6) The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms - N.K. Jemisin
Where? Chapters
Why?
Friday I went home early due to a terrible sounding chesty couch and that inability to think that I term 'fuzzy head syndrome'. All I wanted to do was go straight to bed, but as those of us who live alone, or with housemates who cannot be drafted into being caregivers, know that there's a little ground work to be done before one can take to the sickbed.
There was no food in the fridge for one thing.
So I headed to the other side of town to hit up Tesco, and was genuinely unable to not drop in to Chapters on the way. Despite the fact that my soon to be sick rooms already had a huge pile of books by the bed.
I've been thinking about picking uo The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms for a while, though not just because I'm taken with the premise... can I say this without being offensie?
I've read almost nothing by writers of colour this year. This has been needling away at the back of my head as I try to drown it out with the excuse that I read the next book on the tbr pile that naturally occurs to me as it occurs and there's no call to be putting any political correctness into the mix, and besides. And surely reading a book just because the writer is black is as problematic as just leaving them about because no black writers have happened across my radar.
But all this excuse making is given lie by the fact that about three months ago I noticed that fewer than 10% of the books I'd read this year were by female writers*. As a female person who considers herself appreciative of the works of women I was quite horrified by this statistic and had no problem redressing the balance by intentionally upping my intake of women writers and was thoroughly rewarded with great books that I would otherwise have missed.
That in mind, it seems clear that I stand only to benefit by widening the diversity of my reading choices even if that widening is utterly self conscious.
Anyway, it was a heavily discounted Hugo nominee. I'd be stupid not to buy it.
The Damage? €4.99
* there is more or less a consensus that the collective term for ladies who write is "woman writers" I find this an abhorrently clunky compound noun and avoid it for this reason and no other
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