February Reading
I read 11 books in February, just like January. I’ll need to pick up the pace soon, once the Hugo and Nebula finalist lists come out.
Brigands and Breadknives by Travis Baldree: The latest entry in the Legends & Lattes cozy fantasy-verse, wherein Fern the rattkin bookseller from Bookshops & Bonedust undergoes something of a midlife existential crisis, along with adventures with a legendary elf adventurer, a goblin, and talking blades.
Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues by Jonathan Kennedy: Its subtitle is a misnomer, as it's more a world history focusing on how infectious diseases impacted history across eight different eras than an epidemiological history of the diseases in question. With that said, I think it's an interesting read, but you should know going in not to expect, say, a deep dive into the Great Plague of Athens and its possible causes, and that he barely addresses the medical side of the great 20th and 21st century pandemics (influenza, HIV, Covid), instead focusing on how socioeconomic factors influenced the impact of the latter two in different parts of the world.
Time Loops & Meet Cutes by Jackie Lau: One of my favorite contemporary romance authors dips her toe into SFF with a time loop romance--our heroine gets stuck on June 20 after eating dumplings from a mysterious booth at a night market in Toronto on her way home from work--and it's charming.
Building God’s Kingdom by Julie Ingersoll: This 2015 book is an academic examination of Christian Reconstructionism--a subset of Calvinism that advocates for a form of theocracy (though they don't like it when you call it that). Ingersoll focuses on how a movement that's pretty fringe in terms of adherents who affirmatively follow its precepts is hugely influential within the broader religious right, especially through their focus on Christian homeschooling curricula. And while this was far in the future when Ingersoll wrote this (oh, the good old days), their fingerprints are all over Project 2025.
Breach of Promise by Elisabeth Fairchild: This is one of several traditional Regency romances I discovered in a used bookstore in Sequim, WA during a getaway to the Olympic Peninsula last fall. Books like this were my romance gateway drug as a teen, and I still have a nostalgic love of them. For this particular entry, I enjoyed the section where the hero and heroine were exploring the Cotswold countryside, though I felt like the antagonists were a bit cartoonish, and the hero's noble titles weren't handled quite right--a nitpick of mine since I figured out how they worked and committed the system to memory when I was writing this era and get annoyed when they're wrong. Like, even in a total romp with deliberately anachronistic social mores--which this isn't--IMHO it's best to get those historical and cultural details right. It's not like the people who don't know or care about this stuff will mind them being right, and you'll avoid pulling utter nitpicky pedants like me out of the story.
Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist by Daniel Pollack-Pelzner: I'm as big a Hamilton fan as you'd expect from someone who's really into history and somewhat into musical theater, and I both admire and envy Miranda's talent and the fact he was able to accomplish so much so young. This book did not change any of that, and gave me added insight into all the collaboration and iteration that's gone into making his work so successful. As a writer, my creative work isn't as inherently collaborative, but I could still learn a lot about patience and persistence in editing and rewriting.
The Barren Grounds by David Roberston: This is the first in a middle grade portal fantasy series about a pair of First Nations foster siblings who find a way into a world stuck in an endless winter (somewhat a la Narnia) but populated with animal people from the author's (and the protagonists') Cree heritage. It was a nice Sunday afternoon read for me, though I doubt I'll continue the series--at least for me, it's a very good story for the age group it's written for but didn't have as much crossover appeal for adult readers.
The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi by Wright Thompson: A deep history of Emmett Till's murder that puts the events and people involved into a rich context of the specific place and time that the atrocity unfolded in.
Useless Etymology by Jess Zafarris: After bouncing off the light fiction read I'd intended for a break between two heavy nonfiction histories, I chose this fun, chatty book about etymology instead. Among other things, I now know that pineapple got its English name from its visual resemblance to a pinecone--which used to sometimes be called a pineapple itself, back when "apple" could mean any fruit or fruit-adjacent thing growing on a tree.
American Midnight by Adam Hochschild: This look at the horrifying, repressive, and often violent assault on Americans' civil liberties during and immediately after WWI delves into little-known history, but on another level it's all too recognizable and familiar.
Over My Dead Body: Unearthing the Hidden History of America’s Cemeteries by Greg Melville: A history and travelogue where the author visits 17 American cemeteries--mostly notable ones, but some obscure--as a sort of journey through how our practices and beliefs around death and dying have changed between Jamestown and now.