April Reading

As usual, I’ve been reading.  April’s total was eight books, one for my fitness blog (which I won’t talk about here because I already did there), three nonfiction, and four fiction books.

Because I have an awesome kid, I get Terry Pratchett books for holidays.  This time I got The Light Fantastic and Equal Rites.  As always, I am impressed with his characters, his heart, and his way of connecting the everyday with the big and important.  I’m looking forward to the next holiday to get and read more!

 

Murder mysteries are my comfort reading, but I’m kind of picky about the kinds I like.  I prefer ones that are not too gory or too predictable or too full of people I don’t like.  I’m not interested in tortured detectives who have dark secrets or get super violent.  I want a detective I like to catch bad guys.  I want good prose, thoughtful humans, and engaging relationships.  Therefore, I am happy with Ann Cleves and her Vera Stanhope series.  (I have watched the whole tv series, but I’m slowly reading through the books.)  Telling Tales and Hidden Depths both hit the spot for me.

 

Somehow, my education skipped over Olympe de Gouges.  This is not that surprising, since it skipped a lot of stuff, but it is unfortunate.  The good news is that now I know about her.  The Declaration of the Rights of Women fills in the gaps that the male revolutionaries in France left.  The particular edition I bought turned out to have additional inspirational and aspirational quotes from a variety of feminist sources.  It’s appalling that women’s rights—ANYONE’s human rights—are still so contested.  I am glad to know another pioneer mother in that fight.

 

Coming off of that experience, it is perhaps not surprising that Bill Bryson’s book The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid seemed very white and male.  It was, as all his work is, funny and engaging and enjoyable.  I just couldn’t shake the feeling, all the way through, that his pretty awesome childhood was predicated on a whole bunch of white male privilege.  He was a kid; he couldn’t help it, and yet he was writing as an adult and I guess I wanted a little more acknowledgment of the wider picture.  There is some sense that not everyone had it so good, but maybe I’m just tired of hearing about the memories from the dominant paradigm.

 

In contrast, I also read Bryson’s book At Home, which I liked a lot better.  It talks about everything from how we ended up with windows to how bricks became a dominant building material for a time to why we have salt and pepper on the table.  It’s like hanging out with somebody who knows all kinds of crazy stuff and tells you ALL OF IT really quickly with a quirky sense of humor.  I would recommend this one.

 

Month total:  8

Year to date:  27