Continuing the Spring Book Reports...

My strategy for getting through this year’s reading is to front-load as many of the big, thick nonfiction books I can.  Worst case, if I decide to run away, the heaviest ones will already be finished.

I did take a break from the nonfiction to read Mary Mapes Dodge’s book Hans Brinker.  I wrote before about the collection of children’s classics my grandmother gave me.  This was one and I didn’t remember it very well.  On rereading, it turns out that it is a reasonably good story interrupted by a bunch of educational historical moralizing.  I decided that I needed a photo of the book and the words my grandma wrote inside, but that I didn’t need to keep the book.

I always enjoy Anne Lamott.  Almost Everything is a pleasant addition to my shelf.  I feel like I have read enough of her work that she doesn’t surprise me as often anymore with her insight, but it is always nice to hang out with a wise human.  Keeper.

In that way things have of adding up to something unexpected, three very divergent sorts of books came together for me.  I began reading The Mexico Reader edited by Gilbert M. Joseph and Timothy J. Henderson in little chunks over meals.  It is a compendium of articles, stories, and poetry covering Mexican history, politics, and culture.  I read about Pancho Villa, lucha libre, Aztec ritual, El Barzón, and a whole bunch more things over the more than 700 pages.  It was mostly fascinating. 

The part about Aztec culture and the way that warriors lived, capturing other warriors for sacrifice up until the point when they themselves were captured and sacrificed felt incredibly alien up until I also started reading Top Gun by Dan Pedersen about the founding of the combat school.  More young men training to sacrifice or be sacrificed, but in a context that was more familiar.  This was not the only interesting part of the book.  It is full of good stories and Pedersen has an engaging way of telling them.  It was just the part that stuck with me.  I’m in a place, personally, where I feel like we need a cultural shift away from violence, meaning no disrespect to those who have felt that violence was the only way to defend home.

The practice of violence was a huge theme in Tara Westover’s memoir Educated, about her journey from a childhood in a conservative Mormon family where she did not go to school or see doctors to her current life as a history scholar with a doctorate from Cambridge.  The men in her family controlled and abused the women, who either became complicit or outcast.  It was a tough read.  The convergence of all three books in their descriptions from various viewpoints on violence, protection, defense, and survival provided more material for thought than any of the books alone would have done.  Hooray for fortuitous and omnivorous reading.

Current year total:  23 books.