What I'm Reading Now

 A lot of SF for review purposes, and also these books:

Ursula Le Guin, Birthday of the World

This is a collection of stories and novellas, and a re-read for me. I love Le Guin, of course, but mostly I re-read this for the novella "Paradises Lost," which is set on a generation ship. I'm reading a novel for revieew by A.D. Sui which also involves a generation ship, which made me want to read this one again. Written in 2002. the novella is influenced by the increasing political power of the Religious Right, which was just beginning to grow at that point. In the small community on the generation ship (4000 people), a new religion is born and soon becomes prevalent enough to attempt a takeover of the governing committees on the ship -- the education committee first, and then others. This is an excellent novella which is even more relevant today than it was in 2002. A quotation:

"One kind [of person," Luis] said, "has a need, a lack, they have to have a certain vitamin...Vitamin Belief."

[Hsing] considered.

"Not genetic," he said. "Cultural. Metaorganic. But as individually real and definite as a metabolic deficiency. People either need to believe or they don't."

She still pondered.

"The ones that do don't believe that the others don't. They don't believe there are people who don't believe."

"Hope?" she offered tentatively.

"Hope isn't belief. Hope's contingent upon reality, even when it's not very realistic. Belief dismisses reality."

(snip)

"What's the harm in believing?"

"It's dangerous to confuse reality with unreality," he said promptly. "To confuse desire with power, ego with cosmos. Extremely dangerous."

Helen Philips, Hum

This is sort of like science fiction, in that it is set in the near future. I'm not reviewing it for either of my columns, though. It's the story of a woman who has lost her job. Her husband works gig jobs, doing things like emptying litter boxes for the very wealthy. The woman volunteers for experimental surgery to (slightly) change her face, so that surveillance cameras can't identify her. She does this because it pays a lot of money, but then she uses the money to take her husband and two kids on a visit to a botanical garden, which is extremely expensive because all the actual forests and flowers and insects and so on have been killed off by climate change. 

There's a lot here about kids using screens non-stop and AI doing the parenting and gig work and the flaws of capitalism and precarity and blah blah blah. Nothing new, to be honest, and nothing new to say about any of it.

This is an extremely depressing book. Maybe don't read this unless you like novels where the characters are powerless and their lives are catastrophes.

Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. 

This is a re-read. If you haven't ever read this book, I highly recommend it. It's about Francie Nolan, a poor kid in Brooklyn from her birth to when she leaves the city in the first two decades of the 20th Century. Based on Smith's own life and memories of Brooklyn, it was originally published in 1943. I've been reading and re-reading this book since I was about ten years old, and I re-read it after watching the 1943 movies on YouTube (it's free, though you do get a few ads).

The movie is pretty good, but the book is better. Much more realistic than you might expect from a book written in the 40s, and centered almost entirely around the women characters -- Francie's brother and father are main characters, but it's mostly a story about her mother and sisters and grandmother, as well as Francie herself.

Fumi Yoshinaga, What Did You Eat Yesterday?

This is a manga which is mostly about cooking in Japan, though there's a little peripheral drama among the people doing the eating and cooking. Also quite a bit about shopping in Japan. The main characters are the lawyer, who does most of the cooking, and his boyfriend who is a hair stylist. The series started in 2007, and there's a bit of angst from Shiko, the lawyer, because he's not out while his boyfriend, Kenji, is. Shiko is a tightwad, and Kenji a spendthrift, so there's some squabbling about that. 

Apparently the manga was made into a TV show, but I haven't seen that. I haven't read all the volumes either-- there's a billion of them -- but if you like cooking and representations of quotidian life, you might like this one.

Fumi Yoshinaga is also the creator of Ooku, which won the Tiptree Award/Otherwise Award in 2009.