I started this month reading a book about World War II (and Nazi collaborators in England) and one about the history of witch trials, for no other reason than I'd been recently given the first one and had bought the second one at a literary Halloween bash. Both felt portentous, and not in a good way, once the election results came in--not the way we want life to imitate art.

Nonfiction
Bring Down the Little Birds by Giménez Smith. I don't often read pregnancy and new motherhood memoirs these days, now that I'm nearing the far end of that journey, but I've been seeking out books that incorporate themes of motherhood and nature. This one does not have much to say about nature, but it's still a lovely meditation on a second pregnancy and on motherhood and daughterhood. It would make a wonderful gift to an expectant or new mother.

Wintering by Katherine May. I've been meaning to read this book for a while, and I finally picked it up on the day after the election, when I was consolation shopping at one of my favorite bookstores. I figured now would be a good time for settling in to a little self-care. I really enjoyed this book, but it is an incredibly quiet read (as might be expected from the title), and I think May really lucked out by its being published during the pandemic, when lots of people were looking for ways to cope with a period of wintering. I have a hard time imagining it being a bestseller otherwise in our normally frenetic world. (And let me reiterate--I enjoyed it a lot, and I'm happy that it became a bestseller. I'm just amazed also.)

Witchcraft: A History in 13 Trials by Marion Gibson. I've been wanting to do more research into the history of witch trials for a while, and this book was a good place to start, focusing on 13 specific cases where a person or group of people were accused of and tried for witchcraft, and how the religious and political milieu of the time fed into the charges and trials. I learned a lot, and was surprised to find out that witch trials began a lot later in history than I had understood (coming into prominence during the reformation years, beginning in the 16th century; I had thought they were common in Medieval times, thanks mostly to Monty Python). It was also interesting / distressing to note the way that humans blame all of society's problems on marginalized members who have the least amount of power (usually women in the case of witch trials, and often women who were also poor, disabled, outsiders, or in some way "other"), and to consider the way this scapegoating continues to this day.

Fiction
Mr. Churchill's Secretary by Susan Elia MacNeal. This is a murder mystery/spy thriller set in London during WWII, in which a young woman gets a clerical job in the Prime Minister's office, while someone in her inner circle is spying for Nazi sympathizers. It was a good read, and would have been a lot more fun if it didn't feel like history is repeating itself in the modern era.

Dial A for Aunties by Jesse Q. Sutano. This book, by contrast, was all fun: a madcap caper in which the main character accidentally kills her blind date and her mother and three aunties all pitch in to help dispose of the body, in the midst of putting on a spectacular wedding. One farcical calamity after another occurs, leaving the reader breathless wondering how they would get out of their mess unscathed.

Sisters in Crime edited by Marilynn Wallace. I picked this book up at a library book sale, and it was so much fun--a collection of short mystery stories by many of the big names of mystery from the 1980s (it was published in 1989). It left me wondering if the 1980s can be considered a second golden age of (women) mystery writers?

Discipline by Debra Spark. I recently met Debra Spark at a book event in a nearby town, and while I'd heard her name bandied about in the Maine literary world, I hadn't ready anything by her, so I picked up her latest, in which an art appraiser discovers that the art she's been hired to value has gone missing. This leads down the path of the history of the paintings, which includes a case of mistaken identity of the actual artist, a child's experience at an abusive school for troubled kids, and other subplots, as well as the main character's struggle to connect with her own teenage son. It sounds like the plot of a thriller, but it's not, which is kind of an intriguing thought: take a plot premise and make it into either a literary novel or a thriller (or another genre). Can that be done with any story? Either way, I enjoyed the story, and Debra's writing style, and I'll be looking out for more books by her.

When I was a baby, I earned the distinction of being the youngest library card holder at our local library, and I remained a continuous library card holder for nearly half a century. One time, years ago, I lost my wallet at a street fair in a nearby town, and when I picked it up at the police station (with all the cash still present--thank you kind people of Hallowell), the cop who handed it back to me said, "You sure have a lot of library cards." My wallet still held my Jessup Library card, from when I was in college in Bar Harbor, Maine, my Aurora, Colorado, card, from my year there in the AmeriCorps, my Littleton, Colorado, library card, from where my parents were living at the time, my Maine State Library card, and my Gardiner, Maine, card, from the town I lived in then. I kept my Gardiner card going, for an annual fee, for years after we moved away, because our town didn't have a library, nor did it have a relationship with another town's library. But during the pandemic, when a trip to the library meant checking out books through a window, as if they were an order of French fries, I let my Gardiner card lapse, even though I rarely wandered the aisles to check out in-house books, rather relying on interlibrary loans ordered through the Minerva system. With the pandemic came a conundrum: I couldn't order books without renewing my card, but there was no point in going to the library to renew my card when there weren't any books waiting there for me. I instead focused on trying to read down my TBR pile, while also refilling it with obsessive online purchases. For the first time in my life, I was without a library card. (Technically I still had, and still have, a Maine State Library card, but that institution, along with its neighbor the State Museum, used the pandemic as an opportunity to move out and repair the leaky building they were both housed in, and there's no sign of either of them opening up again in the near future.)

