of Searchlights” by Joanne M. Weston (Poetry)

Science and Medicine

“The Bad Food Bible: How and Why to Eat Sinfully” by Aaron Carroll

“Lyme: The First Epidemic of Climate Change” by Mary Beth Pfeiffer

“When Humans Nearly Vanished: The Catastrophic Explosion of the Tora Volcano“ by Donald R. Prothero

“Patient Care: Life and Death in the Emergency Room” by Paul Seward, MD

“Treknology” by Ethan Siegal

“Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World” by Paul Stamets

“Best Before: The Evolution and Future of Processed Food” by Nicola Tempa

Science Fiction and Fantasy

“A Sincere Warning About the Entity In Your Home” by Jason Arnopp

“Semiosis” by Sue Burke

“The Last Neanderthal” by Claire Cameron

“Only Ever Yours” by Louise O’Neill

Sociology and Psychology

“An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments” by Ali Almossawi

“Mass Starvation” by Alex de Wall

“Big Hunger: The Unholy Alliance Between Corporate America and Anti-Hunger Groups” by Andrew Fisher

“Leftover in China: The Woman Shaping the World’s Next Superpower” by Roseann Lake

“The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt” by Robert J. Sutton

Young Adult

“A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo” by Jill Twiss

“Out of My Mind” by Sharon M. Draper.

“Odd and the Frost Giants” by Neil Gaiman.

“No Laughter Here” by Rita Williams-Garcia

“Blue” by Joyce Moyer Hostetter

“Comfort” by Joyce Moyer Hostetter

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December 20, 2018 · 1:00 am

What I’m Reading Over the Holidays

I was originally planning to write about walking meditation today, but I’ve been dealing with a stubborn headache the past few days that’s kept me from doing the research needed to properly put that post together. It’s such a cool concept that I want to make sure I do it right. So we’ll save the walking meditation discussion for a later date and have a quick chat about winter holiday reads now instead.

Honestly, is there such a thing as having too many posts about books? I vote no! For those of you who haven’t met me in real life, I’m pretty quiet in person…unless we somehow get on the topic of books I’ve read, am reading, or want to read soon. This is one of those things that can make me light up, especially if it happens to be a title I have a strong opinion about.

Luckily, my local library seems to have have endless supply of reading material, and I’ve been reaching the top of the list of some very interesting titles as December speeds by. I should warn you that nothing in today’s post is going to be about Christmas, New Years, or any other winter holidays. They’re simply what I hope to read over this period of time, and this year it’s a beautiful hodge-podge of genres and themes.

These are the books that are currently in my to-read queue. I can’t promise that I’ll finish all of them, but I will be giving them a shot as 2018 comes to an end.

As much as I love science fiction, it’s definitely not the only thing I read. This list is pretty representational of the wide range of fiction and non-fiction that I’m working my way through at just about any point during the year, and everything is listed in order of when I’m hoping to read them. I generally try to read the titles that are due back at the library first unless something really exciting pops up in my queue.

How Long ’til Black Future Month? by N.K. Jemisin

When Humans Nearly Vanished: The Catastrophic Explosion of the Toba Volcano by Donald R. Prothero

In Search of the Canary Tree: The Story of a Scientist, a Cypress, and a Changing World by Lauren E. Oakes.

I Wait for the Moon: 100 Haiku of Momoko Kuroda by Momoko Kuroda. Translated by Abigail Freidman.

The Best American Science and Nature Writing by Sam Kean.

Jell-O Girls by Allie Rowbottom.

Dealing with Dragons The Enchanted Forest Chronicles, Book 1 Patricia C. Wrede.

Happiness: How to Get into the Habit of Being Happy by Gill Hasson.

Happy Times in Norway by Sigrid Undset.

In the beginning of January, I’ll be sharing the list of everything I finished reading over the past year.  (It doesn’t make sense to me to count a book that I only read a chapter or two of before putting it aside for something else). A couple of the bloggers I follow have already published the lists of what they read which is wonderful. Hopefully this trend will grow in the future. It’s so much fun to see what everyone has read and possibly find some new authors or series that you might not have heard of before.

