I stayed up late reading last night, Annalee Newitz‘s _The Future of Another Timeline_, which I am simultaneously finding really compelling and beautifully written, and also somewhat hard to read, in the same way that Handmaid’s Tale is hard to read, because some things about how women and nonbinary folks are treated in this world are so terrible that I think I mostly cope by not thinking about it most of the time.
I’m a little over halfway through now, and I think this is one of those books that people are going to want to include in syllabi for women & gender studies classes — if you like The Handmaid’s Tale or The Power, definitely check this one out. It came out in 2019, and I think that probably did it a disservice, because then the pandemic, and so I don’t think it had a chance to build up the buzz it deserved. Spread the word, folks.
I’ve also recently read Emily St. John Mandel’s _Sea of Tranquility_, which was a really funny reading experience. The protagonist is someone who’s written a book about a pandemic, see, and then there was an actual pandemic, and so the book got vastly popular and got turned into a TV show, and so she’s on book tour through this novel…
…and as you’re reading, you suddenly realize that even though the book she wrote is called Marienbad, it’s actually Station Eleven, the novel Mandel wrote about a pandemic, just before we were hit with an actual pandemic, which got turned into a TV show that Kevin and I are planning to watch soon — there are references that I suddenly realized were to this book I’d read, and even pages quoting from it at one point, and that was all quite funny, in a meta sort of way.
It’s also lovely writing, and both books involve time travel, oddly enough, so I guess I’m on an accidental time travel kick right now, though they handle them VERY differently.
Anyway, I stayed up late reading, and then I ran errands, so I’m rather slow on starting my actual work for the day, but I’m going to try to stay off FB for a while and work instead now. Here is a bunny and some peach blossoms to keep you springy company in the meantime.