Most kids learn at least a little about genre in school; they can probably name a few, like mystery, historical, fantasy, and science fiction. I, too, was familiar with the traditional genre labels, until I took a workshop with Joyce Saricks, author of The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Genre Fiction, while I was working at the Robbins Library in Arlington. In her book, and in the workshop, she examined books through the lens of appeal factors, and divided them into the adrenaline genre, the intellect genres, the landscape genres, and the emotion genres.
I no longer have my original notes on the workshop, but I believe it was Joyce Saricks who used the term “speculative” as well, for books that ask “What if…?” Although she classifies fantasy as a landscape genre and science fiction as an intellect genre, both imagine worlds different from ours in some way. This, for me, is a reading sweet spot: not space opera or high fantasy (though I read those too), but a world that’s like ours, but with a twist: there’s time travel, or a coup changes the political landscape, or there’s been a climate catastrophe, or a lethal pandemic, or women are more powerful than men. Or humans have disappeared altogether! They are alternate histories, dystopias, or futuristic stories. These books challenge and stretch readers’ imaginations, encouraging us to place ourselves in that situation and imagine: What if?
Speculation has value as rehearsal; reading is a way to experience something and think through your responses and reactions without having to experience the situation in real life. Here are some of the speculative books I’ve enjoyed over the years. Some are lighthearted, some scary, some a little too close to reality for comfort.
Nonfiction
- The World Without Us
- What If We Get It Right?
Fiction
- Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
- The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
- This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub
- The Husbands by Holly Gramazio
- Famous Men Who Never Lived by K. Chess
- Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
- The Future by Naomi Alderman
- Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
- An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon
- The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
- Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino
- The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
- Moonbound by Robin Sloan
- The Night Bookmobile by Audrey Niffenegger
Fiction (in which things are very different for women, specifically)
- The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
- The Power by Naomi Alderman
- When She Woke by Hillary Jordan
- Red Clocks by Leni Zumas
- When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill
Young Adult
- The Loneliest Girl in the Universe by Lauren James
- Unwind by Neal Shusterman
Children’s
- We Are Definitely Human by X. Fang
- Journey by Aaron Becker
- When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead
- We’re Not From Here by Geoff Rodkey
- Finn and Ezra’s Time Loop Bar Mitzvah by Joshua Levy
- The Color of Sound by Emily Barth Isler
- The First State of Being by Erin Entrada Kelly
- The Last Cuentista by Donna Barba Higuera
What are your speculative favorites? What do you like or dislike about the genre?
I decided our February book club would be the last one until summer, when I would run it again for a new group of rising K/1st graders. No one showed up for the program…but, there were plenty of kids and adults in the children’s room, so I invited them all in for a storytime instead. We read the same two books – Arihhonni David’s The Good Game and Who Will Win? – and used the coloring sheets I’d printed (a flying squirrel and a bat, characters in The Good Game), I just sprinkled in a few songs and rhymes as well: “Open Shut Them,” “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider,” and 
The kids’ graphic novel book club I started last fall is still going strong, with about 4-7 kids attending each month. This month we read Lucky Scramble by Peter Raymundo, about a kid named Tyler who goes to a Rubik’s cube competition. Our icebreaker question was “What’s your favorite kind of puzzle?” and a lot of the kids said “Rubik’s cube,” even though none of us could solve one. (I said word puzzles, like wordle, and it turns out all of the kids also do the NYT puzzles!)
Last, the kids voted on which book to read next. The choices were Curveball by Pablo Cartaya, Pebble & Wren by Chris Hallbeck, and Puzzled by Pan Cooke. The first two got one vote each and Puzzled got two votes, so that will be our February book – but all three books got checked out. It was a good afternoon!
WeNeedDiverseBooks: 189. Less than last year both in terms of numbers and percentage of the total, though I do suspect myself of undercounting/tagging.
I wish I remember where I heard about Once Upon A Time We Ate Animals: The Future of Food by Roanne Van Voorst, but I requested it mainly based on the intriguing title (I love speculative fiction – and nonfiction). Van Voorst is a “futures anthropologist” and her premise for this book is that we are currently in the middle of a shift from “carnism” (eating meat and animal products) toward vegetarianism and veganism. The book is nonfiction, but spliced in are short fiction pieces set in the future, looking back on a past in which (many) humans ate animals. Whether you’re an omnivore, vegetarian, vegan, or other, this is a fascinating book, and will make you think differently about the way you eat – no matter which way that is currently.
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life was published in 2007, but I didn’t get around to reading it until 2022. It is a year in the life of the Kingsolver family at their homestead, where they’ve committed to eating only what they can grow or source locally for one year. There are many good reasons to eat local, from climate to animal welfare to supporting the community you live in, though you don’t need to devote your life to growing all your own food and raising chickens (unless you want to!). There are farmers’ markets and CSA shares and local groceries in a lot of places – other places, unfortunately, are food deserts, and there’s plenty of advocacy to be done there – and when you eat foods that are in season, they taste better too. (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle also includes recipes.)
Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn’t Food by Chris van Tulleken draws the reader’s attention to how much of the “food” we eat isn’t really food at all (as the subtitle indicates). Van Tulleken introduces the NOVA framework for classifying foods, from (1) unprocessed/minimally processed to (2) processed culinary ingredients (e.g. butter) to (3) processed food (e.g. canned beans) to (4) ultra-processed food (e.g. Coke, Doritos). One of the shocking pieces of information in this book was that the FDA does not regulate foods, or the ingredients that go into foods, anywhere near as much as you might imagine; there are giant loopholes for additives; companies can just say that various chemicals are safe without having any real scientific evidence to back that up.
This Monday was the one-year anniversary of the 
Endlessly Ever After has become a mandatory staple since last December; it’s the book we always end with, but it’s different every time because of its pick-your-path nature. (Our storytime group is beyond excited that there is going to be another one in, I think, 2026? Laurel and Dan, if you need beta readers, we are at your service.)
As you can see, we lean toward bedtime books and fairy tales, including fractured fairy tales. I can already tell All at Once Upon A Time is going to be a repeat read; it goes so well with Endlessly, and the kids – and grown-ups! – who come to Pajama Storytime are old enough to understand and enjoy the humor. That’s something I love about Pajama Storytime: I get to read some wonderful books that are simply too long or complex for my morning storytime, which is mostly toddlers. There are great picture books for that age, too, and I love them, but Pajama Storytime lets me share more books with a different audience.
Jenny Arch 