Am I still doing book posts in 2026? It looks like I am. It's a habit at this point, and I suppose my version of a book journal, which is something I've never been able to keep (on paper, in an actual journal) for more than a day or so, despite being an inveterate documentarian of every other aspect of my life.

My January reads (meaning books I completed in January--there are several floating around that I've been reading but didn't finish or have been dabbling in now and then and might never finish) are all fiction, which is a kind of rare occurrence for me, and the stack seems a little smaller than usual. 

We were in Puerto Rico for the first nine days of the month, and while I normally put a fair amount of time into researching and selecting books to complement a trip, with the holidays coming right before our trip and all that entails, I didn't have the time. So two days before we left, I searched "books that take place in Puerto Rico" online and, armed with two or three of the lists that popped up, headed to the nearby big box bookstore and combed the shelves for the authors listed. I found these three, making this is less of a definitive selection of books to read while on vacation in PR, than a "what the Augusta Maine Barnes & Noble happened to have in stock" selection. Nevertheless, I was pretty happy with the results.

First up, I read Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzales, picking it first, I'm not gonna lie, because of the colorful cover. This is a contemporary book (taking place around the time of Hurricane Maria), and in fact only a small portion of it takes place in Puerto Rico--most of the action is in Brooklyn--but it gives a really interesting portrayal of the Puerto Rican diaspora, gentrification in New York, and some of the modern politics and recent history around the question of statehood, US exploitation of the island, etc. It made me realize that our guidebook glossed over these issues to a pretty significant extent. It's also a really intriguing story of family dynamics, political intrigue, and finding one's purpose in life. And also a sweet love story. I really enjoyed it.

Going much further back in the past, The Taste of Sugar by Marisel Vera begins around the time of the Spanish-American War, right after Puerto Rico gained liberation from Spain and just as it was taken over by the US, going from one cruel and exploitative/extractive master to another. The story centers around Valentina, a young woman from Ponce who marries a coffee farmer and moves to the hills. The economic system forced on the small-time coffee planters makes their life a marginal one, and then a hurricane destroys what little they have left. Valentina and her husband and children decide to travel to Hawaii to work on the sugar plantations, amid promises of prosperity which of course are a pack of lies. It's a devastating narrative and indictment of horrific, racist, classist, violent US policies that way predate our current time. Also, it's an inspiring story of Valentina growing from a spoiled city girl to a resourceful farmer's wife and mother to a bit of a revolutionary.

Finally, The Storyteller's Death by Ann Davila Cardinal is a coming of age story of a girl from New Jersey who spends the summers in Puerto Rico with her mother's family, feeling like she doesn't fit in in either place. The book follows her from childhood through her teenage years, at which point, after her grandmother's death, she begins to witness, and experience, some of the stories she used to hear as a young child, only they play out in a much more disturbing fashion than what she was told. Over time, she begins to unravel a tragic story that affected her beloved great aunt's happiness and her great-grandfather's life. The book takes place in the 1970s and 80s and also touches on 20th century Puerto Rican political and social issues, including the question of statehood or independence and intra-island racism and classism.

After our return, I picked up a handful of Paul Doiron's Mike Bowditch, renegade game warden, mysteries (Knife Creek, Stay Hidden, and one more that I didn't finish until this month) and plowed through them, enjoying the escapism from the horrors of January 2026 in the USofA. There's nothing like a page-turner to keep you from picking up your phone every five minutes to check and see if a certain someone has popped his clogs yet. 

December's reading list is all over the map--with no coherent theme or throughline (is there ever in my reading lists? No, but this one seems extra weird to me. How about you?

Poetry
I've really gotten out of the habit of reading poetry lately, but I was in the local anarchist bookstore during December's art walk (yes, there really is such a shop in Gardiner, Maine, of all places, and they also sell yummy bread) and I saw the latest poetry collection by an acquaintance of mine: Samaa Abdurraqib's Towards a Retreat. I snapped it up, because while I'd interacted with Samaa in other settings (mostly naturalist-based), I hadn't yet read any of her work. I was not disappointed! It's a beautiful collection. I especially enjoyed the "Upta Camp" series.