Have you read any of these titles? What will you be reading over the next couple of weeks? Finally, what’s your most effective and/or unusual home remedy for headaches?

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October 25, 2018 · 1:00 am

10 Things I Love to Read About

On Monday I blogged about the 10 Things I Won’t Read About. It was surprising to see how many of the people who read my posts have similar aversions to those topics.

Today I’m talking about 10 things that would make me keen to pick up and read a book. I tried to make this list as detailed as possible, so you won’t be seeing vague entries like “science fiction” here.

Instead, I’ll be drilling down to specific topics that I’d be excited to read about with little regard given to which genre they might pop up in.

1.  LGBT+ Historical Novels, Especially Mysteries.

I’m fascinated by how people in the LGBT+ community lived during eras when they had to keep such important parts of themselves hidden away. This is still something that happens with LGBT+ people in many countries and cultures today, of course. Seeing how this has changed or is changing in some parts of the world gives me hope that someday it will improve everywhere.

Watching LGBT+ characters attempt to solve a mystery while also holding tightly onto their own secrets also makes this sort of storyline even more nerve-wracking than it might otherwise be. I want some parts of the plot to be revealed while hoping that other portions are only shared with people who will treat the main character kindly.

Example: The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters. (I’m currently read this book, so please don’t share spoilers for it!)

2. Colonizing Mars (and Other Planets).

To put it mildly, humans made a lot of terrible mistakes when they invaded other countries and continents. While there isn’t any life on Mars* that could be destroyed if or when humans begin living there, there are still plenty of ways for that social experiment to have devastating consequences for everyone who participates in it.

Just think of how many people died due to accidents, violence, disease, and malnutrition when Europeans first began living in Australia, the Americas, and other parts of the world. I hope I’m wrong about this, but I expect the death rate for the first few waves of people who move to Mars to be quite high as our species figures out how to survive on a planet that doesn’t even have a breathable atmosphere for us.

*to the best of our current scientific knowledge.

Example: The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson.

3. Diverse or Unlikely Heroes. 

I love it when writers create protagonists who don’t fit the audience’s expectations of what a hero should look like. There have been so many examples of young, straight, white men saving the world in various fictional universes that I’m always happy to see people from other demographic groups get an equal chance to fight bad guys, too.

Example: Buffy Summers from the 90’s TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

4. How Medical and Scientific Advancements Happened

This is by far the broadest category on this list, but I’m intrigued by how scientists and doctors solved any number of problems in the past that are either unknown in westernized cultures today or no longer exist anywhere in the world. The nice thing about reading about medical and scientific advancements is that the author generally spends most of their time talking about how that invention, cure, or breakthrough happened and how it changed society as a whole.

It’s been my experience that these sorts of books don’t spend much time at all discussing the graphic details of, say, a specific disease or injury. A portion of the first chapter might talk about the typical results for people before the invention of a certain drug or treatment, but generally everything else will be about how the researchers figured out a solution to the problem. I’ll endure a  brief discussion of surgery or gore early on if I’m otherwise interested in the topic and the author soon moves on to how that issue affected society as a whole and how the treatment or solution was eventually found.

Example: Breakthrough: Elizabeth Hughes, the Discovery of Insulin, and the Making of a Medical Miracle by Thea Cooper and Arthur Ainsberg.

5. How Social Justice Movements Actually Change the World.

It wasn’t until I became an adult that I learned that Martin Luther King, Jr. was widely hated by the mainstream culture before his assassination. He was seen by many white Americans as someone who was pushing for too much change too soon. This wasn’t something that was covered in any of my lessons about him in school, although after reading his wife’s memoir about their life together I wish it had been.

Sometimes the people who originally fought for a more just world aren’t around to see how all of those long years of hard work will begin to pay off.

Changing laws and public opinion on an issue takes time. It’s not generally something that will happen overnight, but it can happen. This is a topic I’ve been thinking a lot about over the past year or so, and it’s making me want to read more about what previous generations did to fix the things they saw that were wrong with their societies.

Example: My Life, My Love, My Legacy by Coretta Scott King.

