annihilation.

Title: Annihilation: A Novel

Author: Jeff VanderMeer

Why Read: 

Miles recommended it to me, and my friend Laura (and her husband Kevin) both read and loved it.

There's so much going on in this book that it's difficult to really talk about it. When another friend asked what it was about, I summed it up by saying "It's about these 4 women scientists (although, really, it's more about the biologist) who go into this area that's become supernatural, and they're documenting what happens." And it's about so much more than that, but how do you describe it? Oh, brackish.

Either way, it's good. It's sci-fi, but the kind of sci-fi that people who don't like sci-fi would like. Maybe like the TV show Lost, except that I only watched like 3 episodes of that. And at like 2/3rds of the way through, you find out why it's called Annihilation. (Such a good reveal too!) And there's two more books in the series, which I hear are also quite good.

between the world and me.

Title: Between the World and Me

Author: Ta-Nehisi Coates

Why Read: 

“I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.”

This one has been on my radar for a while, and after listening to an episode of This American Life, I remembered that I'd been meaning to read his book. (The segment is fun to listen to, pretty different from reading the book, though.)

The book is a good read. A difficult read, even though the book is short. As previously (and previously) mentioned on this blog, I do like an epistolary book - and this qualifies - it's a letter to his teenage son about his own experiences growing up Black in America, intertwined with a stories from Black American history. It's about how how much we've changed as a society, and how much we haven't, and what that means when we look at current events.

It is naive to be saddened by recent events and think that it's the beginning of tumultuous times. When in reality, these kinds of things have always been happening, we just didn't hear about them in the news; mainstream (white) society didn't care. It was normal. So here's to change, realizing that it takes time for things to change.