March Reading

During March, I read nine books, of which six were kid books, one was fiction, and two were nonfiction.

 

All six kid books were written by Ursula Vernon.  She is amazing and wonderful and makes me laugh out loud.  I loved the Dragonbreath series, but I might just like this series, about Harriet the Hamster Princess, even more.  The books are Harriet the Invincible, Of Mice and Magic, Ratpunzel, Giant Trouble, Whiskerella, and Little Red Rodent Hood.  All of them star Harriet, a princess with no time or patience for stupid princes and a great fondness for whacking things with swords and cliff diving.  Her interactions with some of the classic fairy tales are hilarious and empowering.  For bonus points, the pictures are also great.  Read them, give them as gifts, share them with a favorite kid or kid disguised as responsible adult.

 

The novel I read was The Scent of Water by Elizabeth Goudge.  She wrote a lot of books for both kids and adults and all the ones I have read are charming and old-fashioned in a mostly good way.  This one was no exception.  One of the themes she returns to over and over is the need to find the real bits of life.  This particular book follows a woman named Mary, whose elderly cousin dies and leaves her a house in the English countryside.  Mary remembers her cousin only vaguely, having met her only once as a child, but that memory is magic.  Nothing super dramatic happens.  The other characters all have their own set of obstacles to overcome, but it’s all very gentle and most everyone comes to a good end.  It was the book equivalent of a nice cup of tea.

 

I continue to work my way through the pile-up of nonfiction on my shelves.  Hampton Sides’s book Blood and Thunder about Kit Carson and the Western expansion of the United States was very well written and interesting.  Unfortunately, it’s not a super comfortable subject.  Kit Carson was a complicated human, a killer and a pathfinder, a loyal friend, a good husband, and a man in the thick of historic change.  The book doesn’t sugarcoat the genocide that took place in the “winning” of the west, which was a relief, but again, not the most pleasant reading.

 

Atlantic by Simon Winchester was also well written, but a lot more annoying.  I loved his book The Professor and the Madman, so I had high hopes.  They were dashed.  He is entrenched in his white male British perspective.  It’s not that hard to learn to write “humans” instead of “mankind” or “men.”  The genocides perpetrated across the ocean need more than a casual brief condemnation.  Climate change is real.  All that said, there were interesting stories and some useful information in the book and it was, again, well-told.

 

Spring total:  19 books

Year to date total:  19 books (yes, these numbers will be the same until I hit summer reading.)