Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn

Quick reminder: The deadline to participate in my giveaway from the Adult Book Fair is Wednesday, August 5. There's an easy-peasy Google form to fill out to participate.  The orange cat package has a lot fewer entries than the purple bookshelf package if that will help you make a decision!

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I was reading in a Reddit thread about experimental fiction and Ella Minnow Pea: A Progressively Lipogrammatic Epistolary Fable by Mark Dunn was recommended. The Redditor said it was a fun book. Let's see, shall we?

So far it looks fun.

Ella is a girl living on an island off the coast of the United States that was the home to Nevin Nollop, the man who created the pangram "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog." The memorial to Nollop starts falling apart and as the letters on the memorial fall, the imperialistic town council begins banning the letters in writing and speech. The first time you violate the ban, you receive the warning; the second time, a public punishment; and the third time, you are banished from the island.

The book is told through letters and notes that people on the island are writing to each other and people in the United States, including people who have been banished. 

The back of my copy of this book has Kirkus Reviews calling this book "lighthearted" and Publishers Weekly calls it a "whimsical fable." 

Ummm.

This is a dark dystopian. 

The town council begins by shutting down the town library and destroying all the books. 

When citizens say that the letters falling off the memorial isn't really a sign from Nollop that he is unhappy, but rather is about how the adhesive is just not meant to be holding on for that long, the town council starts denying the truth of the science in favor of superstitious nonsense.

Meanwhile, literacy starts going down and people have to start subbing in letters and sound homophones. Communication starts to fail as people do not have synonyms for words with banned letters in them. 

As people leave town, either because of banishment or because they can no longer make a living on the island, the town council begins taking their land and homes, saying that is has been abandoned. The people who are left struggle to communicate at all. 

I thought this was brilliant in theme and execution. But I found it horrifying and terrifying. I certainly did not find it "whimsical" or "lighthearted." Some of the wordplay was pretty fantastic and the writing was clever, but the reason behind it was so dark that I'd never apply comedy to this. 

Maybe it's hitting differently in 2026 instead of 2001 when this was published. The Trump administration's rapid dismantling of higher education and cultural products is shocking. Maybe in 2001, I wouldn't have worried so much about a dictatorial government. I don't know. 

It's an interesting book. A prophetic book. But maybe not the fun book I thought it was going to be. Or, alternately, I don't have a sense of humor or whimsy. (I don't think that's the case, but maybe!) 5/5 stars

Lines of note:

...with the prohibition, the reading of all books containing the unfortunate letter will have to be outlawed as well. (page 9)

Right. Start by attacking books and education.

They shut the library down today. (page 17)

Librarians are truly protectors of free speech and liberty. Thank a librarian. 

Today The Tribune published the names of fifty-eight of the sixty men, women, and children charged this week with first offense. (Two names were unpublishable due to the presence of a particular letter within.) All were speakers of banned words - words overheard upon the lanes, in schoolyards and church pews, and on the common greens. Neighbor turning in neighbor, perpetuating old grudges and grievances with this new weapon...(page 21)

Hm. Have we seen this playbook before?

Someone is relaying threats to the Council. Each counciliteur has gotten a copy: "Cease the insanity or you will perish." As a result, the - I must now call them what I am only too happy to call them: police goons - the police goons have gone house-to-house in their investigation, yet have yet to turn up anyone except the usual suspects - that is, virtually everyone on in the isle...the Council has put crepuscular-to-auroric house arrest upon all Nollop citizens not in league with the cult. (page 125)

Heavy, heavy sigh. 

Things I looked up:

cenotaph (page 3) -  an empty tomb or a special monument built to honor a person or group whose body is buried in another place

 

bandiford (page 5) -  is a made-up fictional noun from the novel used to describe a architectural base, pedestal, or tier featuring inscription tiles

sarilla geese (page 9) - fictional phrase from the novel. It is used metaphorically by a character to describe unthinking, conformist crowds.

aposiopesis (page 17) - a figure of speech where a sentence is left unfinished, implying unwillingness or inability to continue; suddenly breaking off in speech

partete (page 48) - I don't know this one? It's made of lace, so clothing or home decor? Do  you know?

Hat mentions (why hats?):

orange hat (x2 on page 142, 148)

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Do you know what a partete is? Do you want to read a book about a crumbling society in 2026? Have you ever heard of this book? 

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

I read New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson because it filled a Pop Sugar Reading Challenge prompt. Is that a good enough reason? I guess we'll see. I listened to the audiobook, which was a full cast recording with nine narrators.  

In the year 2140, New York, along with most other coastal cities around the world, is under water. But New Yorkers are gonna stay in New York, so the residents adapted. Streets became canals. People get around using water taxis. We follow the residents of the Met Life Tower as they try to halt a hostile takeover over their cooperatively run building and solve a kidnapping. 

Look, I wanted this book to be something it wasn't. It was just a sort of boring mystery set in a cool setting. If the setting had played a larger role in the mystery (it boils down to corrupt politicians - like that couldn't be the case in 2026?) I might have liked it more. But the male POVs were very caveman and the women were Mary Sues. I just...can't. 

ALSO. Let's get to my my critique. This book posits that a couple of tween boys were able to recover a lost 1780 shipwreck in a single dive.  A shipwreck that is buried beneath the landfill of the Bronx. I rolled my eyes so hard in the back of my head. USING A DIVING BELL. I read books about dragons, I think Nancy Drew really does know everybody in River Falls and understands psychology better than any other human, and I don't usually stop to think about the logic of worlds. But this was too much for me. 

This nonsense is over 600 pages long, doesn't have a real ending, and doesn't really and seriously address the issue of climate change. Read it if you want, but you will also probably be disappointed. 3/5 stars

Lines of note:

Edith Wharton was born on the Square and later lived there. Herman Melville lived a block to the east and walked through the Square every day on his way to work on the docks of West Street, including during all of the six years when the Statue of Liberty's hand and torch stood there in the Square...One day he took his four-year-old granddaughter there to play in the park, sat down on a bench, and was looking at the torch so intently that he forget she was running around in the tulip beds and went back home without her. (Part II- C, timestamp 2:44:00)

Edith Wharton! Herman Melville! My ears perked at mentions of these two. Herman Melville's existence was a legitimate plot point of this book. Friends, we've come full circle. 

Things I looked up:

...like those tribes they thought were pygmies until the fed them properly in toddlerhood and turned out they were taller than the Dutch. (Part II - A, timestamp 2:15:23)

Probably this tribe?

