Jen Schneider’s On (Pantry) Stock & (Kitchen) Timers is a unique collection of a stream-of-consciousness essays and poems that you wouldn’t think would work but does in an enchanting, eye-catching, made-you-look kind of way. Schneider’s words are a collage of thought that walks readers through a maze of sensation/emotion/confusion/questing. This collection deserves a re-read to fully take in what Schneider says, but even after a second reading I found myself pausing, starting a page over, considering what Schneider wrote, how to interpret her idea. Read this book and experience Schneider’s creative art for yourself.
Foreign Fruit by Katie Goh is an outstanding book. I was expecting a microhistory about oranges, or citrus fruit as a whole; I was not expecting an incredibly well-researched social history about culture, society, belonging, searching for one’s place in the world, biases, acceptance, food cultivation, and environmentalism (among other topics). Goh’s book takes readers from Ireland and Malaysa to China, Italy via the Silk Road, France, Russia, and the United States. Readers witness the destructive oppression of Dutch and British colonialism, Communist tyrants, and violent racism. I had never heard of the Los Angeles Riot of 1871, in which nineteen Chinese immigrants were murdered, and no one was held accountable.
Readers are also introduced to the wonders of citrus cultivation; I was also unaware that similar to apples, citrus seeds will not grow true to the parent plant: if you plant a clementine seed you will get some kind of variety of citrus, possibly even a clementine (but don’t count on it). Goh tells us of the origins of many of the citrus varieties we are familiar with today, how the fruit rose to such popularity (aside from being delicious), and its cultural significance in many cultures.
In a fashion similar to Crying in H Mart and My Berlin Kitchen, Goh describes a childhood of feeling like an outsider, growing up in Ireland as the child of an Irish mother and a Chinese-Malaysian father. Her love of her heritage is evident despite her inner struggle to see just where she fits in. Her descriptions of visits to her family in Malaysa are filled with warm childhood memories, and when she returns as an adult she is just as eager to embrace her culture and identity.
This book was a pleasure to read, engaging, informative, completely engrossing. I highly recommend this as a memoir, a microhistory, and as a study of society.
Murder Ballads by Katy Horan is a treat for fans of Dark Folklore and Gothic themes (that’s a gruesome way to begin a review, isn’t it?). I was already familiar with “The Death of Queen Jane” and “The Twa Swans” thanks to Loreena McKennitt. Horan included a list of recordings, so readers can immerse themselves fully into the eerie beauty of these lyrics. Horan includes some backstory to each of the selected ballads; this led me down a rabbit hole of reading the expanded stories behind these ballads. Katy Horan doesn’t just present her readers with a collection of songs, but a unique volume of true crime as well. Apart from the two songs McKennitt produced, I would say my favorite is the rendition of “Where the Wild Roses Grow” performed by Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue. I definitely recommend this darkly beautiful collection to anyone who loves folklore, poetry, and the Gothic and Romantic literature of the nineteenth century. You will absolutely love it. Be warned, though, you will spend hours looking up music videos.
Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder’s beautiful book Mother, Creature, Kin brings to mind the essays of Barbara Kingsolver and Rebecca Solnit, and Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses. Steinauer-Scudder explores such topics as climate change, motherhood, seeking (and finding) one’s center as well as one’s place in the world. She asks her readers to consider their roles within the world, reminding us that the greatest gift we can do for future generations is to leave the world a better place than we found it. She acknowledges the challenges in this, admitting her own failings while striving to do better. Mother, Creature, Kin is a book that everyone should read. It is illuminating and thought-provoking, at times heartbreaking, but pulsing with life.
“Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work” by Allison Tyra is an excellent book. She names and credits literally hundreds of women who were not recognized or rewarded for their achievements, from art to medicine to space exploration and beyond. As an amateur scholar of women’s history (i.e. I am not a student), I recognized some of these brilliant women; others I had unsurprisingly never heard of. Tyra’s book is an epic of female experience: the struggles we face, the biases we must fight against, the acknowledgements we are denied. This book should be read by all, though there will be plenty of naysayers that will insist that “it didn’t happen that way.” (And we all know who will say things like that, don’t we?)
