May 2021 Book Bites

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

• Favorite Bite:

All her life, she had learned that passion, like fire, was a dangerous thing. It so easily went out of control. It scaled walls and jumped over trenches. Sparks leapt like fleas and spread as rapidly; a breeze could carry embers for miles. Better to control that spark and pass it carefully from one generation to the next, like an Olympic torch. Or, perhaps, to tend it carefully like an eternal flame: a reminder of light and goodness that would never — could never — set anything ablaze. Carefully controlled. Domesticated. Happy in captivity. the key, she thought, was to avoid conflagration.

Mrs. Richardson in Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

• Perspective Rating: 8/10 I really enjoyed how motherhood is viewed in so many different ways. I think few books that I’ve read have such diversity of points of view.
• Emotional Rating: 8/10 A lot of moments resonated with me, there were moments when I really felt for the characters and where I could feel how hard the decisions they made truly were.
• Bites Rating: 6/10 Not a lot of quotable moments in this book, it was easy to read and a lot of it I just read through because I wanted to know more.
• Overall Rating: 7/10 This book is truly a great book and I think it’s valuable to read for everyone. The lower rating is perhaps indicative of the writing style, which was good but not one I’d consider memorable.

Obsidian Puma by Zoe Saadia

• Favorite Bite: None here, pretty much everything I annotated was because I was confused.
• Perspective Rating: 9/10 This is where the book shines because there are very few books that are set in Tenochtitlan or even pre-hispanic conquest. The information about this time period and the culture is really well researched.
• Emotional Rating: 2/10 I didn’t get to connect to the characters or the story too much. Perhaps it was the writing style or the way that the characters were just not fully developed but nothing really connected for me.
• Bites Rating: 1/10 I did not like the writing style and I was already confused enough with the story unfortunately.
• Overall Rating: 4/10 What is best about this book is the perspective. I wish there were more books with this perspective that were better written.

Archenemies by Marissa Meyer

• Favorite Bite:

Perhaps most troubling was that the Renegades had done little to counter the growing epidemic of drug abuse or the flourishing black market. If anything, they seemed at a loss as to how to fight an enemy that couldn’t be knocked out with punches and laser beams.

Archenemies by Marissa Meyer

• Perspective Rating: 6/10 There is some diversity in the characters, one of the main characters has two dads and there is also one character who is disabled. However, they are not the main characters and we don’t get much of what is happening from their point of view. They are mostly supportive and secondary characters that I wish got more of a spotlight. I also found that there were some social justice issues (like the drug abuse epidemic mentioned above) where it could have gone much further but it was almost like a passing thing. I wish Meyer would have gone further into these issues explaining how this world was managing (or failing) at doing so than just this. (Or just not include it at all!)
• Emotional Rating: 8/10 Not going to lie, I am attached to a lot of the characters now, on both sides! I am worried about them and want all of them to succeed but I know that’s not going to happen and oh the feelings!
• Bites Rating: 5/10 This is another book that was just super fast to read, not much was highlighted and I was honestly just devouring the book and didn’t stop to highlight things too much.
• Overall Rating: 6.33/10 Super entertaining book that did leave me hanging and wanting to read the next one. I think these books are very entertaining but do lack in substance sometimes. (Or perhaps the attempt at substance is just not enough so it becomes distracting)

Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman

• Favorite Bite:

“Trolls can smell rainbows, trolls can smell stars,” it whispered sadly. “Trolls can smell the dreams you dreamed before you were ever born. Come close to me and I’ll eat you life”

Troll Bridge in Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman

• Perspective Rating: 7/10 I don’t think these characters were particularly unique in the sense of perspective. Most of them were white men/boys encountering various types of fantastical creatures and situations. There was a variety of ages, from young kids to elderly characters so that was one place where there was some variety in perspectives, which I enjoyed.
• Emotional Rating: 7/10 At times it was difficult to connect to the main characters so some stories did flat for me. However, others were just excellent and I empathized with the character’s troubles and was able to dive deep into the story with them.
• Bites Rating: 7/10 It really depended on the story, some of them did have great phrases that I highlighted and annotated, while others were quick reads that I wanted to just keep reading. Nothing remarkable really.
• Overall Rating: 7/10 This book spans short works from the 80s and early 90s and were written for various types of magazines or books that were about a very specific type of story (fairy tale re-tellings or Lovecraft-inspired for example) so the stories can be hit or miss for pretty much anyone. I’d recommend it for people interested in a good variety of sci-fi, fantasy, and speculative fiction short stories.

Eric by Terry Pratchett

• Favorite Bite:

The bees of Death are big and black, they buzz low and somber, they keep their honey in combs of wax as white as altar candles. The honey is black as night, thick as sin and sweet as treacle.

