in may i read three FANTASTIC books and now i am so spoiled because any book i read has to live up to this precedent. after parable of the sower i seriously started and then immediately stopped three books in a row that couldn't live up to the fantastic writing of the three previous books.
pachinko, by min jin lee (i had owned this for a while and been afraid (here is my bias showing!) that a book with korea characters would have names that were hard to keep straight and i would get confused. couldn't have been further from the truth. i learned a TON about the experience of koreans living under japanese occupation leading up to world war two, something i knew nothing about, and was so moved by the characters that lee created and how eloquently she wrote their stories. if you like a sweeping, multi-generational story, you MUST put this on your list!)
cloud cuckoo land, by anthony doerr (brilliant. i loved his previous book all the light you cannot see, and was eager to pick this up. the first third was hard for me - it's five narrators in three VERY different story lines, and i knew they had to come together but wasn't sure how it would happen. the way it does is brilliant, and i was totally enraptured by the story lines. highly recommend!)
parable of the sower, by octavia e. butler (this is a slower burn than the previous two, but i was super interested in this post-apocalyptic story that is science fiction-y...or is it fantasy...or is it afrofuturism...or is it all of these things. it's a book that is unsettling because the world she creates is scary, and at the same time is a future that i could see coming to be. i recommend this, but not as strongly as the previous two reads.)
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