August 2025 Reading

Anybody who knows me is clear that August is my least favorite month.  Perhaps I compensated a bit by reading more fiction.  Five books for the month, total.

Audio first.  I continued to listen to Tamora Pierce’s Protector of the Small series, this time Squire.  I enjoyed Kel’s progress out into a wider world.

 

I finished off Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy, reading The Well of Ascension and The Hero of Ages.  Neither book was as good as the first one, despite an interesting world, a great system of magic, and some compelling characters.  I don’t want to do plot spoilers, so all I will say is that, in my opinion, the books suffered from being too male.  I would sort of recommend them, with caveats.  I am not in a rush to read more of Sanderson’s work because I am disappointed, on the whole, with this series.  The books are not short, so I’m not willing to invest the time for what felt like little payoff.

 

As part of my Year of Water, I read Anne Carson’s Plainwater.  It is a collection of essays and poetry.  The writing is devastatingly lovely and the conceptions are brilliant.  It was not always pleasant reading, however.  I am glad I read it, though.

 

My church’s book group is currently reading The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence.  I’m done, both because I hate reading part of a book at once and because this is a short book.  It’s actually quite lovely and encouraging and uplifting.  Essentially, Brother Lawrence advocates for a God-centered practice of mindfulness in daily life.  Two thumbs up.

 

Thankfully, September starts tomorrow.

 

August total:  5

Summer total:  15

2025 Year to Date total:  50.5

July 2025 Reading

Not a ton of reading this month.  Summer is not great for reading, it turns out, at least in my world.  I read four books this month.

 

Audio first.  I listened to First Test and Page by Tamora Pierce.  The thing I like best about this particular series of hers is that Pierce does not downplay the amount of hard work Kel has to do to begin and continue her training as she pursues her goal to be a knight.  The characters are well-drawn and the payoff is earned.  Thumbs up.  Will start listening to the next one as soon as it is available at the library.

 

As a result of a conversation a long time ago now with my kid, I bought the Mistborn trilogy by Brian Sanderson.  The deal was that he would read them first and then I would get to keep them and read them when he was done.  I am finally getting around to it.  I loved the first book, Mistborn.  The story is great and the plot was surprising and fun.  I enjoyed the way magic works in this world.  I’m looking forward to the rest of the series.

 

In my reading for Year of Water, I read Waves and Beaches by Willard Bascom and Kim McCoy.  This is a charming book.  I bought it on a whim at REI and I could not be happier with my purchase.  The photos are stunning, the text both informative and amusing.  Bascom died in 2000, but McCoy has kept the work updated.  I learned about physics and engineering without suffering!  There were stories about surfing and sailing and other adventures.  I loved it.  Check it out.

 

July total:  4

Summer to date:  10

2025 to date:  45.5 

June 2025 Reading

June is over and so is June reading.  (Don’t worry:  July is now!)  I finished six books in June.

The first two were re-reads for my Sacred Ground group.  I highly recommend both books and the Sacred Ground program.  The books are Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited and Debby Irving’s Waking Up White.  I’ve written about them before, so I’ll just suggest that y’all read them.

 

I listened to the last of Susan Cooper’s Dark Is Rising series, Silver on the Tree.  It was an excellent conclusion to a great series.  I felt satisfied at the end and renewed.

 

For my Year of Water project, I read Joan Didion’s Where I Was From.  Somehow I managed to get to this old and have this be the first of her work I read.  I very much enjoy how she writes.  This particular book is a memoir and exploration of what it means to be Californian.  She’s not entirely convinced that Californians are a good thing.  It was an interesting read and had a lot of relevant water stuff in it that I will eventually discuss in my Year of Water Substack posts.  Short version:  good book.