The Woolworth building opened in 1913 and took the height crown away and after that the Met Life Tower became famous mostly for its four big clocks. (Part II - C, timestamp 2:39)

Woolworth Building

Met Life Tower

Hat mentions:

A thrust hat, stunning the prisoner. (Part III - E, timestamp 6:17:24)

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Would you want to live in a city that was underwater or would you try to move inland to drier areas? Are you worried about rising sea levels and coastal cities? 

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

I heard about What We Can Know by Ian McEwan on a recent episode of Sarah's Bookshelves. 

We have two timelines here. In 2014, poet Francis Blundy gifts his wife Vivien a poem for her birthday, a poem he read aloud at a dinner party. In 2119, we learn that most of the world has been submerged under water after a nuclear weapon occurrence (see my post on Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen for more on that!). Museums and libraries that still exist are on high land, are hard to get to, and travel is difficult in the best of times. A scholar of Francis Blundy is attempting to learn more about that poem from 2014 because it seems as if no copies remain. 

It's sort of an academic detective mystery with a hint of dystopia in it. 

Things I liked: The dystopian future setting was very interesting. I wanted to know more about how people lived in the future. I also liked that academic setting - it's interesting to think about how higher education would evolve in a world like that.

Things I didn't like: The plot? Small spoilers, but this book was mostly about people cheating on one another in both time periods. I am not into that, to be honest. Also, the font was somewhat hard to read at times. 

Overall take: I don't know. I mostly wanted a different story in the future setting. 3/5 stars

Lines of note:

The humanities are always in crisis. I no longer believe this is an institutional matter - it's in the nature of intellectual life, or of thought itself. Thinking is always in crisis. (page 58)

Lolololz. *sob* *sigh* I am very concerned about AI. Out students have no critical thinking skills at all.

Most of our history and literature students care nothing for the past and are indifferent to the accretions of poetry and fiction that are our beautiful inheritance. They sign up to the humanities because they lack mathematical or technical talent. We are poor cousins and we don't get the smartest bunch. Our office are dilapidated. Many of them leak. (page 73)

This literally made me laugh because have we talked about how the building where I work has leaked from the roof for a decade. They actually redid the roof last year, BUT IT STILL LEAKS. Right into the political science department's offices. 

I felt, though I could never say, that I had made a sacrifice by marrying a man who had no taste for reading, who would rather fix the plumbing than talk about literature...(page 203)

I asked my husband if he wished he had married someone who read more than dragon books. He looked surprised and reminded me that I read Gone With the Wind and Moby-Dick this year. It's not just dragons. 

He seemed to disapprove of me on principle, but what that principle was, I never dared to ask. (page 279)

Doesn't everyone have someone like this in their life? 

Things I looked up:

Weil's disease (page 62) - Also known as Weil syndrome, a bacterial infection that is characterized by disfunction of the kidneys and liver. Most commonly caused by a bite from an infected animal, including rats, mice, cows, pigs, and dogs. (This seemed familiar to me, but it turns out that I looked it up when I read The Thorn Birds.) 

The Wanderer by Hans Thomas (page 78) - Hans Thoma (1839 – 1924) was a German painter. An alumnus and later professor of Karlsruhe Academy, he is known for his landscapes, portraits, and symbolic works rooted in German regional life and tradition.

secateurs (page 170) - a pair of pruning clippers for use with one hand

poitín (page 176) - rish moonshine, deeply rooted in the country's history and lore, is traditionally among the most potent alcoholic drinks on the planet

Hat mentions (why hats?): 

A gentleman with shoulder bag, straw hat and walking stick is strolling along...(page 78)

He removed his hat...(page 79)

I couldn't find a hat or gloves and I was in a hurry. (page 149)

I was given a yellow jacket and hard hat to wear and heavy boots...(page 243)

He was wearing globes and a black wide-brimmed hat I had never seen before. (page 260)

the wide-brimmed hat (page 263)

black hat (page 278)

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Have you read any good dystopian books recently? 

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

We read Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro as our most recent pick for my IRL book club. 

Klara is an Artificial Friend (AF) who is chosen to be the companion of a sick teenager named Josie. We follow Klara from her time waiting to be chosen in a store all the way until Josie goes to college. Along the way, there are questions of what it means to be human and what will parents do to protect their own children. Are there limits to what you will do to protect one person at the risk of other people? 

As a book club, we did not LOVE this book. As a book club, we had a great discussion about it. It's not entirely clear to any of us what message Ishiguro is trying to make here and maybe that's a good thing. It's not didactic and it leaves it up to the reader to do the interpretation. I sort of appreciate that about the book, even if I did shut the book thinking that maybe I wasn't a smart enough reader for it. 

You'll note that I don't have any lines of note. It's because the writing is spare and not in a beautiful way. It's as if the author is purposefully creating distance between the reader and the story. Sometimes I think that works because of course we'd want to be distance from an artificial being, but it also sort of made me question how important the author took his own work. 

Anyway, super thought-provoking, but I'm not sure how often I'll be recommending this one. 3/5 stars

Hat mention (why hats?): 

under umbrellas and dripping hats (page 20)

Sunrise on the Reaping (The Hunger Games #0.5) by Suzanne Collins

I did not care overly much for The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Collins's earlier prequel to the Hunger Games trilogy, so it was much with much trepidation that I started reading reviews of Sunrise on the Reaping. 

I found this as satisfying as I found the original trilogy. It's not great literature, but it's good. It's fun. If you're into plot, well, maybe this isn't your best bet because we know the ending at the beginning (if you've read the original trilogy) and a ton of the book parallels other plot lines in the original trilogy. BUT. It's still an imaginative world and Collins introduces unforgettable characters here that I'll be thinking about long after today.

Haymitch Abernathy was Peeta and Katniss's mentor in the first Hunger Games novel. He was District 12's only surviving Games victor, cynical and drunken, and he obviously quickly became a fan favorite. How did he win those Games and become the District 12 mentor? Well, the answer is in this book. Through a series of unfortunate incidents, he is chosen as one of four Tributes in the second Quarter Quell Games. So Haymitch leaves his family, his girlfriend, and all his hopes and dreams and heads to the Capitol. But Haymitch doesn't want to give the Gamesmasters what they want. He wants to fight back. And he does fight back. But the consequences are not exactly what he had hoped for.

There are some criticisms that this book is more heavy-handed in its criticism of things like totalitarian governments, spineless media, and disaffected citizens than previous books. That might be true, but in 2025, what would expect from an American author? As we start to fall more and more into the world of 1984, The Handmaid's Tale, and The Hunger Games, I can see why so many authors feel like subtlety is a luxury of the past. 

In general, I really liked this. I'm not a Hunger Games superfan, so it's likely a lot of easter eggs were lost of me, but if you're a fan of the original trilogy, I'd say give this one a shot. If you've never read any of this series, this is not the one you should start with. 4/5 stars

Line of note:

"You can't choose your parents."

