The time has arrived, I’ve been looking forward to The Future is Queer book club since we hatched the idea late last year. What better way to celebrate Pride than to focus on some speculative fiction by and about LGBTQ folks. Whether you read one or all four of our options, I hope you find something below that sparks your interest so we can continue to enjoy talking about books together. On to the boilerplate: ground rules remain the same as they always have. For […]
Incredibly timely, CBRbookclub is two for two this year in books that are unexpectedly relevant
An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon
The themes of gender identity and the LGBTQ+ spectrum were always going to be relevant for Pride month and An Unkindness of Ghosts was thoughtfully chosen for this book club. However, current events have given an added layer of pertinence. Earlier this year, the CBR Book Club had chosen Station Eleven and then we found ourselves in a pandemic. This month we are seeing protesting to change a racist police system (and institutionalized racism) and An Unkindness of Ghosts has an outright rebellion against the […]
Too Much and Too Little
An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon
Rivers Solomon tells an unflinching tale of slavery and survival, set in a future that is horrifically similar to both America’s dreadful past and terrible present. They sugarcoat nothing; what else would you expect from a story that starts with a gruesome amputation? I have to applaud Solomon for writing a brutal and gut wrenching story. They shout out the horrors of racism, giving graphic depictions of brutality. Black women are tortured, raped, and publicly executed, and Solomon makes you stare at these scenes of […]
This one is for thinking, not for fun
An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon
I wish I’d had more time with this novel but I had to give An Unkindness of Ghosts back to the library because someone else requested it. This means I may have had to rush reading a little and thus may not be as particular about the style and details as I might otherwise be. Here’s why this matters: this is not one of those books you read and enjoy. This is one of those books you read, either don’t exactly like or quite understand […]
A Colossal Disappointment
An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon
I have to admit that sometimes my mind is foggy. I love reading, but some days, my reading comprehension is lower than usual, and if I return to passages later I see there are tiny details I missed that make the story come together. I am hoping that this is what happened with An Unkindness of Ghosts, because I can’t make sense of it otherwise. I loved the first part of this book. It wasn’t an easy read, especially not right now, when any black […]
Another good one to thank #CannonBookClub for
An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon
This was so good, but so hard. I did not go into it expecting fluff, but damn. I started reading it right after watching the first episode of the Snowpiercer TV show, and finished it on the last night we had a city-wide curfew because of protests and riots. An interesting cocktail of race/class topics. I usually use fiction as an escape, but knowing that so many of the awful things that happened on the ship happened for real, and then surfacing from the book […]