Allison Tyra’s book should be recognized as the very valuable work of history it is. It deserves a place in classrooms as a reference book and a history of women’s experiences and accomplishments. Read this for the information, read it just because, or read it and allow yourself to fall into rabbit holes of related history. Whatever your reason, read this.
Celia Drill’s The Lost World is some of the best contemporary poetry I have ever read. Her work is enthralling; she plays with language, creating images in the mind that are a kaleidoscope of emotion and thought. I found myself highlighting entire poems instead of single lines. I read her poems two, three times over, looking for meaning withing the meaning. Drill creates surreal landscapes of sound—I read her poems out loud, wanting to feel the flow of her language.
Drill’s poem “The Raven” describes the raven thus: “When the raven appears, he is never a bird; he is always a small, dark man. He walks with a cane, with God as his witness.”
A bird dies alone in the snow: “I take her home to forest’s solace, lay her in the dark earth beneath joined pines […] The forest is mourners holding hands. My dead bird recedes into roots. And unlike me, silent stranger in dimming woods, she sings from networked branches.”
Celia Drill crafts lines of such beauty: “Rain makes widows of the ghost pines…”; “There is no time, say the dragonflies, only color.”; “Sweetness spirals from the throats of violet, coalesces, sisterhoods of stars.” Her poem “Mug for Lapsang Souchong” is as graceful as the fox that the potter dreams of.
We know writers are artists, and in The Lost World Celia Drill embodies this ideal. “I am only a sparrow,” she says, “but I am voluminous.”
Slightly delayed, but we are still in January for about eight more hours, so…Goodreads Challenge update!
Last year I managed to beat my goal of 145 books, finishing at 152. This year I have set a goal of 150 books. I have completed nine so far, seven of which were poetry eBooks with an average of 150 pages, give or take. I have some hefty books on my planned TBRs for the next few months, March especially, so we’ll see how quickly I get through them. I am a fast reader naturally, but I do not just breeze through a book for the sake of getting it finished. I do take the time to read thoughtfully and make notes or copy things into my Commonplace Book. Many of my nonfiction books look like little porcupines with sticky tab quills.
My reading time will also be slightly reduced as I am setting aside time in the evenings to write because my poetry manuscript is not going to finish itself (though it would probably require far less editing if it did). How is it that something that sounds so meaningful when you first write it sounds like a four year old telling a story when you go back and read it a week later? I mean no disrespect to four year olds: my Finch is an excellent storyteller. His Mόraί, on the other hand, is a slightly off-kilter poet.
I recently shared a post about my February TBR, so I won’t review it here. My March reading list will be in the theme of Women’s History Month. Sister and I are expecting to have TWTCNS finished by late March, and we have chosen one of the books on my TBR to be our next Sister Read.
This was an epic of an adventure taking readers to the days of Britain’s legends. The Wild Hunt rides, kings and princes jockey for power, and queens play politics like a chess game. Lucy Holland’s writing is fantastic; her world-building is authentic, it is clear that she conducted a great deal of research in order to recreate Saxon Britain as historians have written it. The two primary characters, the proud warrior Herla and fierce Queen Aethelburg are brilliantly presented. They are intelligent, strong, dedicated to their people and their causes. Herla and Aethelburg face both the internal scheming of the human Wessex court and the power of the Lord of the Otherworld. Any fantasy fan, historical fiction reader, readers interested in Iron Age Britain, anyone that likes a good adventure, really, will appreciate this book.
This was an interesting book; I requested it out of curiosity as manifestation has been a pretty big topic of discussion on social media sites, so I figured I would take a look. While I enjoyed reading it, I don’t think the subject is anything I can quite relate to. This book is well-written and a good guide for beginners that are willing to take the time to approach manifestation with the attention it requires; I am not that person. I think I will come back to this though. It has definitely piqued my interest.
This book is absolutely priceless! The prompts had me giggling and reaching for my pen before I even finished reading it. Some are thought-provoking, some lighthearted, and others laugh-out-loud funny, so much so that I started reading it out loud to my family and we all began plotting mini stories. I received it as an eBook, but I will be buying a hard copy to add to my writing books. This is a wonderful resource for anyone that writes, is thinking about writing, or for any creative mind, really. The prompts invite you to think about things on the slant, and anyone will benefit from that.
This is the Mask 