"You could reject their business," I point out.

"I couldn't," says Maysilee. "I was going to spend the rest of my life behind that candy counter, no matter how much I hated it. And I'm guessing you'd have been wearing miner's overalls to your grave. We never, none of us, had any choices." (page 82)

Hat mentions (why hats?): 

...with matching thigh-high boots and a tall hat with a visor brim. (page 20)

Feathers fan out from the top of the hat, making her look like a deranged daffodil. (page 20)

...yanks off her daffodil hat by the chin strap. (page 29)

Her hat, a two-foot pillar of red fur, jauntily tilts over one eye. (page 60)

cheap plastic coal miner hat (page 71)

...flips the light in Maysilee's hat. (page 72)

Wyatt picks up Louella's hat...(page 76)

Four black hats stacked on her head...(page 171)

"Made yourself a hat, did you?" (page 275)

...yellow hat feathers bobbing...(page 340)

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Have you read The Hunger Games? Are you interested in reading this prequel?

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If you are interested in voting for our next book for Cool Bloggers Book Club, don't forget to vote if you haven't already done so! The Google form is ready for you. The vote is tight, so your vote could make all the difference. 

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Feed (Newflesh #1) by Mira Grant

I once read a Mira Grant book called Into the Drowning Deep and I talked about it incessantly for weeks and weeks. It was so great and even now I sort of want to read it again. So when I was in Seattle and the friend I was staying with, Jason, had Feed by Mira Grant on his table, I got very excited and immediately ordered it from my library. He was excited to talk about it, but I have to admit I didn't want any spoilers, so I didn't ask any questions.

YOU GUYS!! Do you want to know what this book is about? If you don't want to know, stop reading now.

It's about bloggers in the zombie apocalypse!! Bloggers! Zombies!

Can you even think of a book that would appeal to me more?

Okay, well, this book was amazing. Yes, it's almost 600 pages long, but it reads like it's 200. Mira Grant writes in such a compelling way and I did the staying up way too late to read just one more chapter thing. 

We have a brother and sister pair who were born after the Rising. They have only known a life with zombies. They blog and are chosen to follow an up and coming presidential nominee. What's going to happen on the campaign trail?  I think you know that it's going to be hijinks. Another excellent thing to recommend this book is that Grant does not veer off into romantic storylines. There's no sex, no thinking about sex, and remarkably little mention of romantic relationships. That is PERFECT in a zombie book, as far as I'm concerned. 

I think everybody knows where this is going. 5/5 stars

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Lines of note:

Fear justifies everything. Fear makes it okay to have surrendered freedom after freedom, until our every move is tracked and recorded in a dozen databases the average man will never have access to. Fear creates, defines, and shapes our world, and without it, most of us would have no idea what to do with ourselves. (page 428)

This book was written in 2010 and you can sort of feel the backlash to the PATRIOT Act in it, can't you? 

Someday, we'd be cardboard boxes at the back of somebody's closet, and there wasn't a thing we could do about it. (page 493)

Ugh. Maybe this just hit me because of my mom's recent death, but it was like a kick to the solar plexus. 

Hat mentions:

None

The Compound by Aisling Rawle

I heard about The Compound by Aisling Rawle on Sarah's Bookshelves. It was described as Lord of the Flies meets Love Island and while that's not exactly accurate, it's not entirely inaccurate, either. 

In a near-future (maybe current day?) Lily wakes up in a remote desert compound where she is on a reality show with nineteen other young people. She's 20something, beautiful, driftless, and she's counting on this show to help make her future easier. The world is hard - jobs are boring, there's constant war, and there's a hint that these young people don't think they'll be alive in twenty years. 

The first part of this book was tough because twenty people is a lot. By the time you get to half that number, it's a lot easier to follow who is who. As the show goes on, we see Lily do more and more things for rewards and prizes that she wouldn't have considered doing early on in the show. Will Lily make it to the end with her own true self intact?

I think this book is mostly a critique of social media and late-stage capitalism (buy more stuff! stuff will make you happy!), but when I finished the last page, I still was wondering what the take home theme was supposed to be. There are plenty of interesting social critiques - how women (and men) of color are treated on television, how even when gender roles aren't assigned, people do what's "expected" of them, sexual attraction versus love, and the whole idea of television production on "reality" television and how it influences behavior outside of a set - but I just left the book feeling jangly and uncertain. 

Maybe that's the point. 4/5 stars

Line of note:

The boys were delighted with themselves, and spent a long time finishing it, and a longer time congratulating themselves on it. (page 136)

Ahem. 

Hat mentions (why hats?): 

Some people put their shoes on the lower shelf, and others put sunscreen and hats and aloe vera on the shelves. (page 80)

After two further challenges (name fifteen capital cities - a tin of white paint; reveal who we voted for in the last election - baseball hats for everyone) we were exhausted and starving. (page 90)

They were plainly dressed in shorts and T-shirts, sunglasses and hats. (page 134)

"A month ago, I could have told you the minute and the hour and the date at the drop of a hat." (page 264)

a swimming hat (page 287) - WTF does that even mean? Like one of those stretchy cap things?

The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami

The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami is a 2025 release. It's part of my current trend towards thinking dystopian fiction will save my reading life. 

This cover is amazing. 

Sara Hussein is on her way back from a work conference in London when she is transferred to a retention center because the Risk Assessment Administration (RAA) has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming someone else. Sara has committed no crime, but her RAA's algorithm suggests she is a dangerous individual. This algorithm is a black hole, but it seems to take into account her dreams, her social media posts, and small infractions like losing your temper when dealing with one of Those People.  What was originally supposed to be a twenty-one day stay turns into months as Sara is stuck in bureaucratic limbo. 

How does the RAA know Sara's dreams, you ask? Because in an effort to help with her insomnia, Sara had used a Dreamsaver device and now the content of her dreams has raised her risk assessment score over 500. But the company also mines all of her data and there's a lot of it because in this future world that seems like it's just around the corner (or is today...) facial recognition software means that Sara's every move in the world is being recorded.

What we have here is a chilling look at our dependence on technology and how much of our privacy we give up to corporations and governments. 

I wrote once about how those DNA kits terrify me. I'm voluntarily giving up my data to a random company? Like...what's it going to be used for? Jacking up my health insurance premiums when they learn I have predisposition for an expensive illness? The government to put me on a watchlist because I have a genetic predisposition for addiction or violence? Creating an embryo with my genetic components because I have "the right genes"? And, what's more insidious is that it doesn't even matter that I haven't given away m own DNA because my sister did hers and they can interpolate from that about mine. 