6. Foster Care and Foster-Adoption.

For the past three generations, various relatives of mine have fostered and adopted children. Honestly, this would be my #1 choice for becoming a parent if I had the desire to raise children. There is an urgent need for foster parents here in North America, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the same could be said of many other parts of the world as well.

Having so many extended family members who were foster children makes my ears perk up every time a fiction or non-fiction book is written about this topic.

Example: Three Little Words by Ashley Rhodes-Courter.

7. Rabbits Enjoying Adventures. 

Anyone who has known me longer than ten minutes will have some inkling of how much I love rabbits.

Anytime they show up as a main or secondary character in a story, I’m immediately interested in finding out what will happen to them.

There aren’t a lot of authors out there who write about rabbits going on quests, so I jump into every example of this niche I can find.

Example: Watership Down by Richard Adams.

8. Hopeful Visions of the Future.

As I’ve mentioned here before, I’m thirsty for stories that have a hopeful outlook on what is in store for humanity a few decades or centuries from now. The news is so full of fear and apprehension these days that I look for happier perspectives on what life will be like for future generations wherever I can find them.

Example: All of the Star Trek series.

9. Vengeful Ghosts Who Had a Point.

Many different types of ghost stories appeal to me, but the ones I enjoy the most are about folks who had excellent reasons for being so angry and restless in the afterlife.

There’s something emotionally satisfying about figuring out their backstories and seeing if the protagonists will finally be able to help them find the peace they were denied when they were still alive.

I’m also fascinated by how the actions of a small group of people can continue to negatively affect their descendants and/or community for generations to come. This regularly happens in non-paranormal ways in real life, and there often aren’t any easy answers for how to end those cycles once they begin.

Exploring this topic in a ghost story is a wonderful way to neutrally ask questions about justice, reconciliation, and what the current generation should be morally obligated to do to fix the mistakes of people who lived and died long ago.

Example: The Woman in Black by Susan Hill.

10. The Daily Lives of Prehistoric People.

I sure wouldn’t want to be part of a hunter-gatherer tribe in real life, but I love reading about characters who lived in that kind of society.

There is something fascinating to me about all of the different skills one would need to survive when you need to make, hunt, or gather everything you and your family need to survive.  I’m also drawn to the idea of living in such a tight-knit culture. It’s not something I’d want to do all day every day, but I do see the benefits of forging such strong bonds with others. Having so many adults working together must have made everything from raising children to looking after a sick or injured relative easier than it is in more individualistic cultures.

If there are Neanderthals or other now-extinct human (or human-like) species in the storyline, I’ll be even more interested since there are so many things that a skeleton, stone tool, or cave painting can’t tell you about what a group was actually like.

Example: The Last Neanderthal by Claire Cameron.

What topics are you always eager to read about?

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October 22, 2018 · 1:00 am

10 Things That I Won’t Read About

This Thursday I’m planning to write a follow-up post to this one to discuss the themes and topics in books that I’m always interested in reading about. Since I’ve made several past references here to the sorts of stuff I dislike, I thought it would be a good idea to share the full list of things I won’t read about before diving into everything I love.

I’m the sort of reader who gleefully jumps from one genre to the next based on everything from the recommendations of certain people in my life to what I stumble across in the new arrivals section of my local library.

This list is going to do the same thing. No one genre can contain it, and any genre I read will occasionally include titles that fit one or more of the points on this list.

1. Sexy, Sparkly Monsters. 

I will happily read all sorts of stories about vampires, zombies, werewolves, and unnamed creatures stitched together by Dr. Frankenstein so long as these characters are not romanticized or de-fanged in any way. While I might feel other emotions ranging from compassion for them to concern for their future, monsters are first and foremost supposed to be frightening. If they don’t give me that initial jolt of fear, I won’t be very interested in them.

I know I’m in the minority here, but I also don’t find monsters sexually appealing in any way. This is even more true for the dead, and therefore possibly rotting, ones.

2. Sympathetic Portrayals of Bigotry.

There’s a massive difference to me between writing about a character who is deeply prejudiced against specific groups and the author or narrator working – consciously or unconsciously –  to make bigoted ideas themselves more palatable to the audience.

