LHC #54: “The Underground Railroad” by Colson Whitehead. The library has a lot of copies. I might not have got it out if I’d realized it’s an Oprah book club pick. This was a good example of that FSF tenet that you can have one unbelievable element. There was one section that was dead boring (when she had a job in the town), but the rest was good. There wasn’t as much past perfect tense as I normally like, and I feel like that was an intentional choice.
LHC #55: “The Emerald Circus” by Jane Yolen. Because Jane Yolen and circus. I’ve read at least one other book by her, and this, it was a delight. I devoured it.
“A Brightness Long Ago” by Guy Gavriel Kay. Ed got it for his birthday. He said it was good, but maybe not GGK’s best. I liked the structure. I need to find a resource online about all the little links between GGK books, because the ending of this one had some I knew and some I felt like I was missing. I guess if I’d read them multiple times that would be no problem for me. I just remember the time my friend Nadine pointed out that a bunch of characters from Fionavar Tapestry wandered through Ysabel, and I was like “What?” And I think I never even finished my reread of those…
LHC #56: “Lilith’s Brood” by Octavia Butler. Three books in one really. I was a little nervous about the size (748 pages) and the hype, but I sat down on an evening when I was exhausted and read the first 80 pages and knew I was going to be fine. I found the human interactions a little too much like the worst parts of evolutionary psychology, but the aliens were fantastic. I loved how they were so confident and made some obvious mistakes. I read an analysis (I went looking for the publication dates of the three volumes and went down a rabbit hole) arguing it was all an allegory about slavery, but I’m not sure I buy that.