So many people thought I was being a bit dramatic about the situation. But now 23andMe is being sold (to an unknown buyer - could be ANYONE) and that data is just being used as a selling point. 

Anyway, this book is important and urgent and timely and necessary. Should we stop posting our every thoughts on blogs? Should I have not published our anniversary picture on social media? Should I wear a face mask when I walk the dog? What would it take to go off the grid and not be tracked? What would we lose and what would we gain? 

The first part of this book was a bit slow and there's a section when the action veers away from Sara to another character that I didn't care for, but all in all this is a book that I am happy to have read. 4.5/5 stars

Lines of note:

To be a woman was to watch yourself not just through your own eyes, but through the eyes of others. (page 43)

I showed up at work last Friday without makeup, wearing jeans and a hoodie (it was so cold in our office). My co-worker said, "oh no! what happened?" and it was as if the earth had stopped rotating because I didn't wear makeup. 

The heat on her is such that she's afraid to use words like strike or boycott and must resort to codes like crossword or cricket. That she is losing the ability to communicate in ordinary language seems to her only the latest absurdity in a long series that started nearly a year earlier. Or perhaps it started before, but content with the small pleasures and enclosed freedoms of her life, she didn't notice. (page 294)

Sometimes when my husband and I are discussing thorny political issues, I literally say, "If the NSA is listening, this is just hypothetical." I'm sort of joking, sort of not.

I used to teach an online class about women in politics and there was an online discussion where a student censored a protest sign that had used the word bitch. I asked why she censored it since it was a direct quote from the image and she said that she just didn't use that word and thought it would be disrespectful to others in the class. I think about it a lot. Censored versions of classic novels when racial slurs are removed. The way even if I'm saying a direct quote I'll say "n-word." Is this right? Is this wrong? Is this the way to a kinder society? Or are we losing the ability to communicate clearly, even when that communication is cruel or makes us uneasy? 

Things I looked up:

Victor Arnautoff (page 9 and then frequently thereafter) -  Russian-American painter and professor of art. He worked in San Francisco and the Bay Area from 1925 to 1963, including two decades as a teacher at Stanford University, and was particularly prolific as a muralist during the 1930s. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen, but returned to the Soviet Union after the death of his wife, continuing his career there before his death.

Source. "City Life" mural, Coit Tower, San Francisco, painted by Arnautoff

lomo saltado (page 18) - a traditional Peruvian dish, a stir fry that typically combines marinated strips of sirloin (or other beef steak) with onions, tomatoes, French fries, and other ingredients; and is typically served with rice. 

Château d'If (page 72) - a fortress located on the Île d'If, the smallest island in the Frioul archipelago, situated about 1.5 kilometres (7⁄8 mile) offshore from Marseille in southeastern France. Built in the 16th century, it later served as a prison until the end of the 19th century. The fortress was demilitarized and opened to the public in 1890. It is famous for being one of the settings of Alexandre Dumas's adventure novel The Count of Monte Cristo. It is one of the most visited sites in the city of Marseille (nearly 100,000 visitors per year).

nephrolithiasis (page 133) - another word for kidney stone disease

numinous (page 135) - means "arousing spiritual or religious emotion; mysterious or awe-inspiring";[1] also "supernatural" or "appealing to the aesthetic sensibility." The term was given its present sense by the German theologian and philosopher Rudolf Otto in his influential 1917 German book The Idea of the Holy. It has been applied to theology, psychology, religious studies, literary analysis, and descriptions of psychedelic experiences.

oneiromancy (page 135) - a form of divination based upon dreams, and also uses dreams to predict the future. Oneirogen plants may also be used to produce or enhance dream-like states of consciousness. Occasionally, the dreamer feels as if they are transported to another time or place, and this is offered as evidence they are in fact providing divine information upon their return.

Ligurian Sea (page 145) - an arm of the Mediterranean Sea. It lies between the Italian Riviera (Liguria) and the island of Corsica.

Pershing Square building (page 162) - also known as 125 Park Avenue or 100 East 42nd Street, is a 25-story office building in Midtown Manhattan in New York City. It is located on the eastern side of Park Avenue between 41st and 42nd streets, across from Grand Central Terminal to the north and adjacent to 110 East 42nd Street to the east.

Source. View from 42nd Street and Vanderbilt Avenue, looking toward the western facade

Albert Finney (page 162) - English actor

Sayyida al-Hurra (page 262) - a Moroccan privateer who governed the city of Tétouan from 1515 or 1519 to 1542.  She is considered to be "one of the most important female figures of the Islamic West in the modern age."

Hat mentions (why hats?): 

She lumbers to the bus stop weighed down by straw baskets, hats, and mats, her long, beaded earrings swinging with each step. (page 8)

...a farm scene from the 1930s: hatted laborers kneel between furrows, picking lettuce, while in the background an overseer in blue dungarees leans against a rusty white truck. (page 9)

...retirees in matching baseball hats, sullen teenagers in checkered pajama pants, toddlers trailing behind disheveled parents.  (page 15)

The strangest thing is that Finney is in a yellow tuxedo, and the other guy is in a cowboy hat and fringed waistcoat. (page 162)

At least she has the kids' wide-brimmed hats...(page 263)

"Let me put these hats on you." (page 263)

...gets his hat on him. (page 263)

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Would you allow your dreams to be collected if it meant better sleep? Do you worry about the encroachment of technology in our lives? 

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, translated by Ros Schwartz

 

I read I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, translated by Ros Schwartz for the book about a cult prompt from the Pop Sugar Reading Challenge for the year. 

Our unnamed narrator tells us about her life. She and thirty-nine women live in an underground bunker. Men guard them and occasionally discipline them with whips and orders, but her life is just her and the other women. Then one day there is a siren and the guards leave the women and they escape out of the bunker. We then follow the narrator as she discovers the world she lives in. 

This is not the book for people who complain that Harry and Hermione just wander around the woods forever in the last Harry Potter book (it was only a couple of chapters, yo). It's a quiet book. There is some plot, but it's a character-driven introspective look at what this woman is facing in a life in which all her choice are limited. It's a desolate examination of the very meaning of life. Why do we continue on in the midst of hopelessness? What is the point of it all? 

Because I am now apparently just giving you reviews from other Goodreads users, let's all enjoy these two.

Bleak, harrowing, unbearably sad. But it's also meditative, important, and maybe hopeful. Maybe not hopeful. I'd love to read this in a book club and discuss it with other people. 

4.5/5 stars 

Lines of note:

Whether it was their fault or not, they’d gone mad by force of circumstance, they’d lost their reason because nothing in their lives made sense any more. (location 475)

I am waiting for the day when I lose my reason. 

