Before I get to last month's books, I want to share two articles I just read on LitHub: Trump 2.0: What the Book World Should Do Now, and What Publishing Can Do About Trump: Preserve the Independence of Our Bookstores and Libraries, both by Josh Cook. While I seriously doubt any publishing industry bigwigs read this blog, there is advice in these columns that we can all follow: do not obey in advance, support local libraries and independent bookstores, minimize your impact on climate change (including not using AI at all for any reason ever). I would add divorce yourself from Amazon: cancel your Prime membership; buy books from bookshop.org (which now has an ebook option); and get your audiobooks from libro.fm. Better yet--get all your books (paper, E, audio) from your public library, your local independent bookstore and/or your local used bookstore (buying used books is good for the environment, and the used bookstores I frequent support their local libraries with their income.). One more thing: while I'm not in a position to deplatform the ghouls whose odious ideas are destroying our democracy as we speak, whenever I see one of their books featured on bookstore shelves (i.e., facing outward), I cover it up with a different book by someone who is not actively dismantling our nation. You could do this too.

Now on to our regularly scheduled programming: What I read in February, from the bottom.

Poetry
Starting in late January, I got back into my habit of reading a few poems first thing in the morning. First I finished a collection I picked up in Prince Edward Island last summer, called My Island's the House I Sleep in at Night by Laurie Brinklow, in which each poem is dedicated to a different resident of PEI, Newfoundland, or Tasmania. It's a really fascinating organizational structure, and an amazing way of telling the stories of these island communities through the eyes of so many different people. I loved it. Next, I read The Carrying, by US Poet Laureate Ada Limón (do we still have a poet laureate, or was that axed too?), also a beautiful collection of poems, about gardens and infertility and loss and  making a home far from home.

Nonficiton
The first book is kind of a reread, kind of a new read, because I've read the First Edition of Sisters of the Earth: Women's Prose & Poetry about Nature, edited by Lorraine Anderson, several times since I picked up a copy sometime in the mid-90s (it was published in 1991), but I hadn't read the Second Edition (published in 2003). Normally a second edition might have a new introduction and some updated information, but this one has somewhere around 50 pieces that didn't appear in the first edition (some of these are additions, some replace other works, either by the same author or a different one). I have to admit to being perplexed and kind of annoyed that it wasn't published as Volume II rather than a second edition (with almost the exact same cover). It just seems like a missed opportunity (to sell more books; to bring in more readers; etc.). That criticism aside, it's a lovely and important book, and having read it, I have a long list of authors I want to explore more.

The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year is another re-re-re-read. I revisited this old favorite as research for a project I'm working on, and I still feel like it should be a requisite gift for all expectant mothers.

Rural Hours, by Susan Fenimore Cooper. This book has been on my to-read list for decades. It's one of the first American books of nature writing written by a woman (it predates Walden by four years), written by the daughter of James Fenimore Cooper. It travels around a year, from March through the following February (with a bit of a following summer tacked on at the end), and contains Cooper's observations of trees, birds, the lake, and her neighbors and the townspeople of Cooperstown in Upstate New York. She has a keen eye for the goings on in nature all around her and a delightful way of expressing herself, and while she can be a bit preachy at times, she expresses a well-earned righteous indignation about the abuse of the natural world, through wanton cutting of trees and killing of wildlife, etc, in her time and place. I read it over the course of a year, and I found our natural calendar here in Maine hews closely to that of hers in New York.

Fiction
Because I was working hard to finish Sisters of the Earth, I didn't take much time for reading fiction. But I did finish the final of four Jacqueline Kirby novels by Elizabeth Peters, Naked Once More. This is probably the best of the series, with a nice twisty plot and some fun insights into the main character's writing life, which I like to think reflects EP's notions (there are some choice lines about other people demanding the writer's time and attention).

I also read A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers, the first book in the Monk & Robot series. I don't often read speculative novels, but this one was a Christmas gift, and C read it first and enjoyed it. It is a gentle, lovely book about friendship and humanity. I loved that it was a futuristic story but not one mired in the desolation of a dystopian post-apocalyptic world. There might have been an apocalyptic event that led to the reorganized of society that appears in the pages--there are passing references to "the transition"--but the world the character travels through is actually really pleasant and lovely, even though they are restless and looking for more. By coincidence, I got C the second book in the series as a Christmas gift (I happened to like the cover) and as soon as I find what he did with it after he finished it, I plan to read it too.

What have you been reading?