February 2026 Reads

My February book stack, despite falling mostly in the crime genre, covers a pretty wide range of styles and time periods. I'll keep this intro short, because the blurbs will be long. They'll also contain some spoilers, so be forewarned.

Nonfiction
The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen. Every single person I mentioned this book to looked at me like I was deranged. A history of notebooks? What could be more boring? Au contraire! What could be more fascinating? Turns out, those little bound stacks of paper played a role in society's progress in the areas of economics and finance; exploration, navigation, and shipping; art and engineering; literature; and much more. Each aspect of notebook history is told through stories of individuals and their notebooks (famous notebook-keepers, like Leonardo DaVinci and Charles Darwin, and lots of people you've never heard of). The only thing that could have made this book better is a timeline of the history of the notebook mapping out the many overlapping threads and stories told within the book.

Fiction
Almost Midnight by Paul Doiron. This is the last of a stack of books from the Mike Bowditch, renegade game warden series I started in January. As I mentioned in my post last month, they're fast-paced page-turners and a great distraction from doomscrolling.

The Savage Noble Death of Babs Dion by Ron Curry. I'm going to say more about this book than I usually do, because I've been thinking a lot about it since I read it, and this is one of the blurbs where I might edge into spoiler territory. This book had an intriguing, if somewhat absurd, premise: what if there was a female organized crime kingpin in...Waterville, Maine? And what if that kingpin gets on the wrong side of an even bigger kingpin based in...Quebec? So that's fun, and the story for the most part delivers on the premise. It's structured a bit like a Netflix series, with very fast-paced, high-action (and I'm not gonna lie, violent) scenes, alternating among different characters' points of view. (Do not mistake me for implying that it's badly written, because it's extremely well done. And hey, if Ron Curry can get a Netflix deal out of it, more power to him.) The book also includes some interesting history about the French Canadian populations in Maine, with a revenge fantasy element related to that history, which very satisfying, until, like all revenge stories, it leads to bad places. It's also a lot more violent that what I normally read, and while the violence was offset, or defused, by some humor, there was at least one outright hilarious, comical scene that felt out of place considering the stakes. Finally, one last complaint: there are two major characters whose names are Bruce and Bates (not to mention Babs). Writers do this all the time (myself included), and it can be so confusing, such as in this case, when one of these characters takes the decisive action that shifts the whole trajectory of the narrative and seals the fates for most of the other characters, but I thought it was the other character, because their names are too similar, and I couldn't figure out why he did what he did.

Heartwood by Amity Gage. (Again, spoiler alert.) This is the story of a woman disappears while hiking the Appalachian Trail in Maine, and of the people trying to find her. I was super engaged the whole time I was reading it. I loved the missing woman's diary entires, her close, careful attention to the natural world and how that world shrank to tiny forests of moss as she grew weaker and weaker. I adored the voice of her hiking buddy, an atypical AT hiker who had to leave the trail early, as told through interviews with a game warden. And I enjoyed the point of view of the game warden in charge of the search (although I kept thinking, what would Mike Bowditch do in this situation?). But after I finished I felt a lingering dissatisfaction and have been poking at that to figure out the source. First on my list of irritations: the cause of the woman's getting lost--a sort-of kidnapping--felt both unlikely and underdeveloped, like a thriller plot was trying to be shoehorned into an entirely different kind of novel. Second, the elderly woman at a retirement home in Connecticut who discovers the final clue for finding the woman also felt hard to believe and also a little grafted onto the overall story. But these are minor complaints compared to my biggest issue. The book is endorsed by Jenna-effing-Bush, and I was trying to figure it out: why would a book that glorifies the natural world and eloquently demonstrates the challenges women face in historically male spaces (the outdoor world, law enforcement, and science), as well as the challenges a large man of color (the hiking partner) endured on the AT be promoted by a Republican? Then it hit me: the characters who try to move outside their socially accepted roles fail spectacularly: the woman hiker nearly dies; the Black hiker has to return home for family reasons; the woman scientist loses her daughter through being to focused on her science. And the one who succeeds, the woman game warden who runs the operation that eventually rescues the hiker, gives up her career and her chance for love with another woman in order to take on a caretaker role with her dying mother and young nieces, as she resigns, moves away, and becomes a camp counselor of all degradations. The more I think about it, the more nauseated I become at the book's retrograde politics. It seems weird to me that the author, a professor at Yale, might have intentionally made this the point of the book--and she might not have done it intentionally--but these days any horrible thing is possible.

Great Cases of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. How about a little palette cleanser after all that? While I've seen a million dramatizations of the Sherlock Holmes oeuvre, unbelievably I've never read any of the stories. I picked this collection up at the used book store recently, and tore right through them. I thought they might get boring and repetitive, especially since there's so little personal about Watson and Holmes, but I found them thoroughly engaging, and the puzzles at the center of each were intriguing and fun to try to solve along the way.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. Continuing on the classic crime fiction path, I fully expected to find Chandler's hardboiled detective voice cheesy, having seen it parodied so often in films and cartoons, but I found it delightful, except of course his thoroughly retrograde views on women and any non-WASP characters. I'll be poring over his pages next time I'm stuck for a clever metaphor.

Lady Susan by Jane Austen. I like to revisit a Jane Austen novel every winter, but this year I picked up a new-to-me volume (it's nice when 250-year-old writers can still put new work in front of you). Lady Susan is an epistolatory novel about a society widow who is notorious in her circles for stealing other women's men. The letters it's told through are delightfully catty, and it was fun to figure out whether Lady Susan is the charming, demure lady she portrays herself to be or the conniving seductress her acquaintances believe her to be. (It doesn't take long to figure it out, Lady Susan shows her true nature in her letters to a close friend.) It's also a short book, perfect for reading in a winter afternoon's bubble bath. I bought this beautiful cloth-bound hardcover at the local indie bookstore, and now I want a whole collection of Jane Austen's works in these covers.