I found the earlier chapters clearly defining love as “the will to nurture our own and others’ spiritual growth” really brilliant and challenging in a good way. Unfortunately I found the majority of the rest of the book incredibly repetitive and near nonsensical.

★★☆☆☆ As expected, Clay’s Ark is an entirely different beast than the first two Patternist books. There is also no mention of the psionic abilities of the first two books at all except for one tenuous throwaway reference two-thirds of the way in. The setting and set-up reminds me very much of The Host by Stephanie Meyer as well as the Animorphs series weirdly enough, which I read as a kid.

★★★★☆ Octavia Butler deftly weaves between the supernatural - the supernatural megalomania of Doro or the supernatural empathy of Anyanwu - and real historical devastations of slavery and its legacy on American society into the late 20th century.

★★★★★

★★★★☆ This book was painful, poetic, cinematic, chaotic, terrifying, elegiac...The intensity and totality of Morrison’s language is overwhelming, but it completely envelops you in the drama and horror of these characters’ stories.

★★★☆☆ What it says on the can - a very short, high school level (I assume) science book on astrophysics. I expected some more self-inserts from Tyson but he doesn’t even mention his own contributions to the demotion of Pluto as a planet.