A Fantastic Read

Recently I was texting with my son. We were sharing what we like to read. He asked me if I was familiar with Brandon Sanderson. I told him the name sounded familiar but that I had never read anything by him. For the most part, he is an author of fantasy. Until recently, I haven’t cared much for fantasy. My son knows that, so he mentioned there is a logic to the magic in his books. But more than anything, he writes good characters. I was sold. For me, great characters almost make the story. It is hard to write people the reader cares about without putting them in a good story.

So I asked my son to recommend a good starting place to read some Brandon Sanderson. He recommended a fantasy story but then remembered a science fiction novel that he had written, the first of a series. I am a big sci fi fan, not mindless pulp, but the kind that explores ideas and people struggling with those ideas. My son recommended Skyward. I looked it up on Goodreads, read the description, and immediately got the ebook from my library and started reading. I just finished it. Wow!

When I started reading it, I texted by son to say that it felt like Top Gun in space. The story is about a young girl who wants to be a pilot but has all sorts of obstacles in her way. And the characters! I loved them. Even the ones I didn’t like were real enough that I cared about them. I wanted to know more about these people. Like all great fiction, I felt like I had found new friends. And for a week, I kept coming back to those friends as much as I could.

Whenever I am reading a book, I often find areas that fall flat to me, places where I need to reread a passage to understand what it said. That never happened in this book. In fact, I couldn’t find anything that I didn’t like about this book. And now that I have finished it, I can’t wait to start reading the sequel — Starsight. In fact, I think I’ll go start now. Happy reading!

An Abundance of Stats

When I started reading Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez, I was excited. It was named the best business book of 2020 by McKinsey & Company. As I read the introduction, I became even more interested to learn what I wasn’t seeing about how women are being discriminated against in the name of neutral gender policies. And the book does not disappoint on the facts and illustrations. Unfortunately for me, the book bogs down a bit with the statistics, so it is taking me longer to read than I anticipated. I’ve read three chapters so far, and it has felt like a long sheet of statistics with prose holding them together. That makes it sound like I don’t like the book. I do. However, it could be written in a more engaging manner. Regardless, the knowledge it shares and the awakening it is stirring within me is worth the time invested so far.

Chapter 1 is entitled Can Snow-Clearing Be Sexist? It shows how prioritizing the largest roads is implicitly male biased. Most women drive less than men, take more public transportation, and walk much more. In one country (I don’t recall which), when they prioritized the smaller roads and sidewalks, municipal costs actually went down. Many more accidents happen on the smaller roads and sidewalks when they are not cleared. This illustrates how a more holistic view of resources not only is more women-friendly — it also saves money.

Chapter 2 is called Gender Neutral with Urinals. This centers around the idea of how simply making all restrooms in a building “gender neutral” works against women. Men end up using all the bathrooms while women tend to use exclusively the previously ladies-only restrooms. This is because the men’s rooms lack the female friendly features they need, such as a place to dispose of feminine hygiene products. Also, bathrooms are traditionally allocated the same square footage to men’s and women’s rooms. However, due to the smaller footprint of urinals, more men can be served by the same sized bathroom than women. In order to serve men and women equally, women’s rooms need to be allocated more space. I never knew or even considered this. Very informative and enlightening!

Chapter 3 is The Long Friday and highlights the differences in men’s and women’s responsibilities in caring for others and how this affects women’s careers negatively. This one came as no surprise, but the detailed statistics from around the world are eye-opening. There are some places making progress but many more that aren’t. There is a much room for the world to get better at this.

While I might like the book to be a bit more narrative, the content is fascinating and informative. I can see already how it is changing my view of the world and the problems in it. I expect I will learn even more as I continue to read and bring this knowledge to my personal and work lives.

Enjoyable Light Reading

Ernest Cline’s debut novel Ready Player One was a runaway bestseller when it was published in 2011. It combined video game and pop culture references with a wonderful story and vibrant characters. The author’s second novel Armada is in the same vein. Unfortunately, neither the story nor the characters are of the same quality as his first book.

Don’t get me wrong. I thoroughly enjoyed Armada. I couldn’t put it down, finishing it in only two days. However, the plot was The Last Starfighter meets Ender’s Game. I found it predictable. The author attempted to overcome this by actually referring to those two stories, but that was a bit too meta and didn’t really work for me.

The characters weren’t nearly as engaging as his debut. I didn’t spend enough time with most of them to build any kind of relationship or feeling for them. But, again, I still really enjoyed the book.

Like his first book, the author loads the story with 80s pop culture, video game, and science fiction references. Somehow many to most of them feel a bit tacked on and occasionally remote. I had to look up more than I did in his first book. But maybe that’s just me.