Eric by Terry Pratchett

• Perspective Rating: 6/10 We are once again following Rincewind in this series and he ends up in some kind of time travel mess along with a young demonologist who thinks he has summoned a demon while he has in fact, gotten a wizard out of some parallel universe. We do get to visit an ancient culture that is a mix between the Inca and the Aztec but it has the Pratchett treatment so it’s a very different satirical take. The most interesting perspective is definitely Death, who we see at the very beginning as a beekeeper in his realm and well, his point of view is always one that gets to me.
• Emotional Rating: 4/10 Rincewind is not exactly my favorite character of the Discworld, but I did enjoy the parts of the book with Death and the Librarian which, even though they were few, they were so so great.
• Bites Rating: 8/10 Although this book was not one of my favorites of Discworld it still gave me a lot of laughs and had many great jokes and fun bits as well as parts that made me think about life and escape the current state of things.
• Overall Rating: 6/10 Discworld is a really fun series to pick up throughout the year. It’s guaranteed laughs and interesting characters that you never know what they’ll be doing next. While this was not my favorite book in the series it does give more of a glimpse into the Discworld so I loved it for that.

Empire of Ivory by Naomi Novik

• Favorite Bite:

We were inexpressibly stupid; we thought it was only a cold, you see.

Empire of Ivory by Naomi Novik

• Perspective Rating: 7/10 While this book is mainly told from the white, colonizer perspective, the value that Temeraire (dragon) brings is one that makes Laurence, a white colonizer, think more about his morality. In previous books the rights of dragons as sentient beings are discussed but in this one the very reality that was the slave trade at that time is front and center. This is fantasy but it grapples with historical facts and events and puts them in a different lens. If dragons were real, would slavery have changed? If people thought that dragons deserved rights and to be treated with more respect, why couldn’t black people be given the same treatment? While Novik doesn’t fully expand on all of these ideas, it is something that does bring a lot of value to this installment of the series.
• Emotional Rating: 8/10 To say that I am attached to the characters would be an understatement. I truly care about Temeraire, that stubborn dragon who only sees things in black and white and who is completely loyal to Laurence. Laurence is also one who has earned a place in my heart because of the growth he has achieved throughout the novels. He started out as a navy guy who didn’t have many attachments and now he’s not just loyal to his British empire but also to Temeraire and his chosen family with the aviation crew. The women in this series are also amazingly strong and I only wish that we had gotten this same story but with one of the women aviators! That would have been incredible.
• Bites Rating: 6/10 These books don’t have too much to annotate for me. Novik still does an amazing job at describing the fights, all these new terrains both at sea and on land.
• Overall Rating: 7/10 I am four books out of nine into this series and I’m just still so impressed at how the world building keeps on growing. We’ve now definitely diverged from the factual historical timeline so I can’t wait to see where Novik takes the series next. Also, what a cliffhanger!!! My heart can’t!

So there you have it, I read 6 books in the month of May! I have also been working on three other books throughout the month: The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, Disability Visibility by Alice Wong, and The Stand by Stephen King.

I’ve been thinking a bit more about how to work with this blog. I’m slowly but surely realizing that this is my own space to work with however I want so I don’t necessarily have to follow any real “rules.” Perhaps you’ll see a bit of a change in the month of June, the ratings I feel are not exactly working for me anymore so those will definitely change. Also the types of posts will likely be different, a bit more of book reviews than I’ve had so far. Apart from the books that I’m already working on, I hope to go through my unread books and see which ones I want to prioritize more during the summer (graphic novels/comics, nonfiction, continuing series, etc).

I hope your reading month went well! Let me know in the comments if you’ve read any of the books mentioned above or the ones I’m still reading.

Book Review — The Library of the Unwritten by A. J. Hackwith

Back in February of 2020 I had my last trip before [insert all.the.things]. I went to Portland and got to visit one of my favorite bookstores: Powell’s. At that time I had no idea it would be the last time in a while that I’d visit such an awesome bookstore so I didn’t buy too many books (if only I had known….). Still, I got one book purely because of the cover and a couple of key words on the back:

“head librarian” “Hell” “hero escapes” “author” were the words that jumped at me from the synopsis of the book.

I don’t normally buy books that I’m not looking for but this book just yelled to be picked up! Hell’s library, what’s in Hell’s library?! Is it evil books? Is it books by evil people? What?! I also don’t normally read synopses because I enjoy going into books not knowing much about the plot but this one claimed that this library housed unwritten works, now that’s intriguing! The main character would be the librarian in charge of these unwritten books and that a hero escapes so they have to get him back. With only a tiny bit of unease at stepping out of my comfort zone I bought the book. That was February 2020.

Jump to July 2020 and I figured it was about time to get back into reading since I was stuck at home with not much else to do… Boy it took me a while to get into the book. I don’t blame the book too much though! Middle of a you-know-what and my mental health wasn’t great so my attention span was lacking. I was reading about 20 pages here and there and then I left it for a couple of months until I finally finished it in January of 2021.