Fiction
I picked up Jessica Elicott's latest in her WWII lady constable series, Murder on the Home Front, at Maine's crime writing conference back in September. I always enjoy Elicott's work, and this one was both entertaining and interesting in its peek into life in a coastal town during the war.

My sister sent me The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year a while back, and I saved it for Christmas season. It's really a romcom with some crime novel elements (a locked room mystery and a stranded in a country house trope), but it was a rollicking good read, and I think it did both genres proud!

Nonfiction
Here's where my list starts to get kookie! In the service of reading down my TBR pile, I read Mama's Girl by Veronica Chambers, which a friend sent to me several years ago. It's a memoir of a young Black woman who grew up in New York City with a single mom and absent/angry dad. What it's really about is navigating and repairing a fraught and difficult mother-daughter relationship. I really enjoyed it, and as my friend noted, it was a quick read!

Also from the tall TBR stack: All Souls by Michael Patrick Macdonald, which is the harrowing account of growing up in the projects in South Boston in the 70s and 80s, when Whitey Bulger's gangs controlled everything. You know from the beginning of the book that several of Macdonald's siblings are going to die over the course of the narrative, so it's just a matter of biting your nails as you read and asking, Why doesn't somebody do something?

Still in the family stories department, but in a completely different vein, I picked up two David Sedaris books I found at a used bookstore (probably because I needed a few laughs after reading All Souls, and living in 2025 America): Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim and Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls. These are both fairly old, and I'm sure I've read at least one of them before, but they're good for a giggle if you need to lighten the mood these days (who doesn't?).

Finally, I read Deep Things out of Darkness: The History of Natural History by John G.T. Anderson. John was my biology professor in college (Bio I and II as well as Conservation Biology). I was expecting the book to be heavy going--not because John is dull, but because it's sold (and priced!) as a textbook. However it's every bit as charming and engaging as John's real life lectures. Even though he refers to his personal life rarely in the book (noting places he's visited or lived, for example), his personality and especially his enthusiasm shines through on every page. I love how he made it into a conversation among the various naturalists profiled--noting whether and how they knew each other (and liked each other) or might have read their predecessors' work. It's unfortunate that it wasn't marketed (and priced!) as a trade book, because I'm certain armchair naturalists and historians would find it as delightful as I did.

I started last month by reading the last book* in Elizabeth Peters's Amelia Peabody series, The Tomb of the Golden Bird. After that delightful romp through Egyptology, I turned my attention to attacking my TBR pile, which had once again grown out of hand, starting with several books I'd begun reading over recent months but had set aside for various reasons (mainly because my attention had been diverted by rereading Peters).

When I saw a series of capers by Peter Mayle at a used book sale, I was reminded of the summer before I went to college, when my best friend's mother loaned me Mayle's A Year in Provence. Perhaps she thought it would make me more worldly, or inspire me to move to France, but it did neither, since I never cracked the cover and returned it to her unread, but much battered from riding around in my tote bag all summer. I do love a good caper, however, so I gave the first in the series, The Vintage Caper, a go. Now, the term caper refers to the way the action in these stories (which often center around a heist) resembles a goat scampering around with no apparent purpose or direction. I'd say the action in this book was a little less goat-like and more like a languorous house cat, lying in the sun and talking about wine and food and the difference between Marseilles and Paris, a lot. 

I started reading Strangers on the Train by Patricia Highsmith a year or so ago, after I picked up a book of hers on the craft of writing suspense. I figured I should be familiar with her writing before I take her advice. She does suspense very well. So well that I had to set the book aside for a year to calm my nerves. It was just too stressful waiting for what you inevitably know will happen (that the protagonist will be driven to commit a murder). It's a brilliantly written book (although to be honest I'm not sure I'd have handled the ending the way she did), but I don't think I want that level of anxiety from the books I read.

I'm not sure why I picked up Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha from the used bookstore a couple of years ago. It's an older book---1993 Booker Prize winner--about a 10-year-old boy growing up in an Irish village in the 1960s, written from the boy's perspective in an engaging, nonlinear fashion. The cover says something about it being a comic novel, and while many of the incidents, and the way the child sees the world, are humorous, it is ultimately really sad.

