Kindred

Apparently this 2009 book by Octavia Butler (1947-2006) has been recently reissued and I saw reviews that caught my attention. A long time ago, I read Butler's Parable of the Sower about a post-apocolyptic world with a hyperempathic teen as the protagonist. Butler was awarded a MacArthur "Genius" grant and the PEN West Lifetime Achievement Award. 

In this book, set alternately in 1976 and the early 1800's, Dana, a black woman is married to a white man, Kevin, and they gave just moved to a new home. While unpacking books, Dana's world disappears and she finds herself in some woods and sees a young boy, Rufus, drowning in the nearby river. She saves him but is confronted by the boy's father holding a rifle. She quickly realizes that this is nowhere she knows and, it turns out, no time that she knows. Just as suddenly, she is back in her own home dazed and confused. Within the next several weeks, she is "called" by Rufus whenever he is in mortal danger. She always manages to save his life, having determined from entries in the family bible that he is in fact one of her ancestors. But with every trip to the antebellum south (Maryland), she is put in mortal danger because she is black. Each trip takes longer in the past time--from hours, to weeks, to months-- but is only a matter or minutes, hours or days in the present. At one point, Kevin is holding her hand when she is called and he gets left behind--for 5 years in the past and over a week in the present. Rufus knows his life is dependent on Dana and yet he cannot entirely overcome the views and behaviors that surround him and, at one point, he has Dana whipped for disobeying him. This was in many ways a hard book to read because of the terrible mistreatment of black people, but Butler is a compelling writer and it was also hard to put down. 

"‘[Her] evocative, often troubling, novels explore far-reaching issues of race, sex, power and, ultimately, what it means to be human’ New York Times." (from her website). Also reviews from Kirkus, (of the new paperback edition),  Publishers Weekly (review of the graphic novel adaptation), NPR interviews the creators of the graphic novel adaptation.

The Order

Just what I needed, after reading several more demanding books, was this fast moving thriller about a plot to take over the papacy by an ultra-conservative semi-secret society. I have read a couple of other books by Daniel Silva--the first in the "Gabriel Allon series" The Kill Artist, and a later one in the series, The English Girl, both of which I enjoyed. This is the 20th book in the series, and although it helps to have some familiarity with the series just for character development purposes, I found this book no less compelling in spite of not reading them in order or in great numbers. Gabriel has become the director general of Israeli Intelligence services and so works constantly. His wife, Chiara, must plot with the Prime Minister and Gabriel's co-workers to engineer a much needed vacation in Venice with their two young children. The children's maternal grandparents also live there, giving Gabriel and Chiara the possibility of time alone as well. But fate or bad actors intervene when the Pope suddenly dies and Archbishop Luigi Donati, the Pope's devoted private secretary, comes to Allon with his suspicions of foul play.  The Swiss guard who normally stood outside the Pope's quarters has disappeared as has a letter the Pope was in the process of writing to Gabriel Allon.  "'While researching in the Vatican Secret Archives, I came upon a most remarkable book . . . ,' the pope begins his letter to Allon, and the whereabouts of that book--the suppressed Gospel of Pontius Pilate, in which the Roman prelate contradicts the New Testament's version of the events leading up to the crucifixion of Jesus--drive the action here, as Allon and Donati track the secretive Order of St. Helena, a far-right Catholic society with a plan to hijack the papacy (think The Manchurian Candidate). Can Allon both save the Catholic Church and, with an assist from Pontius Pilate, help to undo the church's legacy of anti-Semitism?" (Booklist)

Kirkus calls it "Engaging and deftly paced." I call it perfect pandemic reading!

Exhalations: Stories

Highly lauded science fiction author Ted Chiang has put together a provocative collection of short stories and novellas in this book.  Chiang most famously Stories of Your Life and Others, which was the basis for the movie Arrival. Covering everything from time travel to species extinction to augmented memory technology, we are prodded to reconsider ideas and values we currently cling to and challenged to consider new ones to fit a changing world. My book group read this for our December selection. I personally found some stories more engaging than others. We decided to focus our discussion primarily on the story "The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling," which generated thoughtful and often deeply felt discussion. These did not feel like a most science fiction I have read in book length, where there is a plot line that you follow to conclusion. The entries seemed to raise more questions than they answered.