I believe that it’s a good thing to create three-dimensional characters, protagonists and villains alike. In no way would I expect every bigoted character to only be represented by their worst flaws. That isn’t how prejudice works in real life. Someone can be perfectly charming to friends or relatives while still doing and saying terrible things to the objects of their hate.

The juxtaposition of these personality traits can make excellent fodder for a story, but I still don’t believe it’s ethical to ever make excuses for the existence of hate or for the people who spread it.

3. Graphic Violence.

Occasional references to rape, torture, murder, and other acts of violence are okay with me, especially if they were integral to the development of the plot. However, my imagination is far too vivid for me to read detailed descriptions of these things without them coming back to haunt me later on.

I prefer types of conflict that don’t do that to me. This photo of a woman who dropped her ice cream cone is only tangentially related to this point, but the distraught expression on her face is about as much despair as I can handle before needing to move onto more cheerful subject matter.

4. Deus Ex Machina.

That is, I don’t like contrived endings or when characters who have been wrestling with a complex problem for hundreds of pages suddenly realize that the solution to their conflict was a simple fix a few sentences before the final scene.

I’d much rather have a sad ending than a happy one that doesn’t fit in with the tone of the rest of the tale.

5. Inspirational Fiction.

After multiple failed attempts to get into this genre, I came to the conclusion that it was never going to be my cup of tea no matter who wrote it. It is the only genre I’ve permanently given up on, and I felt a little sad about that for a long time.

6. Sermonizing. 

This rule definitely isn’t limited to religion in general, and it kicks in even if I happen to completely agree with the author’s point of view. Any topic can be sermonized if it is written by someone who is more interested in pushing a specific agenda than telling a satisfying story.

There’s a huge difference between writing a story that was influenced by your worldview and allowing your worldview to dictate how a story is told. I don’t have much patience for the latter at all.

7. One True Love Personality Transplants.

Okay, so this one might take a little explaining. I have no problem reading books that include romantic elements as a minor or major part of the plot. This isn’t an anti-romance rant at all.

What bothers me about certain characters falling in love, though, is when those experiences erase their personalities and identities.

Years ago I read a series about a character who had decided early in life never to have children. They had excellent reasons for that decision, and they stuck to it until the very end when they fell in love and suddenly changed their mind about having kids despite the fact that none of their reasons for making that choice had or could ever change.

This isn’t a type of storyline that I’m inherently opposed to, by the way. Not everyone knows what they want out of life when they’re a teenager, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with showing how a character changes their mind about a major life decision like this. It can be a fantastic way to demonstrate genuine character development when done properly.

The thing is, anyone who writes this sort of tale really should show how and why someone would change their mind about something so important to them. When such an important mind-shift is brushed away as a sign of True Love ™ five minutes after someone falls in love, I can’t help but to wonder how soon that character is going to deeply regret having kids (or moving thousands of miles away, or giving up their career, or making any other sort of drastic lifestyle change when there was no foreshadowing of them wanting those things for the vast majority of the plot).

8. Love Triangles.

If this wasn’t such a common trope in the romance genre, I’d probably read way more romance novels.

As someone who is polyamorous, I always hope the main character gets to keep dating both of the people they’ve fallen for. Why make them choose? They can love more than one person at a time and therefore free up the plot for more interesting types of conflict.

9. Needles, Blood, and Surgeries. 

Kudos to those of you who enjoy very detailed descriptions of what goes on in an operating room or doctor’s office, but this is something that makes my stomach turn.

I’d prefer to continue to know as little as possible about how exactly medical professionals fix the human body when it gets injured or sick. The fact that they’re (often) able to help people feel better is all I need or want to know.

10. Very Long Books. 

Other than J.K. Rowling and J.R.R. Tolkien, I generally don’t read a lot of long-winded authors. Two or three hundred pages is more than enough space for me to get into a story in the vast majority of cases, so it would take something really special to convince me to jump into a very long read.

What topics are on your Do Not Read list?

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October 4, 2018 · 1:00 am

Hopeful Science Fiction: Semiosis

Last June I blogged about my desire to read more hopeful science fiction. Since then I’ve talked about Woman on the Edge of Time and The Lovely Bones. Today I’m back with another suggestion.

