Bibliokitty

You have probably heard of Octavia E. Butler, who was a renowned writer of science fiction novels and who wrote at a time when there was not a lot of female sci-fi writers, let alone Black ones. Sci-fi is not a genre that I gravitate towards, so I had never read any of Butler’s novels. But since I am always expanding my reading horizons, I wanted to give Butler a try and came across Parable of the Sower. It turns out Parable of the Sower is not so much sci-fi as it is speculative fiction. It is set in a dystopian future where climate change has led to the break down of societal and economic norms. I think Parable of the Sower is an interesting novel, and I am glad that I read it, but to be honest, it does not inspire me to want to read the second novel (Parable of the Talents). I kind of wish that I had picked another one of Butler’s novels to read instead.

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Okay, so I totally get the hype surrounding Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, although I would not go as far as John Green and call it the best book I have ever read it. It is a fantastic novel, though. It is a compelling and epic story about friendship that will suck you in and shatter your heart before putting the pieces back together so you feel content with the end. The characters are so well developed and complicated and mostly likeable, that you cannot help but become invested in their fictional lives. Not many books can make me cry, but this one certainly did.

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I think we have an unhealthy obsession with true crime. There is a plethora of true crime podcasts to listen to, and Ryan Murphy keeps churning out one true crime miniseries after another on Netflix. A recent series of Murphy’s, Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, is about the serial killer who killed at least seventeen men between the years 1978 and 1991. Evan Peters played Jeffrey Dahmer and there was some online chatter about how empathetic he portrayed Dahmer, which led to some viewers developing a crush on him as he portrayed a serial killer. The family members of Dahmer’s victims said they were not consulted about the series. They have had old wounds ripped open and watched their lives turned into entertainment without their permission. But nobody cares what the people who survive monsters like Dahmer think, so long as they can produce content to satiate the public’s thirst for these “intriguing” men who commit murder. Danya Kukafka subverts this disturbing mania for serial killers in her thought-provoking novel Notes on an Execution, where the serial killer’s life is told through the perspective of the women in his life, revealing that there is nothing intriguing about serial killers after all.

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