Although this book took a while to read I really truly enjoyed it! The story centers Claire, the head librarian of the Unwritten Library. This library is home to all the unfinished works by people on earth. You know, you write half a story and leave it there? Yeah, that story now lives in that library. All the main characters live in those shelves but sometimes they get out of their pages and become “real.” These characters are then put back into their unfinished books by the librarian. But, in one case, a hero escapes his book and manages to get out of the library altogether. Now Claire and Brevity (a retired muse) have to get him back into his book before he meets his author and havoc ensues.

But of course that’s not all! The other big big issue is that someone somewhere has discovered that the Devil’s Bible, written by Lucifer (you know, king of the underworld, head of all things evil, fallen archangel) is somewhere it shouldn’t be. Books are huge sources of power, demons are always going to the Unwritten library to read and borrow some of that power so it is imperative that this particular book doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. So, heaven is making sure they find the book to put it in the proper place and also demons are now after the book! Well, of course Claire and Beverly get mixed into this mystery of where the book is and …well… you’ll have to read the book to find out!

An aspect of this book I really enjoyed also was that we got to visit multiple other afterlife places: Heaven, Valhalla, a random pagan afterlife, etc. The way that one gets there isn’t easy for these characters since one is supposed to be a human soul (I kept forgetting that they were not entirely human throughout the whole book, also a side effect of stopping after a few pages and picking it up again weeks later I bet). There are many challenges and puzzles that they must solve at each turn so that was really interesting.

I highly recommend this first installment of Hell’s Library because not only is it for all book lovers and aspiring writers, it also includes LGBTQ characters. Multiple characters are sexually diverse and the issues that they face through the book (and in their backstories) are treated really well. I did not know this when I read the book but A. J. Hackwith is a queer fantasy and science fiction writer so it makes so much sense now that she was able to write about the identities of the characters so well.

I would like to continue reading this series and perhaps re-read this book now that my mind is more at ease. What do you think? Have you read this book? Do you have an unwritten book that you’ve yet to finish?

An unwritten book is nothing but pure potential, a soul’s potential is power [in Hell]. Power naturally, is all the creatures of Hell care about. They’d descend on the shelves like a swarm of locusts if we let them

The Library of the Unwritten by A. J. Hackwith

Pop the Popcorn and Watch This!

Pop the Popcorn! Here are two movies and a show (well, technically three versions of the same show) that I watched in the past couple of weeks and I really enjoyed!

Jakoby and Ward

On May 2nd I watched Bright, a fantasy film that is set in this alternate universe where fantastical creatures live alongside humans. It seems like there was a big battle between good and evil where the Orcs all banded with the evil side so they are now discriminated against by society. Our two main characters are two members of the LAPD: Daryl Ward, a human, and Nick Jakoby, an orc. The trouble here is that Jakoby is the first ever orc who is in the police force so, when Ward is shot point blank while on duty and Jakoby lets the perpetrator go (an orc), things get a bit complicated. In addition, there’s the situation where some group is trying to bring back the Dark Lord by using some old relics. Magic is seen as highly dangerous in this society so people want to get it under control. However, of course, magic = power so everyone is after these relics. The good about it was really the premise, it was very interesting and I really wanted to know more about how the world worked (there was a shot where a centaur was part of the police force, another where a dragon is seen flying somewhere in the background, etc). So many questions!!! Not many of them answered. Bright ends up trying to be funny while having a high stakes plot and it fell a bit flat for me in that sense. Although it is super fun and entertaining, I almost wish it had been darker (ha!). All in all it was pretty good, fun for an evening or afternoon with nothing to do!

The Circle – US, France, and Brazil

I also watched The Circle on Netflix, a reality show where contestants move into an apartment and from there will be able to communicate with other contestants via a social media app called The Circle. I like these types of shows (even if they might be slightly scripted), I think this one in particular was interesting because they have The Circle France and also The Circle Brazil so I was able to see a bit of those cultures and even learn some of their online slang. (I have studied French before so it was kinda cool that I could understand some things as the show went on without having to rely on the captions as much.) My favorite thing about these shows is that it’s probably one of the shows that can be set within the pandemic and it makes sense. Like they’ve been isolated so when they all finally meet for the finale it’s okay! (I actually have no idea when this show was filmed but yeah…) It’s just a great show to escape everything.

From left to right: Bubs, Captain Jang, Kim Tae-Ho, and Tiger Park

Space Sweepers on Netflix was so so so good! This is a South Korean film released this year, 2021. It is a space opera featuring a group of characters that I absolutely loved. This is set in a futuristic world where Earth is no longer able to sustain life and where a new world is orbiting in space. Of course, not everyone is able to go up and live there, they have to be chosen to become UTS Citizens. One of the many jobs that are available in this futuristic world is that of a Space Sweeper, basically there is a bunch of junk out floating in space, which can get off orbit and hit the UTS world or one of the many stations around that world. In this movie we follow Captain Jang and her crew as they sweep space for junk to sell (and basically beat everyone else at the game). One of the things I loved most about this movie is that there is great diversity, there are people who speak different languages (Spanish, Russian, French, English, Korean, etc.) Although there are parts of the story that didn’t exactly get explained, I didn’t care very much because I just enjoyed watching the characters react to all the things that they were encountering. I highly recommend it!

