Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler

This is a variation on the vampire story that comes at the genre with a few different ideas about the creatures, and they are definitely different. The "vampires" are called Ina, and are a species to themselves. These people were never human, they are born; they can't "turn" humans into one of them. The Ina also have a very different relationship with humans: they have a symbiotic bond. The Ina takes care of, loves, and needs the human for blood, and the humans need their Ina. Once the Ina and their human become fully bonded, its like the human is addicted to the Ina, and they actually will go through a sort of withdrawal if they haven't been bitten in a while.
This book deals with so much, just like most of Butler's books: religion, bigotry, sex, race, rules, and more. Fledgling concerns the life of a young Ina female called Shori, who is the result of the genetic experimentation of her mothers to create Ina that can walk in the daylight and stay awake during the day. It turns out that more melanin helps, so Shori's skin is dark. There are other's, other Ina families, that hate what they think of as the corruption of the Ina purity, and they take it into their own hands (actually the hands of humans that they use as daytime weapons) to destroy Shori and her family. They succeed in killing her family and all of their symbionts, but they fail to actually kill Shori, who is their main target. Ironically, Shori survives the attack because of the genetic manipulation that lets her stay awake and be out in the sunlight. But she was seriously injured in the attack, so much so that she lost all of her memories of her life before the attack. She meets and takes her first symbiont, Wright, and slowly, very slowly, remembers vague things about who and what she is, then tries to find and punish those who killed her entire family.

#10 Parable of the Talents, by Octavia E. Butler

Yet another Butler novel on my list this year. I can't help it, I love her stuff. This one is in her Earthseed series, and I want to say its the last one, but I don't actually know how many are in the series, so I probably shouldn't assume anything.
I loved this book so much. The story is about the later life of Lauren Oya Olamina, a sharer, in the 2030's through to her death as an 82 year old woman. Olamina escapes from a life of fear and violence to live with a small community called Acorn in the countryside of California, (at least I think its in California.Its not entirely clear in the book where Acorn is located.) She believes in something she calls Earthseed, a kind of religious belief that says "God is Change, Shape God." This belief helps establish Acorn as a safe place for a few people, until someone named Jarrett Smith comes into power as President in 2032. He had established a church of his own called Christian America Church, and preached fire and brimstone against the "heathens" that had turned his "God-fearing" United States into a cesspool of violence, poverty, and immorality. So he sets out to "cleanse" the country of all those he deems "immoral." Unfortunately, this includes the Earthseed community, which he sees as a cult. With this book, like all her others, you get nothing but brutal honesty. Butler never shies away from portraying humanity as it really is- mean, nasty, awful, hypocritical, violent, erratic- and not some pretty picture we all like a lot better than the reality. And, yet again, she manages to parallel so much of what has happened in this country after she wrote this book; she writes of what could happen if we don't do our duty as citizens and make the hard choices. I don't mean to sound preachy, but seeing what could happen if we aren't responsible enough to stop it from happening makes me very angry.

This is a must read, in my opinion, for everyone.

#5. The Pattermaster by Ocatavia Butler

I just finished this one on Saturday morning, while I was visiting friends in Boston and had a little bit of time. Again, really liked it. It was really different, but it was definitely something I would expect from Butler. This was a story about a population of people so evolved that they communicated mostly telepathically, and that was also how they fought each other. The hierarchy was very interesting in this book, because your status was almost entirely based on your mental strength; the stronger you are mentally, the higher your status. The characters were able to heal themselves using their minds, and kill thousands of people at the same time just by thinking about it in a certain way. I loved how the story worked together, and the twist in the end was so unexpected, but it made the tale end so nicely that it made me really appreciate her storytelling ability that much more. And this was another one that gave you hints that this was just the future of our own lives; this could be the way that the human race evolves. I, for one, think its really cool and hope we manage to last long enough for this possibility to become a reality.