Book 19: Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion. Privileged people privileging. Sorta entertaining in spurts, but not really a great overall work.
Book 20: Naive Lie Theory by John Stillwell. If the mathematical term "group theory" means nothing to you, so will this book. If it does mean something to you, this is a great reference and springboard into quantum mechanics.
Book 21: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler.
Only religion that ever made any real sense to me. Unfortunately, it's fictional.
This book is actually the first in the two-book series that includes Parable of the Talents. I didn't realize I was reading book 2 first, so when I found out, I decided I should read book 1 also. Like Parable of the Talents, Parable of the Sower is barely science fiction. That should come as no surprise, since they occupy the same world.
Given the time of publication and backing out the time of writing, these two books probably looked like predictions that didn't seem at all far-fetched. Much of America's inner cities were going through a crack epidemic and the crimes that come with it. Much of America saw this as a completely irrational trend that could not be reasoned with. Butler is practically stoking that fear by setting her books in an even more dystopian version of that perception.
However, that's not a criticism. Butler actually couples the stoking of this fear with at least the acknowledgment of a social apparatus that created the conditions. While the individual acts remained irrational (justified by the small bit of fictional science, a new drug), the state response and failure to cope with it seems to be a comment on first responders in the real world: police that respond much too late and are completely ineffective even when they do, politicians that spew rhetoric divorced from reality, fire services that make you pay, insurance companies demanding far more evidence than is reasonable, etc.
By way of the required healing, Butler seems to outline what the original cause of this dystopia was in the first place. The healing simply requires people to re-engage with each other. It is to understand that change is inevitable and that you are a part of it. Each individual has a part to play and is doing so whether they want to or not. The implication is that a complete distrust of each other and a complete inability to see the humanity in each other is what led to this in the first place. This is far more simultaneously profound and practical than can usually be found in a science fiction novel.
I actually have a lot to say about the novels that would require spoilers. If anyone is interested in hearing them, drop a comment and I can do a "Spoiler Alert" post.