And those are the things I’ve watched lately that I felt were interesting enough to share. Other things I’ve been watching are:

• Grey’s Anatomy: Yeah, still making me cry after all these years….
• Station 19: Along with Grey’s, in order to get the full picture. Though I gotta say that this show is starting to be better than Grey’s? O.O
• The Masked Singer: This show is weird and I love it XD
• This Is Us: I mean…. No words, I just love this show.

Have you seen any of the movies or shows I mentioned? What have you been watching lately?

Pondering Stew: Motherhood in “Little Fires Everywhere” by Celeste Ng

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

To a parent, your child wasn’t just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once. You could see it every time you looked at her: layered in her face was the baby she’d been and the child she’d become and the adult she would grow up to be, and you saw them all simultaneously, like a 3-D image. It made your head spin. It was a place you could take refuge, if you knew how to get in. And each time you left it, each time your child passed out of your sight, you feared you might never be able to return to that place again.

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Pondering Stew is a type of post on my blog that comes when books leave me thinking, pondering, and stewing about something, a phrase, a theme, a character, a situation. Usually I will connect it to my life, a current event, a random other thing, or simply an idea. Hopefully some ideas resonate with you even if you haven’t read the book that triggered this thinking for me. I hope you enjoy it!

Little Fires Everywhere is a book that explores motherhood from various perspectives. The people who had her kids just as they planned with everything according to a plan. The one who didn’t exactly plan to have a child but had one and so she became a mother. A couple who wished more than anything to be parents but just couldn’t give birth to a child. (Plus many others).

The bond that exists between a parent, but specifically a mother, and a child can be one of the strongest emotional bonds out there. I myself have a good relationship with my mom, we don’t necessarily tell each other everything or are best of friends all the time, but we have a bond that is unlike anything that I have with anyone else. At the same time, I grew up for a couple of years with my grandmother and, at that time, I didn’t differentiate in my head that my grandma was not my mom. I loved her like a mom and she treated me and loved me like her child. Did that make the relationship with my biological mom any weaker? I don’t think so, it might have obscured it for a while but it didn’t break or disappear.

I thought about this a lot while reading this book. The women in the book are all concerned with what makes a mother the one true mom. Is it biology? Is it nurture? Something completely different? What about those who donate their eggs to couples so that they can have children? Are they mothers of that child? What about those who can’t take care of their child for whatever reason and give them up for adoption? Are they no longer mothers? Some of these questions might be easier to answer than others but each situation can be very complex.

Mia is, throughout the book, someone who seems to be a great mother. She listens to her child, treats her like a person, and doesn’t get into the illusion that Pearl is still a baby, she knows that her child is growing up and away from her, and that that is completely natural. At the same time, some judge her because she hasn’t given Pearl a permanent home and she doesn’t have enough money to purchase proper furniture or other luxuries. They are moving every couple of months due to Mia’s process for her art and Pearl is fairly isolated because of that. From her point of view, Pearl is happy that she will finally be able to make some permanent friends and settle down in this new town. And she also seems pretty solid on her relationship with her mother even if there are things that Mia will not talk about regarding her past. Regardless of this, their mother-daughter relationship is rock solid, there is no question that they trust and love each other above anything else, which is what helps them survive and continue living the way they do.

Mrs Richardson, on the other hand, looks like the perfect mother, she planned exactly when she’d have her kids and raised them in a permanent home with all the things they could possibly need. Her four children, however, seem a bit more aloof in their relationship with her. They see her as the adult in the house but they don’t confide in her or tell her about their troubles. Izzy especially, doesn’t quite know how to talk to her mom. Throughout the book Izzy feels like her mom singles her out more than her siblings and doesn’t know why. Even her siblings see her as the weird one in their family.

It’s a completely different dynamic between the two parent-child relationships. So, when Pearl starts to spend more time at the Richardson’s place, it’s not necessarily because of Mrs. Richardson, it is because of the home, the sitting around the living room watching TV, the having these traditions and things that the siblings do as part of their family routine. Pearl is seeing this other way of being a family and having these roots, the excess money to buy whatever one wants, not necessarily the relationships of the siblings and their mother. On the other hand, Izzy sees the relationship between Pearl and Mia and immediately wants to be a part of that. She realizes that Mia is someone who truly sees her and doesn’t treat her like a child who doesn’t measure up. And so, Izzy starts spending more time with Mia, volunteering to help with her art in any way, no payment needed. For a while there, Izzy and Pearl seem to have switched places as they experience different ways that mothers interact with their families.