I must be lacking in certain experiences that make a person fully human. (location 1591)

86% of American women in my age bracket are mothers. I am not. This is by choice, but sometimes I wonder if I am actually not fully embracing humanity since I do not feel a biological urge to reproduce. 

Title in the book:

...felt a surge of grief, I, who had never known men, as I stood in front of this man who had wanted to overcome fear and despair to enter eternity upright and furious. (location 1921)

Hat mentions: 

None

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Does anyone else here love reading dystopian novels as much as I do? 

All the Water in the World by Eiren Caffall

All the Water in the World by Eiren Caffall was a recommendation from Catherine on the podcast Sarah's Bookshelves Live. 

If you read this book, along with The Light Pirate, and Alas, Babylon, I think you'd be all set in the world of dystopian fiction. In this one, really strong hurricanes called hypercanes are common, the glaciers have melted, and a small group of human survivors have taken to living on the roof the American Natural History Museum in New York City, including Nonie and her family. But when a storm surge takes down the building, they must leave and survive without shelter. 

Cli-fi is so scary, right? Because this is not implausible. At some point, humans are going to have to figure out how to live when coastal cities are no longer viable. At some point, will the true danger be nature or other people? 

I found this book engrossing. The chapters are short - two to four pages each - so you always feel like you're making real progress. I found the writing hard to parse at first. Consider the following sentence. It came early on in the book and I'm still not sure what it's supposed to mean, to be honest. 

We were on the fourth floor, Astor Turret was, too, had a good view out the city, big windows. (page 21)

But then once I got into Nonie's voice and her tendency to let her mind wander to the past just as big events were happening, I liked the rhythms of this book. It is clear that Nonie is an expert at dissociation because she just cuts out when things get scary. I appreciated that it was a character trait that lasted throughout the entire book.

Anyway, I liked this. I read it on the drive to and from Iowa on Easter and it made the time go by quickly. 4/5 stars (there were some writing quirks I did not care for)

Lines of note:

"Sometimes you have to remember that The World As It Is changed things, but we can change them back." (page 166)

I think I needed this reminder in April 2025. 

Hat mentions (why hats?):

"Nonie, can you see if my hat is in the pack?" (page 61)

Keller found his straw hat, veteran of rainforests. (page 62)

Keller's had matches, boxers, a roll of bandage, a tin cup, a baggie of seeds, the latest of his notebooks, a pen he took from the Amen gift show that wrote wet or upside down, second socks, a wool hat, a compass, a brass watch. (page 62)

He pulled his field hat lower and dug into his stroke. (page 140)

A sign said MASSPIKE, a black hat next to the worlds. (page 221)

If, like me, you had no idea what that line meant. 

Darling knocked softly on the door, then slid in, drenched, his wool hat back on, his cheeks still bright. (page 269)

Zazen by Vanessa Veselka

FYI: Zazen is zen meditation, usually performed in the lotus position. It's preferred you do this meditation facing the wall.

I read Zazen by Vanessa Veselka for the Pop Sugar Reading Challenge for a book with a one-word title you had to look up in a dictionary. I didn't know what zazen was and I had never heard of Veselka, so I learned two things for the price of one. This is Veselka's debut novel.

Regardless of whatever I say from here on out, I want you to know that I think this cover is amazing. The photo. The author's name in the tiniest font. The title design. I just can't stop thinking about it and what it means.

Della has a doctorate, but is working in a restaurant as her country falls further and further into civil war. Bombs are going off; revolutionaries, including her own parents, are fighting the government; and no future is certain. Soon Della is involved in a terroristic plot she never intended to be the leader of.

This book is...probably too smart for me? Five-star reviews call it a biting satire, an unflinching coming of age novel in a tumultuous time, an unusual and important voice. Maybe it is all those things, but to me it felt like a muddied message. Are we supposed to agree with terrorists? Think the government is one big conspiracy that's out to get us? And what of Della? She can't use her education for anything better and more useful to society than perpetuating violence?

This was published in 2011 and I don't think it's aged well. It seems to promote political violence and in light of assassination attempts and an attempted coup of the US government, I cannot get behind it. But, again, maybe I am missing the point. 

But that cover, right?

3/5 stars

Lines of note:

That's the problem with symbolic gestures. People never take them far enough. They don't see them as a system. They blow up something right in front of them, like the bathroom of the New Land Trust building, and then caper around like monkey. They might as well throw bananas at it. (page 111-112)

Jules reminded me of Credence, so convinced he was smarter than everyone that whatever he said came out like he was teaching you how to tie your shoes. Watching that habit slip, I saw how similar he and I really were. Only I had stopped trying to communicate with anyone at all, patronizingly or otherwise. My attitude was fuck you and your myopic mental laziness, tie your own fucking shoes. Under examination it wasn't a more enlightened stance. (page 193)

Things I looked up:

laccolith (page 37) - a dome-shaped intrusive rock formed by magma pushing apart the host rock strata

Lagerstätte (page 111) - Sedimentary deposit that exhibits extraordinary fossils with exceptional preservation

Hat mentions (why hats?): 

In her hand she had a plastic firefighter's hat. (page 10)

She swung up onto the back of the truck, put her fireman's hat on and smiled back at us...(page 10)

The cumulative weight of a dense culture mesh that prevents us from understanding whether the foundational problem is really race, class or gender? A hat?

Me: A hat.

Mr. Tofu Scramble: Well, it does kind of look like a hat. (page 21)

IN AN ANCIENT LAND...(Women in cowry shell hats enjoying re-colonization on green) BEAUTY IS ETERNAL...(page 55)

After World by Debbie Urbanski

 

After World by Debbie Urbanski was on a list that the author Michael Chabon recommended and someone in my book club sent it along. It's not right for our book club, but it sounded like something I'd like!

I also borrowed Dearborn from the library. We'll see if I read that one.

In a terrible future Earth, humans ask an Artificial Intelligence to find a solution to the climate crisis. The solution is to release a virus into the world, S, that eliminates humans from the world. The AI writes the story of one of the last (the last?) humans left, a young woman named Sen.

It's a weird little epistolary novel, with diary entries, news announcements, and all sorts of weird messages from the AI interspersed with the AI's attempt to fully capture Sen's story. 

This book was so hard to read. It's an unflinching examination of a possible world and is merciless in its personal attacks against the reader. While I sort of know that the extinction of the human race is possible, reading about how we get there is hard. It's hard to balance the thoughts that humans sort of deserve everything they (we?) get because their (our?) stewardship of the planet has been so terrible with the thoughts that we're still human beings who are aware and the biological imperative of how meaningful and important life itself is. 