For Father's Day, I sent my dad The Book of Flaco by David Gessner, about the Eurasian Eagle Owl that escaped the zoo in Central Park and lived "wild" in New York City for a year, and he sent it back to me after he read it. It's an interesting meditation on freedom and wildness, versus captivity and peril, as well as human interactions with birds in general and this bird in particular, and each other. Interestingly, Gessner never saw the owl in person, but writes the whole book from the perspective of after (spoiler alert) Flaco's death, relying on interviews with the most involved humans on his beat.

Laura Jackson was an editor at Literary Mama for part of the time I was there also, and she and I were in a remote nature writing critique group for a couple of years. I always enjoyed her wry humor and enthusiasm for the less-loved elements of nature (I recall an endearing essay about earwigs). So I was thrilled when her first book, Deep and Wild: On Mountains, Opossums, and Finding Your Way in West Virginia, came out earlier this year. Whether you've spent time in WV (I think I nipped through a corner of it on a road trip between Georgia and Western Pennsylvania) or you only know the state from less-than-flattering television and movie portrayals, this book will open your eyes to the land's beauty and richness and make you want to pack up the car, buy some dramamine, and hit the country roads. It will also make you laugh. And we need a lot of that these days.

Finally, my sister passed on her copy of Blood, Sweat, Tears, a collection of women's writing on the outdoors (mainly hiking and trail running). There were some really lovely and moving pieces of writing here, and also several that made me worry about women today---there seems to be a drive among a lot of them to punish themselves through grueling outdoor pursuits, not just pushing personal limits and challenging oneself, but depriving one's own body of food and water while causing injury. It seems almost like another variation on diets, eating disorders, plastic surgery, and other ways women contort and harm themselves in order to conform to impossible standards and/or to take up less space. It makes my heart hurt to read about. 

In October, I continued my avoidance of reality reading spree and finished *most* of the rest of the Amelia Peabody series by Elizabeth Peters, except for the very last book (in chronological order; stay tuned) and the one posthumously finished and published book, which I'd found disappointing when I first read it, and real life is disappointing enough, I don't need to read a disappointing book. (They might not be in the correct chronological order in the stack, but rest assured they were read in the proper order.) Interestingly, reading books that I know so well I was even more compelled to get to the resolution of the various plot points than I would be on a cold read--knowing what was coming didn't tune me out; it made me more invested.

I also read/finished a handful of nonfiction titles:
More than Hope: Lessons from the Colorado Trail, edited by Jared Champion. I have an essay in this collection, along with 10 other writers. It was interesting to read about other people's approaches to and experiences on the trail. I especially enjoyed Champion's piece, "Backpacking, Ideally" and "Wild Geese" by Katie Jackson. As well as my own, "Eight Kinds of Joy on the Colorado Trail," natch.

Women in the Field: America's Pioneering Women Naturalists by Marcia Myers Bonta is a collection of mini biographies of 25 women naturalists from the 19th and early 20th centuries, which I've owned a long time but had only ready as far as the introduction. It's a fascination view into the challenges and the triumphs of women finding their way and making their mark in a field dominated by men.

Deranged: Finding a Sense of Place in the Landscape and in the Lifespan, by Jill Sisson Quinn, is a collection of braided essays exploring her childhood landscape of Maryland, her home as an adult in Wisconsin, and what it means to belong to a place. 

Tomorrow evening (November 18, 2025) I'll be a guest on the YouTube channel Outside Comfort Zone, talking with Jared Champion about the book More than Hope: Lessons from the Colorado Trail, which Jared compiled and edited and in which my essay "Eight Kinds of Joy on the Colorado Trail" appears. We'll also chat about writing, art, and adventures. If you want to join us, you can tune in here at 7:30 p.m. eastern time. Hope to see you there!