All that being said, in life outside of the book, there are many people who don’t necessarily have the “traditional” mother figure in their lives. People, like me, who were brought up by relatives or have been adopted by other people, still have mother figures who taught them how to live and who love them as a mother would, and some in addition to their biological mothers. Although the figure of a mother is idealized in a lot of fictional settings (and often removed in order to give the main character complexity…ugh…), mother figures are found in other places during our lives. I remember Mrs Freeman, a teacher I had in Chicago for 4th grade when I barely spoke any English and who took me under her wing and taught me all the things that she could to help me survive. She was a maternal figure in a sense, there was a feeling of safety that I felt with her and she provided knowledge and tools that my mother couldn’t give me at the time. In other fictional stories, such as Matilda, mother figures come up from unexpected places. Some are never said to explicitly be mother figures, but they certainly play that role.

Today it is Mother’s Day in the United States where I live (though in my Mexican family, we celebrate May 10) and it is a time when we can reflect on that relationship. It is also important to acknowledge that there are people who don’t have these relationships or that the relationship isn’t a good one for them. I can talk today only on the context of my own experience: I can say that I love my mom and that our relationship is one that is complicated but also very loving. I also have a bit of grief for my grandmother who passed away many years ago, when I couldn’t quite understand or articulate what our relationship really was. And, even if not traditional, I think of all the women in my life who have served as mother figures in some way or another, both real and fictional: teachers, aunts, neighbors, authors, heroines, etc.

Are there multiple maternal figures that you have encountered throughout your life? How have they influenced the way you live/think/dream?

Pondering Stew: Isolation and Loneliness in “Beloved” by Toni Morrison

Pondering Stew is a new kind of post for my blog. Basically books will leave me thinking sometimes, pondering and stewing about something, a phrase, a theme, a character, a situation. Usually I will connect it to my life, a current event, a random other thing, or simply an idea. Hopefully some ideas resonate with you even if you haven’t read the book that I triggered this thinking for me. I hope you enjoy it!

Denver’s imagination produced its own hunger and its own food, which she badly needed because loneliness wore her out. Wore her out. Veiled and protected by the live green walls, she felt ripe and clear, and salvation was as easy as a wish.

Beloved by Tony Morrison (italics in original text)

This month I read Beloved with one of my book clubs. I had previously read it in high school for a class and even wrote an essay about the use of the word “veil” in the book. Now I could talk about so many things regarding Beloved; however, some of the things that I’ve been pondering and stewing over while reading this book and many days after I finished it are the themes of loneliness and isolation as well as the consequences of feeling those things for too long.

Beloved really had me thinking…

Beloved was inspired by a real event that involved Margaret Garner, a woman who killed her daughter rather than see her be enslaved again. Here are the characters from Beloved that you can keep in mind as we go through some of the thoughts I had:

• Sethe: A woman who is able to escape slavery with her children, three were sent ahead of her and then she gave birth to the last one as she was escaping. She is only able to spend 28 days with all her children in some semblance of happiness.
• Denver: The child Sethe gave birth to as she escaped. Denver is 17 years old when the narration of the book starts.
• Paul D: A man who lived in Sweet Home, the place Sethe ran away from. Paul D also escaped and has been traveling, trying to find the place where he belongs. He arrives the day that the book starts.

This book has each character carry their loneliness around them, like a blanket that they use for protection. Being lonely means that they don’t have to admit their feelings to other people, isolated they can almost sit next to each other and just be in that moment while shoving all other memories away. None of them make much of an effort to connect to other people either, and most people also leave them alone since they get that feeling that they don’t want to be bothered. In part it is that taboo about how Sethe killed her child and went to prison for it, so there is a reason why people stay away. Denver is also deeply affected by this and doesn’t even get to play with other kids her age, instead she imagines that she plays with her baby sister who was murdered and who now “haunts” her house. Her brothers are barely mentioned but what it does say in the book suggests that they were just waiting for the right moment to leave.

All the characters in Beloved had one or multiple traumatic events happen in their lives that they never really got to process or grieve. Paul D and Beloved both suffered incredible physical torture in the form of beatings, being chained in a box in the ground, and many other unmentionable things. All the characters have suffered mental traumas since they were born into slavery, being treated as objects sold and used however their masters wished, and overall suffered the lack of love and acknowledgement from others throughout their lives.

After more than a year of physical isolation that started in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, this book mirrored my own loneliness and isolation in some ways. Pre-pandemic I had a couple groups of people who I interacted with, coworkers, people I went to dance classes and events with, high school friends I saw from time to time. But now I don’t really see many of them at all or as often and I think, wow, I’ve lived in some form of isolation for a year (I’m not fully isolated since I do live with my parents and sister now, but my physical interactions with people face to face have decreased significantly) and this is nothing like what these characters are going through. Each of them were trapped in their own internal isolation and loneliness throughout their lives, it’s so heavy, so heartbreaking.

