February 2022 Reading

Another month of reading done.  I read 13 books in February.

 

One of them, Heather Corinna’s What Fresh Hell Is This?, I already wrote about on my fitness blog here.

 

I read three other nonfiction books.  The first was Wendy Williams’s The Language of Butterflies, which was fascinating and informative.  I now have a list of butterfly-related field trips I want to take and I am lusting after butterfly fossils.  The writing is engaging and polished.  Check it out.

 

In my continuing quest to educate myself about black hair, I bought Lulu Pierre’s book A Parent’s Guide to Natural Hair Care for Girls.  I figured a book geared toward the white parents of black or multi-racial children would explain things in small words that I could understand.  It was mostly true.  The photos were helpful and Pierre’s daughter is freaking adorable.

 

Frantz Fanon is one of those names that comes up a lot in multiple contexts from antiracism to decolonial theory.  I read Black Skin, White Masks.  Fanon’s education as a psychiatrist frames his discussion of colonialism and racism, meaning he has a larger reliance on Freud and Adler than I personally am comfortable with.  He points out some interesting issues with the Jungian view of the world.  Perhaps the most striking thing about the book is the style—there are passages of nearly clinical scholarly prose and then eruptions of poetry and then quotations from Sartre.  It’s not an easy read and I wouldn’t say it was enjoyable, but I am glad I did read it.

 

February was a little stressful, so the rest of my reading was fiction.  Since I was a little girl and my aunt gave me Elizabeth Goudge’s The Blue Hills, I have been enjoying Goudge’s fiction for children and adults.  The books are old-fashioned domestic fiction, which is mostly a good and wholesome thing, but occasionally not.  Because a lot of her books were out of print, I read the middle book of her Eliot family trilogy a long time ago.  I re-read it this month, in its proper place between the other two books.  The three books are The Bird in the Tree, Pilgrim’s Inn, and The Heart of the Family.  The best part of all three is Goudge’s ability to depict the magic of places and the influences they have on our lives.  The prose might feel a little purple in current times, but it is still well-wrought and lovely.  Mostly it was like reading a long hug, except for a few jarring notes where times have definitely changed (you know, women’s rights, awareness of racism, etc.).

 

My other favorite reading coping technique is, of course, murder mysteries.  Sadly, I now have to wait for Ann Cleeves to write more books.  I read the most recent Vera novel, The Darkest Evening, finished the Shetland series (Thin Air, Wild Fire, and Cold Earth), and polished off the current Matthew Venn book, The Heron’s Cry.  All are more than worth reading, but Vera is my favorite.

 

February total:  13 books

Spring total:  27 books

YTD total:  27 books