It's also sort of hard to figure out what's going on. Who or what is narrating? What timeline are we in? But that makes is more special when you do figure out how everything connects in the end. This book isn't really about the humans - they're all going to die in the end - but about what happens after the humans. 

Tough read. But really thought-provoking. 4/5 stars

Lines of note:

Either she imagines this happening or this actually happens. The border between these two states is become frayed and delicate. (page 38)

Ha ha. Do you ever have those moments when you're like "did I turn off the heating pad?" and you honestly just can't remember the details of how you got from one room to another? I feel like my border between those two states has been frayed since I was sixteen. 

Maybe humans weren't meant to be here in such enormous numbers. Maybe we really had ruined everything and were ruining everything. But even if we ruined everything, I think we still deserve to live. Don't we? Didn't we? (page 107)

So many literal existential questions in this book. Didn't every extinct species deserve to live?

At what point in this process do we stop being human and become something else? And are we all operating on the same timeline, or are some of us further along in this process than others? And what will we become? (page 175)

In the year of 2024, I sometimes find myself thinking that some humans are not as fully evolved as others. And I'll leave that there.

The collective grief of billions of human beings flaps its wings across the clearing. (page 205)

Is there a collective anymore? 

Negative Carry is the point at which the cost of sustaining humanity on Earth exceeded any possible benefit, occurring approximately on S. - 109,500 days, way before any of us were born. This means we shouldn't feel guilty about the state of the world we inherited, as the world we inherited had already been fumigated, dynamited, melted, drilled, scorched, bombed, overcrowded, deforested, and submerged by the poor choices of our ancestors. Let us blame our ancestors. Let us wash our consciences clean in the overfished and flooded rivers. (page 257)

Scientists put the carrying capacity of the planet somewhere between 2-40 billion (we're currently at roughly 8 billion). I will just leave that fact there. 

Voice Widow, n.

Here's what I'm wondering. What if the sea ice wasn't meant to last forever? What if the planet wasn't meant to stay forested and pristine in its pre-industrial state? What if human beings belonged here more than other species? Like many people, I had liked the Earth. And, like many people, at the same time, I didn't mind its destruction. (page 303-304)

It's hard, isn't it? We want to see this world, so we get on a plane and pollute it. We want to enjoy ourselves, so we light fireworks and scare wildlife and tiny babies run away and can never find their ways back to find their mothers. We want to protect the environment, but we still use single-use plastics and throw away that food that rotted in the back of the fridge. We are all pro-environment until it becomes an inconvenience for us. 

Things I looked up:

lobelia (192) - Flowering plant that, if ingested, can be potentially toxic to humans. 

bacopa (192) - A perennial, creeping herb native to the wetlands of southern and Eastern India, Australia, Europe, Africa, Asia, and North and South America. It's sometimes used to treat anxiety, insomnia, and epilepsy. 

cranesbill (192) - AKA geranium. I'd never heard this alternate name before. 

Uebelmannia buiningii (194) - Brazilian cactus currently threatened by habitat loss. 

Dioscorea strydomiana (194) - A critically endangered species of yam from South Africa with fewer than 250 mature individuals known to exist.

Cadiscus aquaticus (194) - A critically endangered species of aquatic flowering plant in the aster family, Asteraceae. It is endemic to the Western Cape of South Africa, where it grows in vernal pools.

Sunda pangolin (194) - A critically endangered species of pangolin known as the guardians of the forest because they protect forests from termite destruction, maintaining a balanced ecosystem.

dwarf wedgemussel (194) - A small freshwater mussel that rarely exceeds 1.5 inches (38 mm) in length. It is brown or yellowish-brown in color. Classified as vulnerable with a decreasing population.

Powassan virus (283) - Flavivirus transmitted by ticks, found in North America and in the Russian Far East. It is named after the town of Powassan, Ontario, where it was identified in a young boy who eventually died from it. It can cause encephalitis, inflammation of the brain. Approximately 10-15% of cases are fatal. 

Hat mentions:

Adults in sun hats and robes scrubbed the exterior walls. (page 54)

...women wearing broad hats, and open beach umbrellas...(page 66)

Sen is to pack a jacket, gloves, and a winter hat. (page 101)

...we would have seen people wearing hats on vacations, and people holding their babies in a waiting room, and people standing in line, fanning themselves with their hands...(page 212)

Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton

Other books by Lily Brooks Dalton

The Light Pirate

I read Good Morning, Midnight because I enjoyed The Light Pirate so much and because it was recommended by someone on Sarah's Bookshelves (it was Susie in this episode!). 

Before we talk about the book, let's talk about the cover. I was convinced I had read this book before because the cover was so familiar, but I think it's because the cover reminded me of this:

Tent? Check. Starry sky? Check. White title? Check. A Novel? Check. The biggest difference is that it's snow on the cover of Good Morning, Midnight and grass on the cover of Station Eleven. Regardless, it's clear that this book is trying to mimic Station Eleven's art.

In Good Morning, Midnight we follow two parallel stories. Augie is a scientist at a research station in the Arctic. When the station is forced to evacuate, Augie stays behind and finds a child named Iris was also left behind. They cannot contact anyone on Earth and the radio stays eerily silent. Meanwhile, the spaceship Aether is going back to Earth after a trip to Jupiter. Mission Control falls silent about a year away from Earth and the astronauts on board the Aether have to figure out what to do. 

This was such a beautiful book. The characters. The characters. Man. So beautifully rendered. 

It's a scary thought. What if you were one of the last people alive? What would you do? How would you react? 

But somehow this book is hopeful and beautiful and sad and confusing and wonderful. 

4.5/5 stars

Lines of note:

"I think he’s unkind because it’s easier to be angry than frightened,” Devi said. (page 95)

I wrote recently in the comments on Elisabeth's blog that I assume everyone is in Emergency Mode. We're all dealing with something, right? And I try to be give others grace when they are doing something unkind, rude, or disrespectful. I'm not always successful (WHY IS YOUR CART TAKING UP THE WHOLE GROCERY STORE AISLE?), but it helps me to remember that everyone is having difficulties. 

When he got to his feet, he shuddered to hear the cartilage in his joints cracking, his bones clicking against each other like dominoes falling down the length of his body. (page 158)

I didn't purposefully start reading books with protagonists who are older, but I am appreciating reading these descriptions about how our bodies break down. 

Hat mentions (why hats?): Eight hat mentions in the book. These are my favorites. 

As the days progressed Augustine began to walk farther, always keeping the emerald green of Iris’s pompom hat in his sights. (page 80)

A green hat! Are we sure it's not Katie Nolan?!

