My Reading Month: August
So I have had a stop and start sort of reading month. I’ll be honest here – this month has flown by and between some crazy life changes and some crazy job stuff, I simply have not read all that much.
When my brain gets overloaded, I tend to gravitate towards podcasts and television instead of books. I’m not sure this is necessarily the best choice, as reading is certainly equally relaxing, but it also takes so much more effort and sometimes I just don’t have it in me (and lets be honest, sometimes trashy television feels SO good).
I do have one book to share with you all, which will be coming up in a upcoming post for other reasons, and I have a book I am in the middle of that I just find to be fascinating and weird and I want to talk about it!
Favorite Book: The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
This is one of those book club books that I would never have picked up on my own. While I do love science fiction and fantasy, alternate histories are just not my thing. This alternate history, which starts with a meteorite (not a meteor, as the protagonist often points out) crashed into Washington DC, wiping out President Dewey and the entire Eastern seaboard. This is not a spoiler as it literally happens in the first few pages.
What follows is a pretty interesting account of a greenhouse effect fueled space race towards Mars. What makes this book exceptional however is its focus on issues of structural gender and racial discrimination. This focus often makes parts of it hard to read, and it isn’t a fun space romp, but it does a wonderful job of highlighting these issues. In particular, Kowal does something I rarely see in fiction in that she focuses on how race and gender discrimination can intersect in ways that divide people who rationally should be united against a common cause.
Overall, this was a very quick read for its length, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Also, if you don’t mind mild spoilers, you can read the short story that inspired this book HERE
Most Interesting Current Read: S. By J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst
This book is not going to be up everyone’s street, as it takes some guidance to make sense of it, but it is worth mentioning anyway. S. is an interactive reading experience that combines a fictional book, The Ship of Theseus which is written by a fictional author of unknown identity whose pseudonym is V. M. Straka and is written IN by two students, Jennifer and Eric.
Their margin notes are in various colors and various time-frames and cover events surrounding their interaction with the book and search for the identity of V. M. Straka. Tucked into this book are all sorts of other items that might be clues, from napkins to postcards to a decoding wheel that apparently helps decode the footnotes in some chapter.
Confused? Don’t pick this book up. Intrigued? You might want to take a look. I am only halfway through my first pass, but am loving the fun that comes in trying to figure out the many different layers to this story.
Overall, I am feeling the reading lull at the moment, but I do hope that with the advent of fall, I pick up some as I miss it!
