Books Read: May 2022

May, a month I normally love, but this month involved air travel for the first time since November 2019, which I found stressful, and very cool and wet weather. So I read, as one is wont to do in order to calm nerves and lose oneself.

Saga issues #55-58

I traveled this month via plane for the first time since November 2019 and didn’t feel like reading my novel on the way home, so checked out the newest issues of Saga on Hoopla. This series took a long break after a huge cliff hanger and it was good to see it come back and I do like they way they’ve picked it up. I won’t spoil anything, but I will say that the daughter continuing the narration of her own story is one of the things I like best about this series.

(Note: I really don’t know where to link to single issues of a comic series, so you’ll notice there is no link here. But it’s by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples.)

The Peripheral

I first read The Peripheral in the summer of 2017 and I’m not usually a rereader, but there was something about the concept of The Jackpot, especially now given world events, that pulled me back into the book. As Flynne slowly makes her way through figuring out how things work with different timelines and her ability to go into the future, I was thinking about what was to come in her timeline a lot. This is still a great read, still fast moving and action packed, but it’s also got the added extra layer of making me think long and hard about where we’re at today in history and where we may be going.

The Wave in the Mind

I’ve started spending the first half hour or so after I get out of bed with a nonficiton book, it gets my mind going in a more focused way than jumping online and it’s been good for starting my day in a calm, relaxed mood. This collection of essays by Ursula K. Le Guin was a page turner for me, I loved so many of them. She talks about writing, readers, and a wide range of opinions on various topics. I wrote down many quotes in my journal as I read, I especially loved the way in which she talks about imagination and uses that word instead of creativity (what a great idea!).

The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. (From the essay A War Without End)

Little Bird Volume 1

Another comic I grabbed on Hoopla that was on my list because it made some award lists, and I’m honestly still not sure what I think of it. We follow Little Bird as she sets out to figure out how to survive living in Canada in a time when a theocracy is ruling and the native ideas of land and life are being surpressed and, often, killed off. It’s quite violent and that may not be my thing in comics, a bit too much blood and guts in the drawings at times for my tastes, but the ideas are intriguing and I’m thinking about them in relation to how we treat native people currently.

Until the Last of Me

Book two of the Take Them To The Stars series and as we move forward in the story, following Mia and her daughter Lola, we also get a larger view into the life and world of the trackers trying to kill them. I didn’t enjoy this story as much as the first novel in the series, but it’s really interesting how the author uses actual events from history and wraps his story around them. In this one we follow the Voyager missions as they launch and start to document our solar system. And Mia and Lola, while at odds at times as mothers and daughters can be, start to figure out more about how to fulfill their mission.

Violeta

If there’s one thing you can count on in an Isabel Allende book, it’s that there will be a lot of drama. I hadn’t read her since college when I read The House of the Spirits in Spanish, but I saw a new book of hers and felt like a bit of a Latin American telenovela was right for me at this time. Violeta is born in 1920 and she tells her entire life story and, as expected, a lot happens. Allende loves to set things in Chile and she doesn’t shy away from the difficult parts of that country’s history, so we see it all through Violeta’s point of view and her life.