February Reading

I read five books in February, four nonfiction and one fiction, only partly because I’m trying to front-load the nonfiction this year.

 

In fiction, I read (fine:  devoured) Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.  I had already watched and loved the show, but, as usual, the book was even better.  It was the latest in the Pratchett books that I am getting from my awesome older kid for holidays.  It’s funny, deep, and rich.  Two thumbs up.

 

I had been meaning to get to reading Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras since my unsuccessful attempt to complete yoga teacher training.  (I will succeed someday, if only because I will never have to have another hysterectomy.)  I liked some parts better than others.  Perhaps as a result of experience, I always bring a healthy dose of caution to any organizational system that wants me to surrender.  That said, the yamas and niyamas are, on the whole good and useful things.  I like to think about Big Questions and the book gave me plenty of opportunity.  This particular edition also has lovely pictures.

 

My Grandma Marian died about twenty years ago now.  One of the things of hers that I have is her prayer book.  She was a devout Catholic.  The book, by Father F. I Lasance, is titled My Prayer Book.  Grandma Marian’s sister Anne gave it to her in 1945 and it sat on the table next to her chair in the den as long as I can remember.  There are various prayer cards tucked inside and one dry leaf.  Now that I’ve explained why I’m keeping it, I will talk about the contents, which are… strange… to my Protestant mind.  First of all, the book is full of stuff to do during Latin Mass.  I presume that the idea was to occupy the minds of the congregation with something since what the priest was doing was in a language a lot of them didn’t know.  Then there is the glorification of violence.  I think I get the whole Mel Gibson torture porn thing now.  I am not going to believe in a God who requires that kind of suffering.  I’m just not.  Which, apparently, is all right as long as I say enough of the sanctioned magic words:  there are prayers upon prayers that will grant a devout prayer various lengths of indulgence.  This seems so very transactional.  And, of course, the text is extremely male-dominated and obsessed with virginity.  Please note:  I know and love many people who are Catholic.  I am not setting out to disparage them or the way they choose to worship.  It is just very different from my culture.

 

Speaking of my culture, it received a corrective in the form of Howard Zinn’s book A People’s History of the United States.  Thanks to my awesome younger kid, some of the contents had managed to filter into my consciousness through other books, but I still learned a lot about how political the teaching of history is.  Zinn worked to put the nonwhite, nonmale, nonwealthy back into the history.  It is not a pretty picture, the way the white supremacist capitalist cisnormative patriarchy has systematically oppressed the poor, black, brown, and female people of this country.  We need to do better.

 

Finally, I read The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist.  I had mixed feelings about it.  On one hand, it is a super important exploration of one of the key problems about our money culture:  the idea that there isn’t enough.  Thinking from scarcity is what fuels the hoarding of money and the concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands.  On the other, it doesn’t go far enough.  The author is a fundraiser by profession.  Having done that professionally, I can both admire her skill and decry her need to use it.  A lot of the job is convincing rich people that they are generous for giving money.  That is better than rich people not giving money, but maybe it would be better still for those people to create systems in which money doesn’t need to be given.  Twist does not question the capitalist basis that allows the super-rich to exist in the first place, which means that we’re talking about partial solutions.

 

Winter reading total:  10 books.  Year to date total:  10 books