His stories have won all the big name prizes--Hugos, Nebulas, etc.-- and critical reviews are almost unanimously glowing.

The Guardian: "The emotional and the cerebral are expertly balanced in these meditations on the mysteries of existence." Read this review to get a brief overview of each of the stories and the reviewer's assessment of their strengths and weaknesses.

The New Yorker: Chiang explores "conventional tropes of science fiction in highly unconventional ways." This reviewer had different ideas about which stories were most noteworthy, so also worth a read.

NPR: Chiang writes often (almost always) with an understanding that nothing we do, nothing he does, nothing any of his characters do, can change that. Consequence comes of every choice, of every breath (the entire point of Exhalation), ..."Nothing erases the past," says the narrator. "There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough."

Kirkus:  "Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them..."

Washington Post: "Chiang’s stories are uniformly notable for a fusion of pure intellect and molten emotion. At the core of each is some deep conceptual notion rich with arcane metaphysical or scientific allure. But surrounding each novum is a narrative of refined human sensitivity and soulfulness that symbolically reifies the ideas. While this combination represents the ideal definition and practice of all science fiction, it’s seldom achieved."

Catfishing on CatNet

Not sure how I came to read this YA novel by Naomi Kritzer, but I enjoyed it. Catfishing on CatNet won the Minnesota Book Award , the Edgar Award, and the Lodestar... Award for best YA, and was a Finalist for the Nebula, Locus, and ITW Thriller Awards.

Our protagonist, 16-year-old Steph, has been on the run with her mother since she can remember. Her father, according to Steph's mother, is dangerously abusive, Steph never gets to stay in a school more than a few months, which makes it hard to establish or keep friends. Her friends are all on CatNet, an online chat room where the moderator, Cheshire Cat, especially likes people to post cute cat pictures. What Steph finds out--that no one else in the chat room knows--is that the moderator is a sentient AI.

"My two favorite things to do with my time are helping people and looking at cat pictures. I particularly like helping people who take lots of cat pictures for me. I have a fair amount of time to allocate: I don’t have a body, so I don’t have to sleep or eat. I am not sure whether I think faster than humans think, but reading is a very different experience for me than it is for humans. To put knowledge in their brains, humans have to pull it in through their eyes or ears, whereas I can just access any knowledge that’s stored online. 

Admittedly, it is easy to overlook knowledge that I technically have possession of because I’m not thinking about it in the moment. Also, having to access to knowledge doesn’t always mean understanding things.  

I do not entirely understand people."

Steph's mom has always cautioned that they must never do anything to draw attention. A classroom prank, aided by her chat room friends and a couple of new found school pals, involves re-programming the school's sex-ed robot--which spirals out of control and gets picked up by more than the local papers. When it appears that Steph's stalker father is beginning to close in, Cheshire Cat decides to help Steph. Then suddenly Cheshire Cat is offline and Steph must reveal's it's secret identity to her online friends  and rely on their help in real life to escape. Publisher's Weekly says of this book, "An entertaining, heart-filled exploration of today's online existence and privacy concerns." Kirkus praises the book by concluding, "Wickedly funny and thrilling in turns; perfect for readers coming-of-age online. " NPR's reviewer also raved about the book and noted, "Steph's life is the stuff of made-for-TV drama, but despite that, she feels deeply relatable and accessible as a character. We meet her at a moment when she realizes that she should be asking more questions about her life and begins throwing rocks at the fence that surrounds her, testing its strength. We also get occasional passages from CheshireCat's point of view, and they manage to be simultaneously alarming and affable, acting with a shocking boldness and then wringing their virtual hands, wondering if they've done the right thing. This story heralds a coming of age for both its human and AI protagonists, and the parallels and differences are illuminating."

Highly recommended for teens and adults.