A Carrie Fisher Reading List

I'm not someone who usually comments on or memorializes the death of a celebrity. Although this has been a year in which we've lost some of the greatest artists, creators, and just all around amazing human beings of all time, the news on Tuesday about Carrie Fisher (edit: and, subsequently, her mother) struck me the hardest. I've never been a mega-Star Wars fan, although I've seen all the movies and have always loved what Star Wars has done for Science Fiction as a whole. Still, although I don't know all of the most obscure Star Wars facts, Carrie Fisher has always stood out as an icon to me. As Princess Leia, she got to be a strong, funny, witty princess who was beautiful but also tough and didn't take anybody's shit. Off screen, Fisher always struck me as having a similar grit, being a child of Hollywood who faced her own share of obstacles, including addiction and mental health issues. I always respected how she spoke out about having bipolar disorder, and wasn't afraid to write about her struggles with mental health and self-medication in both memoir, fiction, and in her own one-woman show. I had been eagerly awaiting her newest book, The Princess Diarist, which was released in November.  So today I thought I would offer a reading list for fans of Ms. Fisher and for her best-known, iconic role, Princess Leia, to spend some time with her work and with works that owe quite a bit to her contribution to the world of Sci-Fi.

Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher

For a short but impactful read of Carrie's life, Wishful Drinking follows her from being born to celebrities Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, then stepdaughter to Elizabeth Taylor, through her own marriages and divorces and, of course, being cast at age 19 to play a princess in Star Wars. Fisher doesn't shy away from discussing her drinking, drug addiction, and mental health disorders while still maintaining her humor an wit.

The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher

Fisher's latest work of non-fiction focuses on her time spent filming the first Star Wars film, and the book takes its' title from the journals that Fisher kept while working on the film as a teenager. I have yet to read this one and the reviews are mixed, but I love behind-the-scenes memoirs where larger than life actors and directors are exposed as regular people. If you are planning to re-watch the original trilogy as I am, it would be a good time to pick up this book for some context of filming A New Hope.

Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn

Taking place five years after the events in Return of the Jedi, this tie-in novel to the original trilogy is a good place to start when it comes to the intricate world of Star Wars novelizations, especially because familiar characters make appearances in addition to the new characters that Zahn penned. A fantastic, action-packed start to the Thrawn Trilogy.

Fortune's Pawn by Rachel Bach

Fortune's Pawn kicks off an awesome sci-fi space opera series that follows Devi Morris, an ambitious, highly skilled mercenary who is looking to advance a few ranks by serving on one of the toughest ships in her corner of space, the Glorious Fool. Joined by a crew of aliens and a mysterious, hot bartender, Devi soon finds her one-way-ticket to her dream job is more dangerous than she thought. There's battles, there's mysterious shadow organizations, and there's a creepy child; all the while, Devi gets to be the hero and do most of the rescuing.

Grimspace by Ann Aguirre

In Grimspace, our leading lady is Sirantha Jax, who has the highly desired ability to jump ships through grimspace. Jax survives a crash landing and is discovered by a group of rouge fighters who hope to take advantage of her rare talent. Meanwhile, Jax is strong and snarky, reminiscent of leading women in urban fantasy books, so it's a nice change in the sci-fi genre, plus there's romance.

The Ship Who Searched by Anne McCaffrey and Mercedes Lackey

Book 3 in Anne McCaffrey's Brainships series, The Ship Who Searched, which takes place in a world where physically disabled people can go on adventures by becoming cyborgs, often in the form of an entire ship. In this book, 7-year-old Tia straps on her ship to discover the cause of her paralyzing disease. Not a sweeping epic like most sci-fi, but a good character-driven (even though the character is kind of a ship) intimate Sci-Fi tale.

A few other space-centric books I've been reading to make some sense of the end of 2016 have also included Terms of Enlistment and Starshine. Have you been reading any old Sci-Fi favorites that serve as comfort reading in times of loss or distress? What kinds of books do you read when you need to do some self-care? Comment below any suggestions!

2017 Reading Challenges!

It’s that time of year: deciding a number for my total Goodreads Challenge for books read in 2017!!! Last year, I set my goal to 80, then bumped it up to 100 after I beat my initial goal in like September. This year, after much contemplation, I’m setting a goal of 120. A few notes about how I decide which books to attribute to the goal: I don’t count children’s picture books that I read for work typically. That’s because I read a minimum of 3 children’s picture books a week and I just feel like that may be cheating because they take like 5 minutes to read most of the time. I do, however, count audiobooks, which I know some people don’t. But I think that audiobooks count as reading (I actually think it’s a little ablist to say reading the book with your ears is not the same as reading with your eyes), as I’m still putting in the time to listen to the story, and often prefer audiobooks for a specific narrator or if I think the experience would be enhanced by listening. I’m an auditory learner, too, so I don’t have any trouble paying attention to an audiobook.

So anyway. 120 books. That’s about ten books a month, which is definitely doable for me. Also, and I don’t know if everyone does this or what, I have mental goal of 150 books but I’m not ready to commit to that so I’m setting the bar at something I know for sure I can reach. Then, if I end up reading more at the end of the year, I can bump my goal up or set a higher goal the following year.

But the main Goodreads challenge isn’t my only challenge. I also participate in Around the Year in 52 books (mentioned in a previous post), which is a challenge that has a specific criteria for each week of the year, and the readers have to select a book to read that meets that criteria. For example, a book with a color in the title or a book over 500 pages. This list is so fun to create, and it’s a good way to clean out my TBR and read books that I own but have been putting off reading. Even though it takes hours to decide what to read each week, it's worth it. Plus, with my newly minted blog, I decided to join the Historical Romance Reading Challenge, which isn’t made up of specific categories for every single book, but has broader categories (medieval romance, time travel romance) and ascending levels based on how many books you read. I plan on aiming for queen status (50+ books and at least 1 book from every category). It sounds like a lot of fun and a good way to get to various historical romances that have been lingering on my TBR.

