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Showing posts from May, 2017

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

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Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler                 Everyone felt safer in the gated community. Here it was a real community. People came together to help each other. Night watches protected the streets. Families would go shooting together to stay sharp and seasoned. But outside of the community there was peril. The homeless outside of the walls were dangerous. No one would live the community unarmed. Lauren Olamina knew that they would only be safe for so long. That the walls that separated her family, from the hundreds of others outside of their walls, could come down. She never wants to be a slave to a corporation or lose her family but she knows she needs to prepare herself to survive. And she has Earthseed. The God of her father is not her God. Her God is Earthseed. Her God is change. With everything around her constantly changing. That’s all she can hold onto.                 This might be one of the most realistic dystopian fictions I’ve ever read. And I can’t t

This is Your Brain on Sports: The Science of Underdogs, The Value of Rivalry, and What We Can Learn from the T-Shirt Cannon by L. Jon Wertheim and Sam Sommers

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This is Your Brain on Sports: The Science of Underdogs, The Value of Rivalry, and What We Can Learn from the T-Shirt Cannon by L. Jon Wertheim and Sam Sommers                 If this title is at all intriguing to you, then you are probably a sports fan and in that case you should definitely read this book. I am a huge sports fan and have been for ages. I have my teams that I am utterly obsessed with, teams (and players) that I cannot stand and I rave and rage at the TV during games. I thought this book could be rather interesting and boy was it.                 Wertheim and Sommers uses each chapter to take a look at different behaviors of not just sports fan, but athletes, coaches, and executives and examines them under the guise of science. They look at different studies conducted around the world, some of which were simple behavioral studies but others were directed strictly to sports, and used those results to explore the topics at hand. Each chapter is extremely intere

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

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The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin                 I’m not sure what I was expecting when I first picked up The Fifth Season but this definitely wasn’t it. I’ve never read a science fiction, dystopia like this before. And I loved it. From the very beginning of the novel, you genuinely feel transported. Very little is given away up front and trying to figure out the mystery of this world, while being sucked into the varying narratives of Damaya, Syenite and Essun is quite the experience. This is a world where so much time has passed and so many ends have come, that no one can be sure of what history is true. This is a world where orogenes can harness the power of the Earth as a weapon, where Father Earth is fighting back against the destruction happening on his surface and where people will give their children to the Fulcrum out of fear of what they are.                 I fell in love with this narrative. Within the first 30 pages I was hooked. The grave tone of the novel from

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nahisi Coates

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Between the World and Me by Ta-Nahisi Coates                 Intimate. Honest. Heartbreaking. Those are the first three words I think of after finishing this book. Put simply Between the World and Me is Coates speaking directly to his son, Samori about life. About what it means to be a black man in the United States of America. What it means to sit back and continuously see that you have no control over your body. What it means to continuously see bodies that look like yours taken prematurely and to see no one punished for the crime. Coates talks about his upbringing, about his parents, about his struggle and then about Howard, The Mecca. It’s as much about Coates trying to make sense of this world and it is him trying to make his son understand what it means to live in a black body.                 Talking about race with children is incredible difficult. I know from the experience of having to talk about race with my own child. It’s uncomfortable and it makes you confron