Some Books I Loved

 **A wonderful novella, whose existence is merely a justification to tell a love story and explore the highest heights of florid prose** I've been sitting on this one for a while.  First of all, I try when I can to write about books that my friends might not have read, and this book was certainly the darling of the scene for a while.  I feel like many of my friends who would like this book have already read it, hah! The other reason though is that I will readily admit this isn't for everyone.  Because let's be clear on what this book isn't , it isn't a thriller-paced "time war" story with dramatic action-packed time travel shenanigans as each side tries to outdo the other skipping across timelines to edit the past and defeat their rival.  And if that's what you expect going in, you're going to have a very confused time reading it To make matters even more confusing, there is a time war going on, with dramatic action-packed time travel shenanigans a...

 **Young adult coming-of-age story!  Time loop! (I love me a good timeloop).  And contemporary black characters.  What's not to love?** So. You know that saying “Time is undefeated”? This is a story about the time that Time lost. I don't read a lot of Young Adult, which is why there aren't very many posts in that genre.  This book is very  young adult, without a doubt, although certainly well-written.  It's about first love, about balancing your friendships against your first real relationship (i.e. something everyone  does poorly), it's about the changing relationship with your parents as you approach college, it's about how to understand yourself and your place in the world.  It's full of teenage angst, although usually in a pretty fun way ("Whoever said silence is deafening must’ve been waiting for Kate to contact him, too.") But you know, it's also a timeloop novel, and man am I just a sucker for a good timeloop novel.  After meeting...

**Simply put, an absolutely perfect short story about how we view the choices we make in our lives** Ted Chiang, second-generation Taiwanese-American, rose to prominence when his fantastic "Stories of your Life" was adapted into a movie with Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner.  His first collection published after that, "Exhalation", was released to great fanfare and absolutely lived up to the hype.  That said, he's quietly been putting out story after story of truly breathtaking Science Fiction for decades Chiang walks the line between the two competing camps of Science Fiction--those who believe that scifi must be grounded in hard science extended to its logical ends; and those play fast and loose and have futuristic technology be simply a backdrop.  Although Chiang is incredibly intelligent and bases many of his stories on the latest scientific advances, he takes these ideas and builds worlds upon them with the fundamental elements of the human spirit as his buildin...