I'll be sure to update this blog on the status of my 2017 reading challenges. Hopefully I'll meet my goals the way that I did in 2016!

What's your reading goal for 2017? Are you signed up for any challenges? Let me know in the comments below!

Returning to Reading

Looking back, I’ve always considered myself a ‘reader’, even during times when I completed maybe two books over the course of the year. I picked up reading fairly early and spent most of my childhood devouring series like The Baby-sitters Club, Nancy Drew, Sweet Valley High, and The Unicorn Club, plus any children’s books written about horses, Egypt, vampires, or ballet dancers. Fast forward to middle school and high school when I decided it was time to read ‘serious literature’ and read the pretentious books that most college students carry around to coffee shops. I missed the Harry Potter craze because of this, and I don’t really regret it. Not having read the Harry Potter series makes me the worst youth librarian of all time, I get it, but I feel like it's also a sort of bizarro badge of honor, like never learning to ride a bike.

Anyway, reading ‘serious literature’ all the time makes it kind of hard to read a lot of books and to read diversely because so much of what you think is literature in high school consists of the writings of old and/or dead white men. So I kind of fell out of reading for awhile. Although I could tell that a lot of what I was reading was universally recognized as ‘good’ and contributes to the amorphous idea of someone being well-read, I wasn’t having a lot of fun and wasn’t seeing myself in any of the stories. Then, throughout college, I mostly read for school. I was a history major and had to read a lot of exciting works like the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, and that kind of reading takes up a lot of time, which doesn’t really allow for much recreational reading. This was the non-fiction era of my reading life which meant I read about quite a few interesting people and learned about different historical events and cultures, but still wasn’t reading for enjoyment.

After college, I tried to get back into reading for fun, but my bookshelves were crowded with history books and I wasn’t really aware of what was new and exciting in the world of fiction. I still loved books and information, so I ended up attending library school, which doesn’t do much for one’s reading life either. Most of my time was spent reading library science articles and doing a lot of writing and researching. The only books that I read enthusiastically at that time were probably George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, because they reminded me of my college history tomes but they had dragons and a lot more female characters. Then, during my last semester, I interned at a public library and spent a lot of time checking in books at the book drop. There were so many new fiction books I had never heard of! Of course I knew and had read most of the classics and modern classic authors, but there were all kinds of amazing looking books from genres I never really paid much attention to before.

During that internship, I realized I really liked working with youth and that meant I needed to brush up on my knowledge of youth books. I knew that YA was a thing, but since it wasn’t when I was a teen I didn’t really know much about it other than that some series were wildly popular and were turned into mediocre movies on a regular basis. So I perused online reviews and must-read lists to figure out some brand-new YA titles that I had to read to arm myself with recommendations for teens. This is also around the time that I started actually using my Goodreads account, and started making tbr lists. I read a bunch of popular YA titles, and although some were really good and some were not, it was a good way to get back into reading for pleasure. The titles were not very lengthy and allowed me to read a variety of different authors and perspectives in a fairly short amount of time. That year, I think I read (and actually finished) about 25 books, which seemed like a pretty good amount to me (oh, poor, naive me).

After graduating library school I immediately found a job as a youth librarian and realized I needed to up my reading game even more if I wanted to make effective book displays, recommendations, and be able to weed and develop the collection. So I began spending more time on Goodreads, Booktube, and various book blogs, and made it a goal to read books from authors I had never read or from genres I knew little about. This past year, I joined a Goodreads challenge that involved reading a book a week that fit a particular challenge criteria, and it was a huge part of increasing my reading over this past year. I set a goal to read 80 books, thinking this was a pretty big step up from reading between 5 to 25 books in a year, and put a ton of books on hold at the library.

It turns out once you start reading diversely and often, you can’t stop. You read a book from one perspective about a certain time period and then you want to read about a different view. You read a few very short books set in the contemporary world and decide to take a break from that by reading a 600 plus page tome about an epic fantasy world. You read a memoir and then need to mix it up by reading some science fiction. And this is how I ended up reading more than 100 books this year, after years of reading a few books a year. Now, my tbr list is some 15 pages long and I’m reading (and loving) books from genres I never would have thought I would have enjoyed. Currently, I’m planning my lists that I’ll be reading for my 52 books challenge in 2017 and am having the best time selecting a range of titles. So far, the genres include fantasy, romance, historical fiction, sci-fi, graphic novels, and classics, along with several sub-genres like urban fantasy and a range of middle grade, YA, and adult titles. I try to read from authors from a variety of cultures and nationalities, although I realize that after years of reading old white guy writers I’m making up for it now. This past year, out of over 100 books, only 8 were written by men and maybe half of those were white.

It feels like coming home to be able to return to reading. I even re-read some of those Baby-sitters Club books that got me hooked initially, and I can honestly say that I enjoyed those 50 times more than reading the majority of what is considered ‘high-brow’ literature. I look forward to many more pages of all different kinds of books and continuing to enhance and enjoy my reading life. This blog, meanwhile, will be a place for me to discuss what I'm reading, post my general bookish musings, and comment on contemporary book news. It will also be a creative way for me to track the books that I've read and loved, and hopefully help me enrich my ever-evolving reading life.