I imagine Denver, sitting in that space that the trees made and feeling that loneliness, that heaviness and not really knowing what to do with it. Mental health is not something that is prioritized for any of these characters, and of course, why would it be? They have other things to worry about! But nowadays, we can go to therapy, learn how to understand our emotions, learn the difference between being isolated vs being alone, increase our own self-awareness. Not that it’s easy! For me, it has taken me years to get to a point where I can recognize that “oh, I feel…. lonely” or “oh, I did that because I am afraid of what others think of me” and so on. I am still not great at it, but I am working on it. (Thanks to my therapist Ruth!). Thankfully, these characters were able to see through that blanket of loneliness and isolation and saw each other and themselves. Paul D saw a home in Sethe, Sethe saw a glimmer of hope as he extended a hand to her, and Denver saw herself and her own ability to learn and grow and be someone for herself.

Most of us go through these moments (short or long) feeling like we are alone and we’ll never feel anything else, but if anything, Beloved shows us that we can have hope if we turn to the person next to us, or the person within us, that self/soul/essence, that lights our fire and our passions. I encourage you to take a look in the mirror today for 60 seconds, a staring contest with yourself if you will, and see that fire within yourself. It is there, acknowledge it, love it, empower it, because it is what makes you unique and yourself and that is wonderful.

Those were some of the thoughts I’ve pondered and stewed over the past week or so. Beloved left me with many thoughts but these were the ones I went back to again and again. What if Sethe had had a therapist? What if Paul D had talked to someone about his traumas? They didn’t have the means or the access, and many other people still don’t have means or access to mental health help nowadays. But, what if we all did? All of us who need that help could all become self-aware and might be able to see where our true passions lie and that we are truly capable of doing it and achieving our dreams. What if…?

What do you think? Have you felt any of these things before? Also, did you do the mirror challenge? How did it go? Let me know in the comments!

Wyrd and Wonder 2021 — A month-long fantasy adventure

I was very excited when I found out about the Wyrd and Wonder challenge for May! This challenge is hosted by Lisa, Jorie and Imyril and it basically entails consuming fantasy stories in any format. It looks super chill and right up my alley. I might do a couple of prompts here and there but overall I love this challenge because I haven’t read much fantasy in the past year or so and I’d love to get back into reading some of my favorite fantasy authors. I also hope to watch some movies and perhaps take some photos for my instagram.

Here’s my current list of books that I do plan on reading:

• Eric by Terry Pratchett is part of the Discworld series. I have been reading the Discworld books for a few years now and I just take it suuuuper sloooooow. I just love savoring these books and taking my time with the series. (In fact, that might be the case with the books written by my favorite authors.
• Empire of Ivory by Naomi Novik is the 4th installment in the Temeraire series. This series is so fun! Historical Fantasy with dragons and battles and amazing characters (both human and dragons), just a lot of fun.
• Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman is a short story collection that I actually started in April but didn’t finish it. So far I was really enjoying it though so it will be good to get back into it.
• Archenemies by Marissa Meyer is the second book in the Renegades series. I read Archenemies in March and it was a quick read and a lot of fun. I’ve really enjoyed all of Meyer’s fairy tale re-tellings and her take on superheroes is really unique and fun.
• The Stand by Stephen King is not pictured because I haven’t picked it up yet but I will be starting that this month as well for a buddy read with a friend. We will be taking it super slow though so I don’t anticipate finishing it in May.

There are other books that I’ll also be reading but those are not in the fantasy realm so I am not mentioning those here. I will update as I read them though!

All in all I’m very excited for a May full of fantasy, magic, and fun reading!

IMAGE CREDIT: Banner by imyril; images by Svetlana Alyuk on 123RF.com

April 2021 Book Bites

April 2021. Last time I posted one of these posts it was 2018, that does not escape me. It is cliche but life happened and got in the way of me working on the blog like I wanted to. And then I didn’t feel like reading much during the pandemic so not a lot to write about. Then, finally, a couple of months ago I started reading and joining book clubs (virtually) and the urge to get back to blogging came back with that. So, I am here again, finishing up posts that I started back in 2018 and working on new ones. As we know that life can be complicated and full of twists and turns, all I can promise is that as long as I am having fun with the blog I’ll continue with it. So, let’s remember how it was that I rated books:

1. Perspective Rating: Does this book show me different perspectives? This score is all about diverse points of view!
2. Emotional Rating: Does this book tug at my heartstrings? Does it make me sad, angry, inspired, emotional in any way? Of course, emotions could go from me loving the book to completely hating it so this rating can be complex depending on the book.
3. Bites Rating: This is all about annotation and language? Did I have to stop and savor certain lines or passages? Was it confusing? Simple? Complex? The more I highlight and have trouble picking one bite for the review/post the better the score.
4. Overall Rating: Average of the above three ratings.