 

I swear that when I went into Barnes and Noble, I was only planning to spend a gift card I had buying a baby gift (Moo, Baa, La La La, which both my kids adored) and another batch of Sudoku puzzles.  It is not my fault that not one, but two new Rick Riordan books jumped up and made me take them home with me.  They were the first two installments of the Percy Jackson Senior Year Adventures, The Chalice of the Gods and Wrath of the Triple Goddess.  There is nothing better for a bad day (or week, or year, or whatever this current mess is) than a good dose of Rick Riordan.  I laughed out loud.  I cheered.  I felt better about the possibility for good in a complicated and often not good world.

 

June total: 6

Summer total to date:  6

Year to date:  41.5

May 2025 Reading

I finished seven books in May.  (I’m going my continuing education right now, so I’m actually reading a lot, but it doesn’t count toward my book total!)

Audio first.  I listened to the next three books in Susan Cooper’s Dark Is Rising series, The Dark Is Rising, Greenwitch, and The Grey King.  They are great books, full of the right amount of adventure and kids who get to do real things without being totally abandoned by adults.  I’ll be listening to the last one in the series as soon as it comes available from the library.

 

My mom found a copy of Into the Uncut Grass by Trevor Noah soaking wet on her patio one day.  She dried it out, read it, and brought it to me because it is a really adorable book.  The message about listening and understanding other perspectives is a timely one.  The illustrations are also charming.

 

The last book for this year’s EFM curriculum was The Hebrew Bible:  Feminist and Intersectional Perspectives edited by Gale A. Yee.  This book saved my sanity bacon over the course of the EFM year because Yee and the other authors call out all the problematic stuff in the Old Testament, provide alternative interpretations, and generally hold everyone to account for allowing sexism and racism and other discriminations to continue.  It’s an academic book, so the prose is not page-turning, but it's not entirely jargon-infested either.  Folks who are tired of the patriarchal interpretation of the Bible might enjoy this one.

 

My water reading continues.  I feel like I’ve been reading Steven Solomon’s Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization for months.  That might actually be true!  Anyway:  I’m done now.  The book is an informative historical and economic discussion of the role water has played in civilizations, including the current and future challenges posed by limited supply and growing population.  Solomon has, in my opinion, an unfortunate tendency to talk about “man” and “mankind” when “human” and “humankind” would be less sexist and more inclusive; this makes his prose irritating to me from time to time.  That said, he does a good job of explaining complex interactions and adds fun historical anecdotes.  I would recommend the book, although not quite as highly as Peter Gleick’s book (the one I read in February).

 

Finally, I read the recently-released We All Want to Change the World:  My Journey Through Social Justice Movements from the 1960s to Today by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.  I am a fan.  I read Abdul-Jabbar’s Substack posts.  He has a clear writing style and a strong grounding in the events he discusses.  He’s thorough in his research, charming, and uncompromising in his stance that, to echo his echo of Fannie Lou Hamer, none of us are free until all of us are free.  At times, he shares his frustration that so little progress has been made in so much time, but he remains steadfast in his commitment to continuing to work for justice for all.  May it be so!

 

On to summer reading.

 

May total:  7

Spring total:  35.5

Year to date:  35.5

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

March 2025 Reading Report

I finished four books in March, which is a little low, but it is what it is.

Audio first.  I listened to Over Sea, Under Stone by Susan Cooper.  (One reason, I think, for the low total, is that I am still in line for the next book in Cooper’s series.)  I read it when my kids were younger and it holds up as a good read.  My only quibble is that it seems like every book of a certain age (maybe even new ones, but I don’t know…) has some incidental imperialism/colonialism/racism baked in.  This book’s is relatively minor—the children in exploring the house where they are staying posit that they are British explorers who might meet up with unfriendly natives with no sense of why natives might be unfriendly to colonizing explorers.  Anyway:  good story, rousing Arthurian adventure, fun characters.

 

For the course I am taking at church, I had to read The Four Vision Quests of Jesus by Steven Charleston.  It is a fascinating book about how Charleston, who is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation, worked to reconcile his Native American heritage with his Christian faith.  Charleston is a great writer and a wise and generous thinker.  His work expanded my mind.

