Murderous Mermaids? Sure, because I trust Mira Grant aka Seanan McGuire

 

 

 

I don’t care for mermaids. Nor have I ever been interested in zombies. I have never wanted to read about diseases and outbreaks. And yet, I’m obsessed with Mira Grant. I am slowly working my way through everything she’s written. And she’s quite prolific. I never ever would have picked up her books if a friend hadn’t recommended her to me. The reason being I don’t really read scary books—I don’t like having nightmares. But her books are not horror at all. They probe what could happen if. . . . And sometimes what happens are dangerous situations that the average person is not prepared to handle. I know I most certainly am not. But after reading her books, maybe I would make it along a little farther in the story than the first person to die.

Roxane Gay’s Hunger Helped Me Recognize My Goth Roots Stem from Something Darker

Roxane Gay‘s latest book, Hunger, opens up with “Every body has a story and a history. Here I offer mine with a memoir of my body and my hunger.” (3). Gay writes of being fat in a world that shames and demeans people for taking up space. And she looks at her body’s history: how did she get where she is? Why does she weigh so much? What happened to create this body? It wasn’t merely eating. It wasn’t just not taking exercise or being weak or lazy. I could not handle some of the physical challenges she’s endured. Hunger is not a self-help book, it’s not a feel-good book, nor is it a change-your-life book. And while it is not any of those things, this book is everything to me. This book is a writer opening up about her past, exposing the very things so many of us don’t talk about, this book made me feel connected to her in a way very few authors do.

Mira Grant is thoughtful, even when she’s killing her best characters in Feedback, a Newflesh novel

Mira Grant is a thoughtful writer. Correction, well-established, respected Seanan McGuire is a thoughtful, caring writer. So thoughtful that she created a pseudonym when she started writing a new book series—because it was drastically different from what she had already written—she didn’t want to alienate her fans, confusing fairy-loving (magical creatures) readers who picked up her gory, bloody, virus-laden zombie books.

Patti Smith Writes About Nothing in M Train…So she writes.

Patti Smith spoke at a church in Berkeley and did an impromptu musical performance. Her self-deprecating humor was exquisitely charming. Her book, M Train, is about nothing. Really, on page one, first paragraph, first sentence, she writes, “It’s not so easy writing about nothing.” (Smith, 1). I devoured M Train. I was on vacation in New Mexico reading it, at my Aunt’s ranch, sitting on the porch, drinking coffee out of my deceased Uncle’s mug. Everything felt so connected, so immediately relevant. And yet, I suspect I would relate to this book and connect everything wherever I was while reading it.

Women, Explain Things to Me. Rebecca Solnit and the Feminists who Talk

 

It seemed everywhere I went I saw Rebecca Solnit‘s Men Explain Things to Me. Having recently read Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist and finding a kindred soul in Gay, I was excited to read this new essay that gestated the term “mansplaining.”

The essay which gives the collection its title, Men Explain Things to Me, is quite short. In it Solnit recalls a conversation with a man. She is telling him about a book she wrote when the man interrupts her to tell her about a seminal book on the same subject released that summer… And it’s her book but he is too daft to realize it, nor has he read this book he is telling her about. Solnit uses this incident to explore this phenomena of men explaining things to women that women already know. And of men telling women what is right (most often regarding our bodies).