Okay, well, this book stack is a little embarrassing. That's 12 books in one month--all but one a re-(re-re-re-)read. Let me tell you how it happened:

Fiction
When I got home from my week-long writing retreat on September 1, I started reading Crocodile on the Sandbank, the first Amelia Peabody mystery by Elizabeth Peters. This was supposed to be a research read. During the retreat, I'd decided to go forward with writing a historical mystery novel that I'd begun toying several years ago and which I'd set aside due to the pandemic shutdown making research a challenge. My book will take place in a similar time period to Crocodile (although in a very different place), and I thought, since I'm so very familiar with the story, I could concentrate on the mechanics, reverse-engineering the novel. Haha, joke's on me. Instead of deconstructing the book, I delved in, as delighted with every twist and turn as if I'd never read it (several times) before. And when I closed the last page, I couldn't stop, and picked up the next book and the next and the next. I won't list them here, but I read the first 11 books, from Crocodile through Guardian of the Horizon. And, as you might have guessed, I've kept going this month. Why fight it? Perhaps, on a subliminal level, I'm learning a thing or two about plotting and character and dialogue and all the other elements of putting together a book. But most of all, I'm having a grand time.

As for how and when do I read so much: Normally I only read fiction at bedtime, but I've made an exception and read these books while I'm eating lunch and breakfast, as well as during any lull I might experience at the end of the day, either before I embark on making dinner or after I've made it and am waiting for C to get home from work. I also probably stay up reading a teensy bit later than I usually do, especially if my current read is less exciting. (Something about knowing how a book will end makes me want to get to that end even faster than when I'm trying to figure out what will happen.) One good thing is that reading has largely taken the time previously occupied by doomscrolling, which means I'm in a happier frame of mind.

Nonficiton
I did manage to squeeze one nonfiction book in among the tombs and pyramids: We Are Animals, by Jennifer Case, a collection of essays about pregnancy, birth, and early motherhood in modern America. Case is unflinchingly honest about her feelings about her second pregnancy (i.e., not happy), and her personal experiences are fleshed out with thorough research about our country's incredibly horrid, misogynistic, and racist birth industry. It's a timely book, when women are losing their access to choice around conception and birth, and it's engagingly written. 

I think I was deeply imprinted by childhood summers that involved weekly treks up the block every Friday morning to the Bookmobile to load up on as many books as I could carry back down the street. (I was lucky to live, until age 13, on a street where the roving library--which was a big red bus with the Roadrunner painted on the side, and which these days would probably be subjected to a copyright infringement lawsuit by Warner Brothers--stopped once a week). To this day, summer is reading season for me--on the beach or in the hammock or at the campsite or in bed late at night, anywhere is a good place to devour a book--as July's reading stack can attest. Beginning from the bottom:

Nonfiction
My friend Amanda K. Jaros released her memoir of hiking the Appalachian Trail, In My Boots earlier this year, and I finally sat down and read it last month. The book is really wonderful, and I'm not just saying that because she's my friend. There are two kinds of outdoor adventure books. First, there's the kind that purely relay the physical experience of a hike (or canoe trip or other expedition): I did this and I did this and I did this. These can be great, if the adventure is interesting enough and the storyteller good enough, but they can also be boring as hell in the wrong hands. Second, there's the kind in which the traveler takes an emotional journey alongside the physical one, which almost always makes for a better more interesting book--and this is what kind of book In My Boots is: the journey of a young woman growing from a self-doubting, timid, emotionally abused child into a hiking powerhouse who is not afraid to go after what she wants.

 Poetry
I finished the third in James Crews's trilogy of poetry anthologies, The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace and Renewal, which I read a poem or two every few days for the last couple of months. As with the first two books in the series, the poems in this book express just the kinds of sense of goodness in the world--at least among poets--that I have needed to hear about  in this troubled, troubled times.

Fiction
Another book I picked up during my trip to Colorado in May was Sabrina and Corina, a collection of short stories by Kali Fajardo-Anstine. These wonderful and wide-ranging stories featuring Latina characters showed me a whole different cultural milieu that exists in Denver and Southwestern Colorado, parallel to and overlapping with but still wildly different from what I grew up with. Short stories are tough, and sometimes they leave me with a feeling of incompleteness or confusion, but all the stories in this book landed and were beautifully rendered and deeply emotional.