 

For my own Year of Water, I read James McBride’s memoir The Color of Water.  Aside from the title, it was not very watery, but it was a very good book.  McBride’s mother is a Polish Jew who married a Black man.  He recounts the struggles and triumphs of her life with deep love and compassion and humor.  It’s a lovely, if sometimes heartbreaking, book.

 

Finally, just for fun, I read The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery.  I bought it on a whim because really, it has a great title.  It is the interwoven story of an older concierge and a twelve-year-old girl in an apartment building in Paris.  Each is extraordinary in her own way and each keeps her own secret.  When their lives touch each other at last as a result of a new tenant moving into the building, what happens is both wonderful and bittersweet.  No plot spoilers.  Go read the book.

 

March total:  4

Spring total to date:  18.5

2025 total to date:  18.5

February 2025 Reading Report

This month I will start with a caveat.  I did not read all of Walden and Other Writings by Henry David Thoreau.  I read the part of the other writings that was A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.  Even that, it turns out, was a selection.  So I am giving myself half a credit for the book.

 

How was it?  It was interesting, if not always good.  Thoreau writes some very long sentences, but his observational skills are unparalleled and his love for his subjects runs deep.  It was, if nothing else, a detailed picture of what those rivers were like in his time.  Even then, he was perceiving the changes that humans were making to river systems and the environment as a whole.  While I like some of his other works better, I did enjoy this one.

 

My other nonfiction read of the month was Peter Gleick’s The Three Ages of Water.  I am talking about it in chunks in my Year of Water postings (more on Thoreau over there, too).  It traces water in science and culture from the beginning of the universe to the present day, dividing the ages as beginning to roughly the Enlightenment, from then until now, and from now into the future.  He outlines the choices that lie before us and the probable consequences of those choices.  Spoiler alert:  if we choose wrong, it’s going to be bad.  Gleick is a knowledgeable and engaging writer and the book was fun to read without sacrificing anything in the thought-provoking department.

 

I listened to one audio book.  I continue through the Elizabeth George mysteries, this time In the Presence of the Enemy.  I like them all and this one is no exception.

 

I have the best kids ever.  As proof, I will offer that my kid was in a bookstore, saw a book I needed, bought it, and sent it to me.  The book in question is A Stroke of the Pen:  The Lost Stories by Terry Pratchett.  There is no way better to fix a troublesome day than to spend some time in Pratchett’s imagination.  The stories in this collection were early ones, before the development of the Discworld.  They’re very fun, if not as polished as his later work.  They were mostly published pseudonymously (is that a word?) and were only discovered again due to a happy accident followed by some very hard work.  I am duly grateful.  (I feel like I need to add that there is a foreword by Neil Gaiman, a person who has moved himself to my Do Not Read list, but it is easily skipped.  Your mileage may vary.)

 

In my own ramblings in bookstores, a pleasure I try to limit due to the exorbitant expense, I bought Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss.  It is a beautifully written book about a girl with an abusive father who is obsessed with early English history.  A field trip with students essentially role-playing stone age villagers goes sideways.  Despite the dark subject matter, it was a lovely book.

 

One way I keep down the expense of books is by shopping library book sales.  They are much cheaper and my money supports libraries!  Plus you get to keep the books!  This is how I acquired Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams.  What a great book!  It’s set in Arizona in the 1980s and focuses on two sisters and their newly-diagnosed with Alzheimer’s father.  There’s something for everyone:  Indigenous people, environmental issues, cockfighting, mining, railroads, piñatas, orthopedic shoes, teen pregnancy, and dancing.  It’s hard to describe.  Sometimes it is so sad that I felt my heart breaking.  Other times, it was funny and joyous.  Overall, it satisfied.

 

February total:  5.5

Spring total to date:  14.5

2025 year to date:  14.5