Let’s get started!

The first book I read this month was Such A Fun Age by Kiley Reid. I was supposed to read this last year but never got around to it. This book was very different from my normal reads, a contemporary book with a 20-some year old who works as a babysitter and doesn’t quite have a plan on what to do with her life (as many of her friends and family members are quick to tell her). There is a lot of social commentary on racial bias, the white hero complex, career expectations, and self judgement about pursuing a fulfilling career vs a profitable one.

Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid

• Favorite Bite:

But there was something about the actual work, the practice of caring for a small unstructured person, that left Emira feeling smart and in control. There was the gratifying reflex of being good at your job, and even better was the delightful good fortune of having a job you wanted to be good at.

Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid

• Perspective Rating: 8/10 This book did have a different perspective from my own from Emira’s point of view as well as the point of view of a nanny of color taking care of white children. It’s a difficult topic to breach and at times it did feel like we got more from the white savior’s point of view than from Emira’s. Especially the ending where things were wrapped up a bit too fast and focused more on Mrs Chamberlain than Emira.
• Emotional Rating: 7/10 A lot of this book definitely made me feel angry. Angry at the way people treat nannies and caretakers. Nannies and caretakers tend to be mostly women of color and they don’t get healthcare or other benefits a lot of the time, mostly because it’s a system that is set up by each family. It left me with a lot of unanswered questions, which was probably the point but I also lacked some more depth at the end.
• Bites Rating: 4/10 I highlighted exactly nothing of this book. It was easy to read, nothing complicated, but also nothing stood out for me.
• Overall Rating: 6.33/10 It was a good book, I wanted to know more about the story but a lot of it was filled with microaggressions towards the main character. A lot of the time I found myself frustrated with all of the characters and rolling my eyes at the decisions they were making. The only character who was enjoyable in this book was Briar, the toddler. That being said, it did open my eyes to the world of nannies and the struggles that they face so that was definitely valuable for me.

The second book I read in April was a manga: Himouto! Umaru-chan Vol.1 by Sankaku Head. I got this book at Barnes and Noble where they had set up a blind date with a manga, which seemed like an exciting prospect. I am so glad that this was a fast read because I did not like it XD The book centers a brother and sister, the brother works a full time job while the sister (Umaru-chan) goes to high school, is practically perfect, beautiful girl, but then we find out that she basically makes zero effort, she’s just naturally gifted. She also just complains and emotionally manipulates her brother to get all the things she wants. I mostly felt bad for him and the way he enabled her all the time.

Himouto! Umaru-chan Vol.1 by Sankaku Head

• Favorite Bite:

My sixteen-year-old sister is throwing a temper tantrum over a manga… this is…not good!!! She’s my responsibility…! Umaru’s been living in my apartment for a year now… and she just gets lazier and more spoiled by the day!! At this rate she’ll never be able to make it in the real world!!

Himouto! Umaru-chan Vol.1 by Sankaku Head

• Perspective Rating: 3/10 It gets points for being set in Japan so you do get some cultural references. Other than that I can’t think of much else to give it points regarding perspective.
• Emotional Rating: 3/10 If frustration counts then yeah I was very frustrated. The main character was so uninspiring. And I think this is supposed to be a comedic book, but I guess I do not like this type of comedy. Sigh…
• Bites Rating: 2/10 Okay so it’s a manga so it might be a bit more difficult to find good lines and such. I also don’t read many manga so it’s hard to know how to annotate them. I mostly just read them straight through so perhaps an unfair rating here. Still, I was not impressed.
• Overall Rating: 2.66 Yeah… not the best. Needless to say, I will not continue with the series. I did hear there was an anime series but can’t say that I’m inspired to watch it either.

Throughout the month I also read Beloved by Toni Morrison. What a change of pace! This is actually a book I read when I was in high school. Needless to say I have a different life perspective now and I think I got way more out of it. I’m working on a post just for Beloved so I’ll update this post once that is up. The book is about Sethe, a woman who escapes slavery while pregnant. She is able to get to her children who were sent ahead of her to safety and now live with her mother in law. Then, merely 28 days after she arrives with them, she sees that some white men have found her and want to take her back, which leads her to killing one of her children. The book switches perspectives between the characters and from the present time, years after she killed her child, to the time she was still enslaved, as well as her journey as she escaped. A very complex, beautiful, and heartbreaking book.

Beloved by Toni Morrison

• Favorite Bite:

Their skirts flew like wings and their skin turned pewter in the cold and dying light.

