Bird Books, Birthed Book, and Some Others

A side benefit of letting the pile of books grow before sitting down and blogging about them is that I no longer remember what I had to say about most of them.  It makes catching up quicker, if considerably less meaningful.

I read a string of books in the fall that felt like absolutely the right book at the right time.  Stork by Wendy DeSol was chopped full of bird symbolism, included unexpectedly weird mythological fantasy, and was a fun read full of modern teenage angst and Starbucks marketing. The Mockingbirds by Daisy Whitney had me crying about the prevalence of sexual assault while longing to re-read To Kill a Mockingbird, which is directly references. Like those two, I think I picked up The Valley of the Moon by Melanie Gideon because it had a bird on the cover (and the moon, making it a glow year book) but I found the pro-botanical time travel book to be remarkable, if not as light as I anticipated.

I was reluctant to read A Book About Love by Jonah Lehrer that M sent me because somehow I couldn't see what there was left to say about love/was feeling pretty good about where I stand in loving relationships/have read a lot of well-written stuff concerning research into parenting, marriage, and happiness.  But then I started reading because I love my friends and I love receiving books and suddenly this one resonated.  I'm still unsure how to decode messages God and the Universe send through the books I read, but feel fairly certain I received a message there.

Speaking about books about love, Love and Gelato by Jenna Evans Welch was great fun, or at least as much fun as a reasonably sensitive book about being sixteen and raised by a single mother who just died can be.  The characters eat a lot in Italy, which made me like them (people go to Italy for many reasons, but there are two reasons they stay: love and gelato), and they did things that just made me feel old.  The teenage narrator reads through her mother's notebooks, and finds her mother's thoughts when she (the mother) received e-mails from admissions in study abroad programs long before the narrator was born.  I bristled at the author for such a blatant anachronism-- until I realized that the book was published this year so the dead mother was studying abroad in 1997 or so.  She certainly could have received an e-mail.  And I know she is fictional, but I still found it disturbing to be older than the now dead mother.

Speaking about gift books, Wonder by R.J. Palacio is great, if it captures 5th and 9th grade a bit too well.  I'm closing bird year out with great gifts  The Big Year and Chicken (with library books Goldfinch and The Nightingale also on the pile).

I should also shout out Birthed: Finding Grace through Infertility by Elizabeth Evans Hagan (more information here) and After the Crown by K.B. Wagers.  The books have the common trait of being very-well done and having been written by someone I know.  And not much else, but both are good.

I just remembered There Will Be Bears which I also read, despite being about bears and not birds.