My bottom line for this novel is that it’s good enough. It is a light, fun, quick read. It didn’t challenge me or make me think. It was bubble gum for my reading life. And sometimes that’s all I’m looking for.

The Experience of Women

Last evening, I finished reading Red Clocks by Leni Zumas. It won the 2019 Oregon Book Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Neukom Award for Speculative Fiction. And for good reason, I think.

The story is a dystopian future in the vein of The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. In many ways, I prefer Red Clocks. This is mainly because it is much more accessible and hits much closer to the world we live in today. Atwood’s story takes place in a future where a conservative Christian coup has taken place and overthrown the government of the United States. The result is a society that subjugates women in the name of protecting them. It is certainly a scary prospect but feels a bit remote.

Zumas’ tale could take place any time in the next decade, should things go in that direction. No date is given but it feels like today with a few twists.

Two years ago the United States Congress ratified the Personhood Amendment, which gives the constitutional right to life, liberty, and property to a fertilized egg at the moment of conception. Abortion is now illegal in all fifty states. Abortion providers can be charged with second-degree murder, abortion seekers with conspiracy to commit murder. In vitro fertilization, too, is federally banned, because the amendment outlaws the transfer of embryos from laboratory to uterus. (The embryos can’t give their consent to be moved.)
Chapter 10, Red Clock by Leni Zumas

The story is about four women that are each dealing with challenges in their lives that are made more challenging by these laws. The magic is in the storytelling; the author never goes into a lengthy exposition about why these laws are wrong. The strength of the novel is in simply showing how these laws affect the women, individually and personally.

The girl slumps down against a green filing cabinet. Holds her head in both hands, knees up to her chest, rocking a little. “I just want it out of my body. I want to stop being infiltrated. God, please get this out of my body. Make this stop.” Rocking, rocking.

She is terrified, realizes the biographer….

Mattie is a kid, light boned and soft cheeked. She can’t even legally drive.

Four and a half months.

Of swelling and aching and burning and straining and worrying and waiting and feeling her body burst its banks. Of hiding from the stares in town, the questions at school. Of seeing the faces, each day, of her parents as they watch the grandchild who won’t be their grandchild be grown. Having to wonder, later on, where is the someone she grew.
Chapter 100, Red Clocks by Leni Zumas

This story helps to break the illusion that difficult questions like these are black and white. They affect real people whose welfare and future need to be taken into account.

The characters are compelling and fully human. This is exactly the kind of speculative fiction that I like most, taking a current possibility and extending it into a near future to explore what the consequences might be. The result is both entertaining and thought provoking. Thank you, Professor Zumas.

Digital Reading and Writing

I love to read. And my preferred method of reading is on my ereader. Currently I have a Kobo Aura ONE that I use. That’s the hardware. I don’t use the default Kobo software, though. It is good enough, but I found an open source project that I like even better. I was able to load it on my Kobo alongside the existing software. It’s called KOReader. Using this ereader software, I can read on my phone or my ereader, anywhere, any time. And I can queue up any number of books that I want to read. That way I have many choices for my next book when I finish the one I am reading. I also always have my books with me, on my phone or ereader. I try to use my down time to read rather than play games or surf social media.

Today, while I was surfing social media, I saw an ad on Facebook for an eInk tablet called reMarkable. Normally, I don’t click on Facebook ads, mostly because they usually aren’t anything I care about. But this was for a product that I am familiar with. I passed on the first version of the reMarkable tablet. It seemed to have all the flaws of a version one. But this ad was for the second iteration. I decided to click through and learn more.

It bills itself as the tool for reading and marking up PDF files. It also allows users to take notes digitally with an included pen. They even say they have given it the feel of writing on paper. In fact, they call this “digital paper”. You can take notes in your own handwriting and convert them to typed text with OCR. And all this syncs with your phone and computer. What it does not do is distract you with email, games, or social media. It sounded amazing and like something I would use. It is a little on the expensive side, but I decided to pre-order it.

It also serves as an ereader, reading epub files, so I was thinking that it could become my everyday ereader. I have a couple of magazine subscriptions that come with a PDF version of the print edition. I plan on reading those on the reMarkable tablet, so I was thinking maybe I could move all of my reading to it. I did some research and others are saying that it is a subpar ereader. When I searched to see if KOReader was available for it, I found that it is!

Now I am very excited to receive this device and see how it measures up to my plans for it. It won’t ship until September, so I have a bit of a wait. In the meantime, I’ll continue to read on my Kobo and take notes in my notebooks. Happy reading!