The Last Caretaker is a thriller about a woman who goes to work as a caretaker at a nature preserve and finds herself caught up in an underground network that spirits domestic abuse survivors out of town and into new identities. I'd heard about it on a podcast months ago, was intrigued, and then promptly forgot the title and author. But the premise stuck with me, and finally last month I dug around among the many (as my kids used to call them) "boring literary podcasts" that I listen to, found it, and ordered it. I was not disappointed. A really great story.

I think Everyone Is Lying to You by Jo Piazza was another podcast discovery, and I actually preordered it, which I am almost never organized enough to do (I usually read books about 20-40 years post-publication). It's also a thriller, about a journalist who attends an influencer convention and finds herself in the middle of an instagram tradwife's disappearance after her husband's brutal murder and has to figure out who the real killer is. So much fun! (And so weird--even though I was on instagram for a long time, and involved in the blogging world for even longer before that, I had no idea how extensive and insidious the influencer world is!)

The last three on the pile are used bookstore/library book sale finds:

• The Downeast Murders by J.S. Borthwick. Borthwick was a Maine mystery author, about whom I've found very little info (is she even still around?), but whose traditional whodunits are always a delightful read.
• Murder Your Darlings by J.J. Murphy is a cute whodunit starting Dorothy Parker as the amateur sleuth. It was a fun, cute read.
• Confessions of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella. I have no idea how I missed reading this when it first came out--probably because I was busy with a baby and/or I thought it sounded frivolous. It *is* frivolous, but so what? It was a super fun and funny read, with shades of Bridge Jones, and I enjoyed it thoroughly (oh what a delightful escape from our current reality! There aren't even cell phones, let alone rampant fascism!).

Last month I got back into the swing of reading, after a bit of a lull in May, and of course I focused on escapist fiction, because reality is so awful now, who wants to face it? Here's what I read, from the top of the stack:

Fiction:
When I was in Colorado, I picked up three books by local authors at the Tattered Cover. One of these was Three Keys, by Laura Pritchett. I read Pritchett's first couple of books, way back in the early 2010s, after I briefly met her at a conference, but then kind of forgot to look for subsequent publications, so it was fun to find a book by her on the shelf. The protagonist of Three Keys heads west on a road trip from Chicago, after she loses her husband to early/sudden death, her job as a waitress to a restaurant fire, and her son to young-adult attitude. Her only plan is to visit three places to which she has keys: a vacation rental in Colorado, a trailer in the Arizona desert, and a beach hut in New Zealand. Along the way she has a bunch of different adventures and ultimately  finds a new direction for her rudderless mid-life. You have to suspend a lot of disbelief regarding the coincidences and circumstances she finds herself in (and about her repeatedly saying she's "new to middle age" when she's 55), but it's a fun book about the realities of being a woman in one's 50s, and about what possibilities life might hold if we took a chance and went out there and sought our future.

I picked up Mother Nature by Sarah Andrews, a mystery from the 90s, from the $2 shelf at the used bookstore. It features a geologist amateur sleuth, a senator involved in some unsavory dealings (which, frankly, appear rather quaint compared to our current era of sordid and downright criminal politicians), and leaking underground storage tanks (or LUST, which I got a kick out of, since, though I didn't work in that program when I was employed in environmental regulation, I knew people who did). I looked Andrews up online and found that she wrote about a dozen novels before dying in a plane crash (with her husband and son--awful!) in 2019. So write your novels now, kids, and stay out of private planes. I'll be keeping an eye on the used bookstore shelves for further volumes of these geological mysteries.

My son read The 7 1/2 deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton a while ago, and absolutely loved it, so he passed it on to me. It's a multi-point-of-view (sort of), and time-loop story, in which the main character wakes up in the body of a different guest at a house party in a moldering old estate on the same day, over and over, and has to figure out who killed the daughter of the house and why. I have to admit to having a hard time getting into it--it's very confusing at the start, and I was trying to read it on a camping trip with lots of distractions going on around me--but once I caught on to what was going on, I was swept along in the story and the clever writing, and the way the repeated events of the day, viewed from different perspectives wove together in the end to reveal the killer and motive. 