Beloved by Toni Morrison

• Perspective Rating: 10/10 This is a very unique perspective. Toni Morrison describes in the introduction that this book was inspired by a real event where a Sethe killed her child in order to keep her from slavery. She’s also able to immerse the reader in the memories of the characters. We get to go into Paul D, Denver, Sethe, and Beloved’s minds and memories, some of which are fuzzy and sometimes overwhelming.
• Emotional Rating: 9/10 I was overwhelmed a lot of times with this book. It’s a very heavy book that doesn’t let one take a breath easily. One should take this book slooooooow. I read it at night before bed, just 20 pgs or so each time and that worked for me.
• Bites Rating: 10/10 I mean this book is just beautifully written. Some sentences I just needed to stop and think about the passage or re-read the sentence in order to let the words sink in. Sometimes sentences would have deeper meanings and would reference things from the past in obscure ways so it definitely made the reader work (I enjoy that in books!).
• Overall Rating: 9.66 Beloved is really a great book, the first in the Beloved Trilogy. I have also read the second book in the trilogy, Jazz and I enjoyed that one a tad more (perhaps it was because it’s a bit less violent and more psychological). I would like to re-read Jazz and then finish up the trilogy with Paradise (eventually).

The next three books I read during Dewey’s 24-hr Readathon, you can check out that post here. Either way, the ratings I gave there were only for Goodreads so let’s see how they stack up in terms of the Bites of Books ratings.

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

• Favorite Bite:

I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance. I loved a few of my teachers. But I cannot say that I truly believed any of them.

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

• Perspective Rating: 10/10 Black voices have often been silenced and listening to a black man tell his life story and point of view via audiobook was incredibly powerful. I highly recommend you listen to this audiobook because it really adds to the experience.
• Emotional Rating: 10/10 This book is a perfect balance of hard truths being put on the table while inviting for some hope and light at the end of the tunnel. Society has racist roots, there’s no way around it, we still live in a society that treats black people a less than. What we can do now is listen to black people, believe them, support them in every way we can.
• Bites Rating: 10/10 I listened to this book so I couldn’t annotate it. However, I found myself listening hard, really taking in his words and pausing and thinking about a couple of passages. The book also sounds at times like spoken word, there’s a rhythm to his words that is really quite beautiful.

I also read The Duke and I by Julia Quinn. I don’t normally read romance but I watched the Netflix show Bridgerton and I got curious. NOTE: There should be trigger warnings for the show and the book for sexual assault. The book is about a 20-something lady, Daphne, who is in search of a husband but isn’t having a lot of good prospects. Meanwhile she meets a Duke, Simon, who is set on never wanting to marry. They come up with a plot to seem interested in each other in order to bring better prospects for Daphne and keep the mothers and young ladies away from Simon.

The Duke and I by Julia Quinn + Seiko

• Favorite Bite:

There were always whispers. And whispers, if left unchecked, could quickly grow into roars.

The Duke and I by Julia Quinn

• Perspective Rating: 2/10 I mean…. Regency romance… nothing new or unexpected for here for me.
• Emotional Rating: 4/10 I will give this book that it was fun to read, minus the sexual assault, which is near the end of the book, everything after that was just …..sigh…..
• Bites Rating: 4/10 The writing was easy to read, nothing too impressive or complicated. I did not annotate the book at all and there are no passages that stand out to me.
• Overall Rating: 3.33/10 Yeah overall this book wasn’t amazing but it was entertaining. It’s junk food if you will. I didn’t suffer reading it, it was just not out of this world. I will continue reading the series since I bought them impulsively so I guess you’ll see updates about that eventually.

The last book I finished this month was The Rain God by Arturo Islas. This book was really wonderful and heartbreaking in so many ways. It is not often that I find books detailing what it is to be part of a Mexican family living in the US. Although my family’s situation is different, I did identify with a lot of the issues described in the book. It follows the Angel family, from the grandmother, Mama Chona, to her grandson Miguel Chico and their life (and death) experiences.

The Rain God by Arturo Islas

• Favorite Bite:

As his hands reached for the pain in his chest, El Compa heard only the buzzing of a lone cicada sending out its love signal in the distance toward the poor people’s cemetery.

The Rain God by Arturo Islas

• Perspective Rating: 10/10 It is rare that I see so much of myself, my family, my culture in a book. Unfortunately books with this point of view are not often popular or given a lot of publicity.
• Emotional Rating: 10/10 This book hit me emotionally in so many ways! Not all of it was comfortable and not all of it was nice and happy feelings. In fact, most of it was uncomfortable and challenged a lot of customs and beliefs that permeate the Mexican culture.
• Bites Rating: 10/10 I lucked out because this book was already heavily annotated when I purchased it from a thrift store. And I say that I lucked out because I found myself agreeing and disagreeing with a lot of the annotations the previous owner had made. Both in understanding of the text as well as in what was annotated. There were even some parts of the book that I read out loud to my family and that is something I can safely say I’ve never done before.
• Overall Rating: 10/10 This book might be one of my favorites of the year.

Have you read any of the books that I mentioned here? What was your favorite book you read this month?

And that was April! I read 6 books in a month! I am on a roll right now with my reading and I’m looking forward to what will come next in May. Stay tuned for a TBR and other May plans 🙂