April 2025 Reading Report

April was a good month for finishing books.  I finished ten this month.

I’ll start with the fun stuff.  My birthday is in April, which means that I get a new Terry Pratchett book, this time Moving Pictures.  Pratchett turns his considerable satiric power to the movies and hilarity ensues.  It is, of course, more complicated than that, but what a great ride.

 

My birthday also brought two picture books and two graphic novels.  Silly Boobies: A Love Story by Ame Dyckman is both funny and sweet, what you might get if you crossed the Sneetches with Romeo and Juliet without the tragic ending and with boobies, who might be the most endearing birds ever.  This is a great time for books that encourage us to accept and celebrate difference, so I extra love this one.

 

If You Give a Pig a Party by Laura Numeroff is an excellent addition to the series that began, I believe, with giving a mouse a cookie.  This gentle story captures the excitement and chaos of being a small being having a birthday so well.  The rhythms are wonderful and the illustrations captivate.

 

Nathan Hale’s first two installments of The Mighty Bite, The Mighty Bite and The Mighty Bite: Walrus Brawl at the Mall made me laugh out loud.  What is not to like about the adventures of a trilobite and his gang of friends, including Amber the Ambulocetus and Tiffany Timber, paleo-newscaster?  There is much chaos, all of it entertaining.  Two thumbs up.

 

I rounded out my kid/young adult reading with Linda Sue Park’s A Long Walk to Water.  I loved her earlier book, A Single Shard.  This one is also great.  It is based on a true story.  It traces the experiences of two kids in Sudan in different generations, Salva, displaced by war, and Nya, who spends her days fetching water for her family.  It is a challenging story, but one that highlights resilience and hope.

 

Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel The Water Knife is set in a dystopian Arizona/Nevada/California and explores what happens when water becomes scarce enough that chaos ensues.  The water knife of the title is an enforcer in the employ of a Nevada water magnate.  His story intertwines with that of an Arizona journalist and a refugee from Texas.  There is intrigue, sex, violence, and really good writing.  Highly recommend.

 

My first year of Education for Ministry is nearly done, which means that I finished A Short Introduction to the Hebrew Bible by John J. Collins.  On the whole, I liked it.  Collins explains the history clearly, draws in multiple sources, and provides really good photos and illustrations.  He’s not as ready to call out the sexism and xenophobia and the violence they engender in the texts as I would like, but he tries.  If his were my only text, I would feel like I was getting a very white male view.  Fortunately, it is not.  (Tune in next month, when I will have finished the other!)  A useful book for those interested.

 

I got involved in another group in church in which we read Unbinding the Gospel by Martha Grace Reese.  The book is about the e-word, evangelism.  The e-word has become even more difficult to stomach in recent times as the rise of the so-called Christian Nationalist and other fundamentalist evangelical churches has gotten a lot of press.  I’m not going to be knocking on doors any time soon, but I have been motivated to prayer and to being a little more open about what my faith and my church do for me.

 

April total:  10

Spring to date total:  28.5

2025 to date:  28.5