My sister passed You Are Fatally Invited by Ande Pliego on to me. It's a bit of a takeoff on And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie, only more gruesome. I think it might cross genres from mystery into horror, though I'm not really a horror reader, so I'm not sure about this. If you like a good puzzle and don't mind a bit of a blood and a jump scare, this book is a fun read.

Nonfiction
Finally, I read (or, more accurately, finished reading because it took a couple of months) Such News of the Land: U.S. Women Nature Writers, edited by Thomas Edwards and Elizabeth De Wolfe. I came across this book in my research into women nature writers for a long-term writing project I'm slogging through, and was surprised to find both writers are professors in Maine (and that one was provost of one my kids' colleges--unfortunately he retired and my son transferred before that knowledge could be of any use to me in terms of chatting to him about the subject matter; since the book came out nearly 25 years ago, he may not have been particularly interested in talking about it even if I had buttonholed him at some college event). The book's a collection of ecocritical essays about a wide range of women nature writers, and I read it mainly to discover writers I wasn't already familiar with, and while there weren't a ton of these, there were a few, and I found most of the essays extremely interesting, even if they didn't further my personal research.

Can you believe how small that book stack is? One reason for the scant pile is that I took a one-week reading hiatus early this month (as part of The Artist's Way). For the whole week, I set aside all book reading, plus limited online reading, podcast listening, and TV watching (i.e., cut way back on other people's words going into my brain). This was made much easier than it would otherwise have been because my sister was visiting for most of that week, so I was busy visiting museums and beaches and bakeries. Another reason, is that when the week ended, I didn't want to return to the book I'd started at the beginning of the month and was about halfway through with. I rarely *intentionally* quit reading a book in the middle (though I sometimes set one aside and just never pick it up again), but this one had just gotten really boring and I didn't even care what might happen next. I only paid $2 for it at a used book store, and I just might return it to them. This is kind of revolutionary for me (I usually force myself to finish books even if I don't like them). I'm actually excited. (Oh, and because I know you're now dying to know what the book is, it's Lauren Groff's Matrix. I hate to diss on another author's book, but she's pretty successful and I don't think my opinion will harm her sales--and no doubt lots of people find the book more interesting than I did.) I also spent a week in Colorado, so while I read a lot on the plane and in airports, I didn't read much while I was there. Finally, I have a big, fat nonfiction book that it's taken me more than a month to read, and ditto a long poetry collection, both of which will show up in next month's list. But what did I read this month? It was all fiction:

The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle. I don't often read fantasy, but C had put this in a pile of books to give away, and I remembered enjoying the movie when I was a kid, so I gave it a try. It's a beautifully written story, and it felt a bit like an allegory for our times (the angry mad king alone in his castle, with his dopey son, two clueless but semi-loyal henchmen, and a raging, uncontrollable bull who has driven all of the unicorns out of the land as his only companions), although the king, the son, and even the bull possess far more intelligence, integrity, and valor than our current cast of kooks and weirdos running our national sh*tshow. The old movie (screenplay also written by Beagle, along with the old Hobbit and Lord of the Rings cartoons that used to appear on network TV annually when we were kids) is hard to come by these days, but C has ordered a DVD through his college library (because after I read it, he decided to read it again, having forgotten, apparently, that he'd put it in the discard pile), and I'm looking forward to seeing it again.

The two books I read while traveling to and from Colorado are both thrillers that take place in Maine and revolve around the summer tourist season in coastal towns. The Summer Guests by Tess Gerritsen is the second in the Spy Coast thriller series, in which the disappearance of a young girl and the discovery of a skeleton in a lake lead the retired CIA gang into a tangled historical mystery. I enjoyed it a lot. In The Last House Guest by Megan Miranda, the main character, who doesn't quite fit into either the "summer people" or "townie" category races to uncover why her friend died falling from the cliffs the previous summer before she succumbs to the same fate. It was also a page turner, and perfect for a 10-hour travel day.

