May 2023 Reading

I thought I might finish one more book today, but it’s not happening, so I’ll get to count it next month.  In May, I finished eight books.  Four were nonfiction, two were fiction, one was poetry, and one was a picture book.  I also voted three books off my to-read shelf, as I will discuss below.

May is the month in which I get to bid farewell to Winston Churchill’s history of World War II.  I finished the sixth volume, Triumph and Tragedy.  I have had enough casual cultural racism and callous attitudes toward violence.  I don’t have the heart to cite all the instances of the racism, but one that stood out was this one, from the time of the second Quebec Conference, “I was also glad to record that although the British Empire had now entered the sixth year of the war it was still keeping its position, with a total population, including the Dominions and Colonies, of only seventy million white people” (p. 150).  Clearly, the nonwhite people of the empire did not count, literally.  Not that Churchill was alone in his racism.  He points out that the American forces still segregated by race and that the Christmas party plans of his own soldiers and sailors included dressing up as people of other races for fun.  As to the violence part, he says, “At any rate, there never was a moment’s discussion as to whether the atomic bomb should be used or not” (p. 639).  Not even a moment?  Before wiping out two cities?  There were a few lighter moments, like when he describes how Stalin felt on discovering that Churchill and Roosevelt called him “Uncle Joe” between themselves.  And there was one moment of strange karma, in which the Luftwaffe, in April of 1945, came to a functional end:  “It had no more power to recover and fell to pieces.  Part of its headquarters escaped south from Berlin, and for a few days tried to operate from a lunatic asylum near Munich” (p. 542).  While I am glad I persisted to the end of Churchill’s account, I can’t really recommend the experience.  And, as a result, I decided that I did not need to read the three-volume biography of the man that had been sitting on the to-read shelf for some time.  I gave it away to a good home.

 

As I mentioned in last month’s reading report, I am doing an anti-racism training program at church called Sacred Ground.  I still have a couple of meetings left to go, but I finished the second of the core books in the curriculum, Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited.  The man can preach.  He claims Jesus as an outsider, a minority voice in the culture of his time, and in ours.  And Thurman lets no one off the hook.  Both the oppressed and the oppressors among us are called to tell the truth, to give up our hate and its corroding effect on us, and to learn to hold each other in love.  He is not a cheap grace kind of guy.  Highly recommend to those interested in understanding racism and white supremacy as sin.

 

Back when I read Gail Carriger’s book The Heroine’s Journey (go read it; it’s great) about how books that are structured in ways that are not the hero’s journey with which we have been bombarded, I learned about another book called The Heroine’s Journey by Maureen Murdock.  That second one is the one I read this month.  Murdock’s contention is that those of us enculturated as female have a different path to wholeness than the traditional hero’s journey.  She writes from a Jung-influenced place and draws from many sources in myth and story.  One of her points is that we, as women, need to reclaim the power of our female nature, not just attempt to remake ourselves as men of power.  The book is more than thirty years old at this point, so many of the ideas have percolated out into the consciousness, but it was still a useful and inspiring read about choosing a fulfilling path.

 

Oliver Burkeman’s book Four Thousand Weeks:  Time and How to Use It is the kind of book that can change one’s life.  Burkeman wrote a productivity column for a long time and confesses to a love for planners and colored pens in all their seductive promise, so it would not be surprising to find this a book in the mold of Steven Covey’s First Things First.  It is something else entirely.  Burkeman points out that we’re all going to die, which sounds depressing, but isn’t.  We are never going to accomplish all the things.  There is no perfect technique for satisfying all the demands on our time.  Once we accept this, we are freed.  If we’re never going to please everyone and tick every box, we are newly empowered to choose what we want to do with our time.  Obviously, there are places where we do have to please others and times when we are responsible not only to ourselves but to our communities of family, work, and larger society.  But, he points out, there are some benefits to not being efficient at stupid tasks, because people tend to pile more on us when we demonstrate our ability to get them done.  This is only a small sampling of the contents, but I highly recommend this book.

 

On to fiction.  I continue to read my way, slowly, through all of Ursula Le Guin’s work.  This month, I read Lavinia, a novel based on Aeneas’s wife (the one who wasn’t his Trojan wife or Dido), who has just a passing mention in Virgil.  Le Guin gives her a voice and a cultural context.  She even gives her visions of Virgil himself.  It’s a lovely, lyrical book and I very much loved it.

 

Deanna Raybourn continues to entertain me with her Veronica Speedwell books.  This month I read A Dangerous Collaboration.  It had all the hijinks I expect, plus butterflies, intrigue, and Developments in Veronica’s relationship to Stoker.  I have a couple more of the books on my shelf, and I am impatient to get to them!

 

For a while, I kept running into Rilke.  Not the man.  That would be weird, since he’s dead.  But references to him or quotes from him kept turning up.  Eventually, I decided to read some, bought a book, and that was that.  Fast forward to this month and I finally read the book I bought, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus translated by Stephen Mitchell.  The particular book I got has the German and English on facing pages, so that if I ever learn German I can read the original.  (So far, I’m resisting the temptation to take on another Duolingo challenge, but it could happen.)  What a lovely book.  I need to read poetry to feed my soul.  I could start quoting, but, basically, I loved it all.

 

Finally, my excellent son (the librarian one, as opposed to my other excellent son) got me Sandra Boynton’s book Woo Hoo!  You’re Doing Great! for Mother’s Day.  It is hilarious and encouraging.  Who does not need to be egged on by a chicken?  Life is hard, so we should all read more funny picture books.

 

May total:  8

Spring total:  43

Year to date total:  43

 

On to summer reading!