What I've been reading: Books No. 31-32

Book No. 31 was "Bury Your Dead" by Louise Penny. I didn't realize I was jumping into the Inspector Gamache series many books into the series, but it intrigued me enough that I plan to go back and read these from the first one. This plot was super complex and twisty - it basically had 4 different cases in it. The main case is that a amateur historian/anthropologist whose obsession is finding the lost remains of Quebec's founder, Champlain, has been murdered in the English Literature and History building in Quebec City. This has the potential to inflame passions between French-speaking separatists and the English-speaking residents. The second mystery is the historical question of what happened to Champlain's body. At the same time, Gamache is processing a previous case that went horribly wrong and left him severely injured and many officers on his team dead or injured. And the fourth case is a previous mystery that he has doubts about. He sends an officer back to Three Pines to re-investigate and find out if the person in jail is really the one who committed the crime. I really liked Gamache and his dog, Henri, a great deal. All the threads were deftly woven together, and the writing is quite good, with the exception that I found all the sentence fragments very distracting. Once I got pulled into the plot, the stylistic weirdness didn't bother me as much, but it did make it more difficult for me to get into it in the first place. Overall, though, I really liked this and see why Penny got awards for this book and for many others in the series.

Book No. 32 was "Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements", edited by Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown. This collection of short stories and essays is an homage to Octavia Butler. A lot, if not all, of her work, had elements of social justice, and the editors argue that anybody who imagines a more just future is engaging in science fiction. Some of the stories were better than others. I really loved brown's story "The River," which is set around Belle Isle in Detroit, for instance, but found a few of the others to be a bit heavy-handed in the symbolism and read more like parables than short stories. There were a number, though, that felt like teases for an entire novel or even a series of novels that I would be happy to read, like Jelani Wilson's " 22XX: one-shot" or "The long memory" by Morrigan Phillips. Highly recommended to sci-fi lovers, especially fans of Butler, and anyone interested in social justice movements and/or supporting artistic endeavors by POC.

( The other books I've read so far this year: )