April 2023 Reading

We made it to the end of another month.  I read six books in April.

 OK, I read five and listened to one, but I’m counting it.

 

I listened to Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows.  It had been a long time since I read it and I love Ratty and Mole and Badger.  I love Toad, too, but the quiet, lyrical reflective parts of the book are the ones that feed my soul.  I highly recommend listening to audiobooks via the public library.  I used Libby to check out the book and it’s easy and free.

 

When T. and I went to visit Syd and Sam, we met up with them in Reno.  We arrived early, so naturally we went to Sundance Books, where a picture book jumped out and made me buy it.  Really.  What is not to like about a book with a large picture of a toilet plunger on the cover and the title I Want to Be a Vase?  Julio Torres tells a funny and affirming story about not allowing one’s shape to define one’s purpose in life.  Gentle chaos ensues and even the grumpy vacuum is won over in the end.

 

I needed to re-read King Lear by that Shakespeare guy (no, I do not want to hear anyone’s theories about how Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare.  I don’t care.).  I could have lugged around my giant volume of the complete plays, but instead I chose to live dangerously, entering Half Price Books to buy a paperback of just the single play.  Moral victory occurred; I walked out with just the one book.  It has been a good long time since I read the play or even saw it in production.  It’s not my favorite.  There is so much collateral damage in the play.  Maybe I’m just not in the mood for tragedy these days.

 

One of the things I love about my church is that it has tons of ways to get involved.  I’ve been participating in an anti-racism training program since the beginning of the year.  I finished one of the core books of the curriculum recently.  It’s called Waking Up White by Debby Irving.  Irving recounts her personal journey confronting her unconscious racism and her realization of the systemic cultural issues that poison us all.  She’s a great writer and it’s a fascinating read.  White folks need to do the work of learning about the systems that privilege us and then the work of dismantling those systems so all of us can thrive.  Highly recommend.

 

My church book group is currently reading Rachel Held Evans’s final book, Wholehearted Faith.  I had an insomnia night, so I read ahead and finished it.  I had never read any of her work before.  This is her final book, finished after her death by her friend Jeff Chu.  She writes with heart and humor and honesty about the real challenges of being a person of faith, about the way our churches can stifle us or sustain us (or both!), and about being real with ourselves and God.  Those of us who, when we say we are Christian, add “but not that kind” to distance ourselves from the cis/white/hetero/patriarchical loud brands that we see in the news around us can find in Evans a more relatable, understandable, loving way to relate to God and each other.

 

Finally, I read Louisa May:  A Modern Biography of Louisa May Alcott by Martha Saxton.  LMA is one of my personal heroes, even if she was not perfect.  This book does not leave out the warts and yet leaves me with my admiration for the subject.  Biographers of LMA have a tricky task.  They all come to the work having loved her books for children, but then they have to confront the reality that she didn’t love doing that work, that it came out of necessity, that there was, potentially, another, greater body of work that she could have done had her life had a bit more opportunity and room and love in it.  Saxton does an okay job.  She dismisses the childrens’ books (and sometimes screws up the plot details—I have read all the books so many times that I notice this stuff) and champions the other novels.  She treats LMA’s struggles with family and finances with compassion.  Sometimes she lets the family have too much space and LMA too little.  I am glad I read it.

 

April total:  6

Spring total to date:  35

Year to date:  35