Her helmet was a few sizes too big and he had insisted that she wear three hats to pad it. (page 136)

Three hats! I frequently wear two, but three seems like a lot. 

The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller

Someone on the podcast Sarah's Bookshelves recommended The Memory of Animals pretty persuasively, so I ordered it from the library and then proceeded to not read it for nine weeks. And it's due tomorrow, so I had to get to it. 

Teffy lost her job working with the octopuses at an aquarium. There's a pandemic and things are getting pretty bad, so she signs up to be a volunteer in a clinical trial for a vaccine for the Dropsy virus. But the trial doesn't go well and Teffy and four other volunteers watch out the windows as London falls into chaos. Meanwhile, there's technology that allows Teffy to relive her memories and she spends more and more time in the past. 

Weird combination of octopus book (see The Soul of an Octopus and Remarkably Bright Creatures) and pandemic book (see Station Eleven and Hamnet). The bit about reliving memories was weird, too. I mean, the book is weird. Like so weird that it's borderline incoherent? 

Okay, the parallel is that the survivors are like animals in a cage. The volunteers for the experiment are like the experiments on octopuses that Neffy witnessed. Fine. (I mean, let's not get into whether or not animals have a choice about it and the humans absolutely could have either not done the experiment or left the hospital when things got dodgy, but let's let Fuller have the parallels.) The additional parallel is that something something memory something something octopuses don't have a brain. I don't know. It's weak. Here's the conversation I imagine happened.

Author: It's about survivors of a pandemic.

Agent: And...?

Author (thinks about Sy Montgomery and Shelby Van Pelt): And the main character works with octopuses.

Agent: What makes it unique?

Author: AND THERE'S VIRTUAL REALITY MEMORY.

Oddly enough, I didn't hate this book. But I don't think it says as much as the author thinks it says. The characters are oddly flat, the writing is fine, but not spectacular, and I honestly want to figure out who it was that recommended this on the podcast and never really trust them again. Read Station Eleven if you want pandemic lit. 3.5/5 stars

Things I looked up:

Roberts radio (page 10) - Roberts is a British company that makes cool looking retro radios. The company has been around since 1932, so presumably the radios they make were once cutting edge. 

Crittall windows (page 10) - Windows with gridded metal frames. 

Antipaxos (page 24) - A small island in Greece. It's almost embarrassing how often I have to admit my lacking my knowledge of geography is. 

Hat mentions (why hats?):

I can just make out the shape of her, the arch of her hat. (page 76)

It was something I'd looked forward to, enjoying the feeling of being the one the loud handsome man was waving his hat at, as though we both might have been almost famous. (page 132)

Piper isn't wearing her hat and for the first time I see her hair - undercut at the sides and top styled up. (page 233)

The One by John Marrs

Our book club pick for this month was The One by John Marrs. I actually thought we weren't meeting for a couple of weeks when I got the Facebook notification about an event coming up this week and so I had to read it super quickly and good news, everybody, it's a quick read.

In the near future, the gene that determines "the one" for each person has been discovered. You send in a swab of your DNA and if your Match has done the same, you can meet them. This has a lot of consequences for society, including previously happily married couples getting divorced, a rise in suicides, and general society upheaval. But couples that are Matched have longer relationships, less domestic violence, and seem to be super happy. 

This book follows the story of five couples. I thought the book was super easy to read and sort of an interesting concept in the way that Black Mirror episodes are interesting, if sometimes horrific. But there were only two couples I found myself invested in. The others were problematic for me in a few ways I don't want to get into too much for fear of spoilers. 

I did think that this was an interesting read. 4/5 stars

Hat mentions:

None

****************

Book club thoughts: This was an easy read and everyone who was there finished the book, which is like a miracle and will probably never happen again. Everyone agreed that the characters were mostly unlikeable, the scientist was super upset about the science being BS (there was a real rant), and we actually had very little to say about the book. Every time I'd try to steer us towards discussing the book, we ended up talking about our pets. The host had just adopted a new dog that day, so we brainstormed ideas for her name, discussed best training practices (my vet was there!), and did whatever we could to not talk about the book. I wouldn't recommend this one for your book club, to be honest. 

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker is the coming of age story of a girl named Julia, who is living in a California suburb when the news comes that the rotation of the Earth is slowing. No one knows why, but the days and nights are getting longer very quickly. 

When I first heard the premise of this book, I thought this was going to be a Big Story, like The Martian, where there's a person who is the focus on the book, but we also see people at NASA and the UN working on a problem. That is NOT this book. This is a book about a girl growing up while the world is changing in crazy ways around her. We only hear from experts in occasional newspaper clippings and on television news. This is about a girl and her singular experience.

The earth's rotation is truly slowing by 47-thousandths seconds of a day, so scientists have been adding leap seconds here and there, so this isn't as silly a premise at it may seem, although the idea that the rotation would slow by hours in a single day is pretty farfetched. I think some of the science in this book is a bit precarious but to quote Glen Wheldon, I'm here for science fiction, not science fact. For instance, I think the electrical grid would fail long before it did in this book, but I didn't write the book, so who cares what I think?

Look, this book is pretty dire. If you're not in a place to read a dystopian sci-fi novel with focus on a decimated planet, don't read it. But I honestly thought it was a lovely bit of writing and the pages were easy to turn and it was exactly my kind of thing. 

4/5 stars

Lines of note:

But I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different - unimagined, unprepared for, unknown. (page 29)

I have found this to be absolutely true. I'm worrying about X, but Y is the thing that comes out of left field and becomes the focus. 

My grandfather was eighty-six years old. All his old friends were dead. His wife was dead. he had grown bitter about his own longevity. (page 60)

My maternal grandmother, who lived to be almost 100, once told me that there was nothing worth living for once she turned eighty. I mean, I felt a little hurt by this statement, but I also understood what she meant. 

Ours was a sudden bond, the kind possible only for the young or the imperiled. (page 223)

I know that some of you have developed wonderful friendships in adulthood, but I honestly believe that I'll never have a friendship as great and genuine as those that I developed when I was young and had all the time in the world to devote to building friendships. 

We were beach kids, sunshine kids. We did not know the properties of snow. I had never seen it fall, never knew how soft it felt at first, how easily it collapsed beneath feet, or the particular sound of that crunch. I never knew until then that snow made everything quiet, somehow silencing all the world's noise. (page 230)

Snow does make the world so muffled. I loved everything about this description. 

