For once, I’m actually reviewing a book not long after it was released! I’ve read some of Kazuo Ishiguro’s other work and enjoyed it, so I preordered Klara and the Sun a few weeks before it was released. I knew it was speculative fiction, which isn’t a genre I usually read, but it’s one that I definitely want to read more of. And this book didn’t disappoint!
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A couple of months ago, I read and reviewed The History of Bees by Maja Lunde. The End of the Ocean is the second in the series, tied together thematically rather than with characters. The End of the Ocean explores the effect of development and climate change on water supplies and the natural landscape across different time periods, 2017 and 2041. The End of the Ocean was also my first book that I read for read-a-thin in February, so I’m happy I can tick that off my list. The rest of my TBR for read-a-thin can be found here.Read More »
Contains mild spoilers!
The History of Bees was the first book I finished after reading Ulysses, so it had a lot to live up to. While it’s definitely not as dense and challenging as Ulysses, it was definitely a good read, and I read the entire thing in roughly three sittings. I knew very little about Maja Lunde before starting the book, and was pleased to find out after she has a very successful writing career, with several children’s books, and a second adults book in the Climate Quartet series (The History of Bees being the first), Blue. It’s exciting to see an author planning to put out a four book series focused on climate issues, as the climate emergency is the biggest problem humanity is facing in our history, and the more it’s written about and talked about, the more pressure can be put on governments and businesses to make impactful changes. Of course, writing about climate change is in no way a solution, but it’s important to be loud about it, to keep pushing the potential impacts if nothing does change, and this is where writing can come in, offering a potential future world, and the 2098 of The History of Bees is definitely not a world I want my descendants to be growing up in.Read More »
Includes spoilers
My first read of 2019 was An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (AART) by Hank Green. Green is best known for creating educational videos on YouTube including Crash Course and SciShow videos, and his brother, John, is known for his YA novels including The Fault in Our Stars and Turtles All The Way Down. As a fan of Green’s from YouTube and other places on the internet, I didn’t want to write off AART as just another ‘YouTuber book’. I felt, or rather hoped, that he hadn’t got a publication deal for being Hank Green, and that the publishing house had felt his work worthy of publication on its own merit. Having read videos scripted by Green as well as essays and thinkpieces published online I was confident he was capable of writing in a sophisticated and considered manner, though essay-writing and script-writing requires a different set of skills to novel-writing.
lit fic with ellie 