If you have recommendations for future instalments of this series, I’d sure like to hear them. Leave a comment below or send me message about it on Twitter.

Semiosis

Sue Burke’s Semiosis is a 2018 hard science fiction novel about colonists from Earth who travel to a distant planet in hope of making it their permanent home. The storyline followed the original group of explorers as well as their descendants for several generations. They knew almost nothing about the planet they named Pax  before they arrived there, so preparing in advance for what they were about to experience wasn’t easy.

Nearly every chapter in this book showed how the most recent generation in this timeline adapted to the many challenges they faced while attempting to survive on a planet where RNA, not DNA, was the building block of life. Generally, one chapter was assigned to each new generation as they came of age and began making decisions for their community.

Th experiences of the first generation were promising. The land was covered in vegetation, much of which their scans showed was safe and nutritious for humans. They quickly began attempting to build shelters and adjust to the many differences that came with living in such an alien environment.

Plot-Based, Not Character-Based

As you might have already guessed, this was a plot-based novel. Since each section more or less introduced an entirely new cast of characters (based on how many members of the previous generation had managed to live to see old age), there wasn’t a great deal of time for any one character to steal the spotlight.

I normally have a strong preference for character-based stories, so I did need some time to adjust to the fact that I would only have a short amount of time with any of the fascinating people I met as one generation was slowly replaced by the next.

Given how long it took the original group of immigrants to realize that many of their assumptions about what life on a distant plant would be like were completely wrong, it made sense for the whole adventure to unfold slowly over the courses of multiple lifetimes as new generations built on the knowledge their parents and grandparents had painstakingly put together. No individual human could ever live long enough to gather all of the clues they did over such a long period of time.

However, I would have liked to see more continuity between the generations. I understood why the lifespans were shorter for humans, especially in the beginning, but I spent so little time with the many characters that I didn’t feel like I bonded with any of them. They were there in one scene and then sometimes gone in the next.

Persistence

There are many details about the plot that I can’t share with you without giving away huge spoilers. Needless to say, the characters in this book were surprised over and over again by what life was really like on their new home in just about every way you can imagine. The food obviously didn’t taste anything like food does on Earth. Calibrating what was and wasn’t dangerous on this planet was hard for them, too, as well due to how little they knew about life on it ahead of it.

All of their previous training was useful, but it couldn’t have possibly prepared them for everything they were about to experience. They had no way to contact Earth, leave Pax, or receive any additional supplies, so they had to figure out ways to keep going no matter what happened to them.

The first generation had some really rough experiences due to a string of bad luck and not having the right types of supplies at critical moments. It wasn’t all doom and gloom, though. There were conversations about ordinary things like unpacking the ship or how to decide when to switch from the food they brought with them to scavenging for a fresh dinner. I especially loved the characters’ contagious excitement at finally getting to explore the land without having any idea what they might find there.

Mixing those moments of grief in with all of the other emotions they experienced was a nice touch. It reminded me a lot of what happens in real life when someone is dealing with a difficult problem but also still has to do totally mundane things like sweep their floor, plan dinner, or take their pet for a walk. Life is hard sometimes, but it still goes on.

This feeling returned once they realized there was an intelligent life form on that planet that all of their previous scans of it had failed to pick up. I couldn’t stop reading once I reached this section, and it only got better from there.

The Big Picture

There are two reasons why I’m recommending this as a hopeful science fiction read.

Number one, we’ve all had days that were so frustrating or painful they felt like they’d never end.

This book could describe a day like that and then zoom out and see how that experience mattered (or didn’t matter) in the longterm. There were questions asked early on that didn’t receive answers until decades or even generations later.

There’s something comforting in seeing that pattern play out over and over again. What doesn’t make sense to us now might make sense years from now. Alternatively, it might fade away and not be meaningful at all after enough time has passed.

Number two, things did improve for the characters over time. The tragedies they experienced were real, but so was the hope they found as they adjusted to the challenges they faced and figured out how to look after themselves long after all of their Earth supplies had run out.

What hopeful science fiction stories have you been reading recently?

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