Yeah, I wouldn’t force it. About 15 years ago my mom read A New Earth and said I would really love it, but I was not ready for it whatsoever. During a very difficult time a few years ago I find my way back to it just coincidentally. Or maybe it found it’s way to me, I don’t know. Reading that book at the right time was an absolute paradigm shift.

I think if I would have force read it 15 years ago to make my mom happy, I would have perhaps labelled it as “too much” or even said “yeah I read that, it was ok”.

Sit with it, know it’s always there. Or even work your way up to it. Your mother didn’t just love one book. She was a reader, maybe walk her path?

You need a book club. Unless you’re friends are particularly book people, you’re not going to be having the same experiences with your reading. People are funny with reading books, we’re all over the place and we can only read so many at one time. If we don’t feel into it we’re not going to commit that time to it, but if you’re in a book club where people go just for that experience, It should work.

Audiobooks are great for multiple people experiencing a book together.

It’s not a situation you’re going to find yourself in a lot, but if you have a friends or family that might enjoy it, consider putting aside sometime to share the experience of a book together. Consider it binging a show, maybe on a road trip or something, once a week you set aside an hour together. It’s a really unique experience that not many people have had to share a book.

Audiobooks are often considered by muggles to not count as reading, but the ironic fact is that they actually let you do more than you could with a regular book. Can’t wash dishes or drive cross country reading a paper book, and as I stated already you can’t share the experience with 20 other people in the same room with paper.

I really love the organic simplicity of Dodi Smith’s “I Capture the Castle” as one who journals myself. Perhaps not the most inventive, but I feel it deserves mention.

This is not going to earn me any respect in this community, but in anticipation for the release of Diablo 4 earlier this year I read all of Diablo: The Sin War in two weeks.

The series was the literary equivalent of a 7-year-old boy acting out dialogue while playing with his action figures, but I really wanted to know the lore before the game came out 😈

There’s a great interview with Octavia Butler floating around where she’s asked about the themes of race and identity in her books. She sort of brushes it off is just another tool to write about lol.

One of her strengths is to handle this material in such an objective way. She’s a black female author presenting her ideas in the most masculine way. She really is one of a kind.

Octavia Butler’s Kindred offers a depiction of time travel where a woman wakes up a century or two in the past and then returns home to modern day. She’ll be home for an hour or a day or a week and then go back unexpectedly, each stay getting longer and longer. Her stays in the past are traumatizing as the two time periods contrast drastically.

It’s not her most compelling narrative, but I recommend it for what it is, especially if you’re a writer and thinking about using time travel or dramatically changing socioeconomic conditions in your work.