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.