Hat mentions:

Sylvia would spend the next few afternoons pruning roses in a sun hat and casually pulling up weeds. (page 23, this same sun hat comes up on page 130 and 160)

She rested for a moment, hands on hips, looking around from beneath the wide brim of a straw hat... (page 115)

Inside were albums of black-and-white photographs of my grandparents in stylish hats and fur-lined coats...(page 141)

It was a man in a beach hat, an empty white bucket swinging from one hand. (page 194)

A man in a faded blue T-shirt and a wide-brimmed hat...(page 210, same hat referenced on 211)

The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton

In the near future, hurricanes are hitting Florida harder and more often. A young girl is born during the peak of one of those hurricanes and is named after the storm. And that's how we meet Wanda, the titular character in The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton. 

This is a sobering book on many fronts. What happens when municipalities run out of money to keep basic services running? What happens to families when phones stop working? How do you survive in a world with no solid ground? Climate change is real and happening right now and when do these stop being hypothetical questions and start being things we need to grapple with?

It's also beautifully written and the characters seem real and like you should be able to ask them to come over for dinner. I'm particularly fond of the biology professor who takes Wanda in and shows her how to survive. There's a weird magical element to the story I was not a huge fan of, but it doesn't come up all that often and it doesn't detract from the main message of the book, which is that we better start preparing because bad things are going to happen soon.

4.5/5 stars

Lines of note:

The truth is, Kirby's happiest when he's fixing things. Sometimes she worries that this is the reason he married her. (page 10)

Ha. Don't we all have this worry?

Now that she's gone, he allows himself to believe she was good at everything. That they would be unconditionally happy if only she were still here. When she died, he was beginning to think he barely knew her. Now that he's lived with her ghost for ten years, he is an expert. (page 136)

I just thought this paragraph on grief was evocative and moving.

Nursing a dying creature isn't always the kind thing to do. (page 187)

Oh, how it hurts to think about when you need to give up on certain people, places, and things.

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven 

The Glass Hotel

Sea of Tranquility is a hard book to describe. We follow multiple characters in various time periods and geographic locations. Edwin St. Andrew is the third son of a British noble who has been exiled to Canada in the early twentieth century, Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour on Earth in 2203, and Gaspery-Jacques Roberts is a detective in the far future who has been hired to solve a mystery. There are reappearances of characters from The Glass Hotel, so it was fun to think of this as part of the ESJM extended universe, like Taylor Jenkins Reid does. It is a standalone novel and you don't need to read The Glass Hotel to know what's going on, but they were fun Easter eggs. 

The writing in this book is divine. The pacing is spot on. There's a dog AND a cat. Her writing is effortless. The multiple storylines converge in a perfect way and it really rewards careful reading. 

I have a handful of quibbles with the book: the author substitute complaining about how hard her life on tour is a particular sort of whining that privileged people do that irritates me, the pandemic storyline was a little bit too on point, and time travel is not my favorite sci-fi trope, although I think she handled it really well here. But those quibbles do not overshadow my overall enjoyment of the book.

And, just like with all ESJM's books, I can't stop thinking about it days after I've finished it. There's something about the fact that we will all die and centuries from now, it won't matter how or when. I just keep looking around my house, a place I am so proud to call home, and wondering what will happen to all of it when I'm gone. 

4.5/5 stars

Lines of note:

Edwin is capable of action but prone to inertia. (page 5)

I think this one sentence describes me perfectly. I am Edwin.

Sometimes order can be relentless. (page 68)

Right? We had a friend in grad school whose house was immaculate. She had a big, dumb retriever named Thor and Thor got his paws washed and dried every time he came into the house. It was very stressful to be in her house, even though she was a lovely hostess and so very kind and obviously loved her dog very much.

"...I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we're living at the climax of the story. It's a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we're uniquely important, that we're living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it's ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world." (page 189)

One of the reasons that we never had children was because we really felt like it would be irresponsible to bring a child into a world where their future will never be as bright as ours were. Maybe it is narcissistic for us to feel this way, but we always thought we'd rather regret not having children instead of regretting having them.

Adulthood Rites (Xenogenesis #2) by Octavia E. Butler

Dawn

Adulthood Rites is the second in the Xenogenesis trilogy.  When we last left this world, Lilith had to cooperate with her alien captors in a number of ways to be able to return to Earth, including mating with them for the purposes of procreation. She has had children on Earth, but these children are "constructs," in that they resemble humans as children, but grow into the alien-form, Oankali, after they metamorphize. One of her sons, Akin, is kidnapped by human resisters who shun contact with the Oankali. By the time Akin has been rescued, he has formed bonds with the resisters and decides that humans should have the chance to start again with their own society away from Oankali interference. This book is mostly told from Akin's point of view, a switch to someone who is part-human, part-Oankali, and is in that very challenging place of feeling as if his identity is unclear and that he belongs nowhere.

The questions this book raises are so big. Are humans destined to destroy the entire race, either through violence or genetic mutations?  What rights do we have to control our genetics and reproductive rights? What is the "correct" level of assimilation to a new idea, culture, or agent? I have so many thoughts whirling about in my head based on this book and I don't even know where to start. I'll do my best to do justice to this book.

The parallels to colonialization and assimilation are just spot on. Someone invades your homeland and you have the choice to either assimilate with all the losses of culture and freedoms that come with that or you reject the colonizers' rights to your body and your land and become "terrorists." The relationships between those who have assimilated and those who have not become tense. The colonizers do not understand why anyone is sad or upset about this change of status because what they bring to the table should make everyone safer and healthier and better. The best thing about this book is that all of this (and more) is in there, but Butler never just says the thing.  She shows it through interactions and thoughts and is simply brilliant. 

One of the things that the Oankali has done to humans is made them sterile unless they mate with Oankali themselves. In light of what's going on with access to abortion, birth control, and general women's health care right now, this particular storyline seems so prophetic. The Oankali have done this because they want to control the genetic traits that kill people (cancers, etc.), but in doing so, they've created a community of people, specifically the resisters, who don't have a hope for the future. They cannot have children and the feeling that the future is not worth living for creates an unsustainable living situation for them. 

The biggest theme that I see throughout this book is about whether or not human beings are irredeemable. Should humans be given another chance with another planet? To be trustees of a planet that they have not contaminated with pollution and material goods? Should they be given a chance to reproduce naturally, with all the dangers and mutations that come along with that? Should they be given a chance to work together and not kill one another over resources, disagreements, or religion? Or are humans bound to just kill themselves somehow no matter what?

If you can't tell, I think this is brilliant. Just brilliant. 5/5 very enthusiastic stars

Line of note:
"What lesson is condescension supposed to teach me about this group of my people?"

He would not have spoken so bluntly if Lilith had been with him. She insisted on respect for adults. Dichaan, though, simply answered his questions as he had expected. "Teach them who you are. Now they only know what you are..." (page 206)