Five novels, Four non-fiction books, and Two books of poetry last month. Maybe I should also be tracking genres and themes in my reading? Oh well, I started this reading log think because I was a tad jealous that my kids always seem to get credit for listing what they read and I don’t. Also, because I have no idea how much I actually read in a year and thought it would be fun to find out. But now that I’ve finished 55 books in 5 months my inner analyst is suddenly curious to add books up by categories. Way to turn something fun into another chore, right?
45. 5/4/18 Original Sinners: Why Genesis Still Matters, John R. Coats. Overall this was worth reading.
46. 5/4/18 I Saw Ramallah, Mourid Barghouti. This is well worth reading. It might crack your heart open.
47. 5/10/18 Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks. I’m not sure I can recommend this as a book everyone should read, indeed, taken out of context some parts could be misused, but I’m sure it end up on my re-read pile at some point.
48. 5/11/18 Kokopelli’s Flute, Will Hobbs. I read this as a kid when it was a brand new book and it’s on next year’s Battle of the Books list for Kid 2 so I read it to her. Now it seems a bit traumatic and to be a bad case of cultural appropriation and misappropriation. We had conversations about that. It is a good page-turner for kids and did get us to look up pictures of ring-tails.
49. 5/11/18 Being Mortal, Atul Gawande. Written well enough to be a page turner even thought the end is, well, it’s all about The End. It did spark one pretty big epiphany for me in that as a kid I moved every.single.year so no wonder I make decisions like an 80y’0 most of the time. Read and and you’ll know what I’m talking about.
50. 5/13/18 Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Pablo Neruda. My Spanish is just good enough that I sometimes felt disappointed in the translation, mostly because he sometimes changed the line breaks unnecessarily.
51. 5/14/18 The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, Kate DiCamillo. Kid 2 and I actually cried over this one. She brought it home for 1 Book, 1 School. It’s OK for kids but way too sad and traumatic for mothers to read. Also, reading aloud when you’ve melted into a sobbing, snot-dripping puddle is really hard.
52. 5/15/18. Miramar, Naguib Mahfouz. I have to admit that I’ve enjoyed some of his other work more.
53. 5/24/18. The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco. This is an excellent story but the pacing isn’t great, sometimes it’s a page turner and sometimes it’s a bit of a snooze.
54. 5/29/18. Blue, George Elliot Clarke. I love what he does with language and race. Gender, not so much.
55. 5/30/18. Spirit Animals: Hunted, Maggie Stiefvater. Kid 2 loves these books. She got to request a free book from school to take home for the summer and this is what she picked. I’m still sorting out my feelings on the feel-good multiculturalism that lacks depth and represents a sort-of flat and fake take. And, of course, in this book we learn that the white boy from Eura is destined to be the leader….
