First five books of 2019

So far, I am on track to meet my reading goals for this year.  Sadly, I don’t think that will result in much of a reduction in the load of the to-read shelf since I seem to have acquired another twenty or so books due to Christmas and other bookish occasions.  I have decided that this is not a problem, but rather a sign of my lively mind or something.  Point being:  five books read so far.

Possibly the strangest book I’ve read in some time was Betty Grable and the House of Cobwebs by Kathryn Heisenfelt.  Yes, that Betty Grable.  Betty is the Nancy Drew at the center of a very mild mystery.  There is never a doubt about who the bad guys are or whether Betty will ultimately triumph.  She perseveres despite spooky noises and even a fashion disaster!  In the end, she discovers the secret and brings happiness everywhere.

Then I read Power of Three by Diana Wynne Jones.  It was, as seems typical of her work, a thoughtful book, this time about the consequences of history, the nature of stereotypes, the unexpectedness of our gifts, and the unusual path of coexistence.  Likeable characters have flaws and yet somehow muddle through.  Unlikeable characters eventually experience karma.  All of it unfolds in lovely prose.  Two thumbs up.

Slavery and the Making of America by James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton is not exactly a fun book to read, but the prose makes it accessible.  It unpacks some very unlovely history with many of the usual suspects doing bad things and some slightly more surprising ones doing bad things, too.  I am deeply ashamed of all the horrors white America perpetrated on African slaves and then on the (so late!) freed African Americans.  This book does not leave white people a place to hide, which is a good thing.  We have a lot of reparation work to do if we even want to pretend that we believe in the promises of our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution, much less if we want to consider ourselves decent human beings.

I enjoyed Diane Ackerman’s book A Natural History of the Senses, but not as much as I felt I should have.  This might be a place where reader mood is everything.  Objectively, I could find the prose beautiful.  The ways she chose to explore and describe our sensory experiences were creative and interesting.  And yet, overall, I wasn’t very excited.  It might have been that each section, while illuminating in its way, could stand alone; the book was more a collection of essays than an overarching whole.  I seem to want things holistic these days, but again, that is no fault of the book, but of me.

Today I finished Empty Hands, Open Arms by Deni Béchard.  It’s a book about bonobo conservation in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  Except it isn’t exactly.  It’s about the kind of community-driven, relationship based service that was so exciting to me when I worked in service learning.  Yes, there are apes in the book.  Yes, there are NGOs writing grants and collecting data.  There are lovely photos and an account of a trip into the African rainforest.  But it all adds up to much more, a sense of how this kind of work can be done, protecting vanishing species, while also empowering humans who have had every kind of political and social and economic disaster roll over them.  It requires that the outsiders, with their fancy degrees and their piles of cash, take a humble role, listening to indigenous voices, respecting local knowledge, learning the culture.  Solutions are built on the ground, with the participation of stakeholders, not imposed from outside.  It is hard work and not always successful, but it is the way the work should be done.  I felt inspired.

Five down, many to go.

Last of the 2018 reading

I finished out 2018’s reading with two nonfiction books and three mysteries.

Women and Politics by Julie Dolan, Melissa M. Deckman, and Michele L. Swers covered both the history of American women’s political involvement and the current culture.  It was pretty depressing.  We have a long way to go and the path leads through intersectional justice.  Most of the book’s contents were not new to me, but the concepts were backed with scholarship and laid out well.  The authors did not hesitate to deal with complexity (news flash:  all women do not think the same way!).

Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat was a Christmas Eve gift from Brent.  I can’t say I have read every word of every page, but I did read the entire theory section and I’ve been cooking out of the other part of the book this week.  Nosrat is an engaging writer, funny and smart.  I liked her mix of personal and informational data in the text.  So far, the recipes are tasty and the theories are reasonably applicable.  I personally like it when recipes give a time estimate at the top so I don’t have to read in detail to figure out if they will work on a weeknight or only on a weekend when I’m not running around, but that’s a quibble.  Definitely a keeper.

Ellery Queen writes perfectly acceptable entertainment.  I would not describe The Scarlet Letters as anything more than that, but it was a fun read.  Also, coolness points for choosing to call the main character Ellery Queen, which, I realize, applies to his work generally.

I am not one of those people who gets book gift certificates for Christmas and hoards them.  I spend them right away on books I’ve been wanting.  So, not surprisingly, I hurried to order Louise Penny’s new book Kingdom of the Blind.  It was great, as usual.  I pretty much never even care about the mystery part; I just want to hang out with her characters and their meals in Three Pines.  She can write as many as she likes; I will read them all.

Finally, I bought The Witch Elm by Tana French.  (I gave it to Brent in e-book form on Christmas Eve, but wanted my own actual book.)  Brent and I bought French’s first book on our honeymoon in Ireland.  She continues to write evocative prose.  The plot of this particular book took a long time to get moving, which was mostly all right because of the aforementioned prose.  The second half of the book worked better for me, although I did figure out the mystery.  Then there was the ending, which I did not like.  On the whole, I would say it was all right, but not fabulous.

Total for fall:  21 books.

On to 2019, with a goal of 51 books.