I started a one-week reading fast this today. While last month's book list was down considerably from March's numbers, you can see I'm still mainlining books, clearly as a way of avoiding our current reality, but also with the side effect of preventing me from getting anything else done. The reading fast is part of The Artist's Way program that I'm doing with my creativity group. I'm interpreting this fast as: no reading of books in any genre; extremely minimal news consumption; only reading emails that are important/personal (have already failed on this one today); not reading anything else online; and not listening to podcasts (I have a long-ish drive ahead of me this evening and an even longer one on Sunday, so I'm not sure if I'll be able to pull this last item off). Maybe cut back on TV. I'm hoping that by minimizing the number of other people's words coming into my head I'll perhaps start generating some of my own. In the meantime, here's what I read in April:

Poetry
The Path of Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy. This is the second volume in the trilogy of poetry anthologies edited by James Crews. (I read the first one a few years ago and am working on the third now.) It's a wonderful collection about exactly what it says it's about--connection and joy--and it hit the spot perfectly in these troubled times.

Nonfiction
How to Read Nature. This quick, entertaining ready by Tristan Gooley is a great introduction to becoming more in touch with the natural world, from being aware of direction based on the sun, moon, and other signs to predicting the weather based on cloud types. It's a great reminder to put down the technology and pay attention to the world.

Made from this Earth: American Women and Nature. This book by Vera Norwood is absolutely my catnip--a study of early American women nature writers, naturalists, scientists, scientific illustrators, specimen collectors, and gardeners. It shows that women were more prevalent in these fields than we're given to believe by the histories written by men, while also delineating the barriers they faced, and the way that (as in so many other fields) professionalization pushed women, who were pioneers in some cases, aside in favor of males. It's absolutely fascinating, and I was introduced to so many naturey women I'd never heard of.

Fiction
The Gulf is a quirky novel about a young woman whose joke about starting a Christian-based writing school becomes a reality, and she gets caught in the middle of unscrupulous founders, a wishy-washy ex, and the students, some of whom she becomes close with, all while a hurricane is bearing down on the campus.

I continue my Paul Doiron jag with The Precipice and The Widowmaker, and I continue to enjoy the escapades of loose cannon game warden Mike Bowdich, while appreciating the character arc that he's on, continuing to grow and improve from one novel to the next, while sometimes relapsing into his old ways. I might have mentioned before that I'm surprised that Doiron can show his face in Maine, for the way he portrays it as a hellscape of drug dealers, gun nuts, and pedophiles. That there are occasional "stunning" or "gorgeous" women sprinkled among the degenerates whose hard luck stories lure Bowdich into going rogue seems nothing short of miraculous in this otherwise horror show of a state. (And for the record, that is not my experience of Maine.) Still, highly entertaining and tightly written page-turners.

And I found another Her Royal Spyness mystery by Rhys Bowen, On Her Majesty's Frightfully Secret Service. I do love a mystery with a spot of humor, and these never fail to deliver. I just read them as I find them in used bookstores, except for having begun with Volume 1, and it doesn't seem to matter too much.

I discovered a $2 hardcover section at the used bookstore, and the next two come from that shelf. First, I'd been on the fence about reading Girl on the Train since it came out a few years ago--partly because I have a perverse aversion to anything popular and also it seems thrillers with "girl" in the title always end up being gratuitously violent. But I went for it, and I was hooked from page one and sped through this face-paced psychological thriller. And even though it is about violence against women, the women are not, in the end, helpless victims.

Last, speaking of hellscapes, Carl Hiassen paints a portrait of Florida that I'd think would make anyone who's not deranged want to stay away. I really enjoyed Squeeze Me, a story about a (once again) rogue former game warden turned animal control professional, a reclusive eco-warrior, the residents and hangers-on at the "Winter Whitehouse," plus various and sundry law enforcement officers and a whole lotta pythons. It fully reinforces all of my preexisting prejudices against that state. (And again, Does Hiassen require round-the-clock body guards to not be murdered by his fellow Floridians whom he paints as totally nuts?)

I'd gotten about halfway through the third book from the $2 shelf by the time this reading fast began, and while it started out pretty good, by about page 50 it got really boring and has continued so for about the next 80 or so pages, even though it's a NYT bestseller and well regarded and blah blah blah. I almost never intentionally quit reading a book, although sometimes I put one away on a shelf and forget about it. But this might be the be the one. After all, it only cost $2!