In the meantime, a scrappy group of volunteers in my town turned a pile of donated books and a drafty old grange hall into a library. I had visited early on, to donate a bunch of children's books, but hadn't been back until this September, when I was invited to give a reading. It was a delightful event, and the library is a wonderful space. At the end of my reading, I signed up for a library card, which I picked up earlier this month, when I checked out my first book.

Nonfiction
Educated, by Tara Westover. I know I'm about six years late to the party on this one, but I've been meaning to read it since it came out, and when I spied it in the library's stacks, I realized the time had come. I brought it home on a Wednesday afternoon, stayed up way too late that night reading, and finished it the next morning. It was that gripping--harrowing and shocking. I mean, I'm not surprised that there's abuse and gaslighting and family members treating each other terribly, but I'm still shocked by seeing this brutality laid out, line by line, paragraph after paragraph. I went into it expecting one of those books that's a good story but mediocre, but it was beautifully written, from the overall structure to the individual sentences.

Fiction
The Lottery and other Stories by Shirley Jackson. I kept going on my Shirley Jackson kick with a reread of The Lottery. It had been over ten years since I read it last in graduate school--the whole book, I mean, not the story "The Lottery," which I've surely read a few times over that time. I was delighted to find how much I still love these stories. They're creepy and quirky and mundane and insightful and chilling and pitch perfect.

Broken Harbor by Tana French. This is a police procedural, with a the propulsive pace of thriller. I was totally sucked in for about the first half of the book, but then I started to find the minute-by-minute narration of every second of the detective's work on the case a little tedious. Around that time there was also a moment where the narrator (first-person) zooms out, as if he's narrating from some distance in the future and comments how a certain event was the moment when something important occurred, even though the whole rest of the book, before and after, is written as if in the narrator is experiencing it all in real time. I wondered at first if this was a clever technique on the writer's part, or just a weird slip of the pen. I decided that it was a slip (or a sloppy choice) since it distracted me for the rest of the book. Finally, the events led the murderer to do what they did were just way too farfetched. So I give it a "meh." Maybe I'll try another--she's apparently a highly regarded writer--but I won't rush out to do so.

The Dark on the Other Side by Barbara Michaels. I've been trying to stop myself from going back and reading more Barbara Michaels until I get through my whole TBR pile (which just keeps growing so it's a hopeless task), but I happened to run across this one and I didn't remember anything about it, which made me think I hadn't ever read it before (I later checked my blog posts and found I last read it in 2018). What intrigued me is that there is a male main character (with occasional exchanges of POV w/ a female character), which Barbara rarely does, so of course I had to read it and see what that was like. It was a delightful read--and perfect for October, with a witch and werewolf (or is it a gaslighting husband?) theme. So fun!

Scat by Carl Hiassan. This is another of the books I found in the boys' closet and which I read because I felt sorry for it, having never been read by my kids (though M told me later that he had read it, so I needn't have fretted). It's a cute story about a couple of kids who get tangled up with a biology professor and a Hayduke kind of character who are trying to protect a swamp and the Florida panther who lives there from some oil development guys. It was a fun read, and it's too bad my other two kids missed out!

Poetry
Sparrow Envy and Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves by J. Drew Lanham. I loved both of these books so much. The poems are about birds and wild things and history and social justice and human nature. They make you think and make you feel. Some are joyful, yes, while others tend toward the heart-wrenching end of the emotional scale. But all are beautiful. 

September was another read-ey month--still in summer hammock mode, I guess. My book selections this month were all over the map. My reading lists are usually pretty diverse, but I think this month could win a prize for weirdest combination of books. Working our way from the bottom up, we have:

Fiction
The Cliffs by J. Courtney Sullivan. C heard a review about this book on NPR and he thought it sounded right up my alley--a coastal Maine setting, a spooky old house, ghosts, women's history, a woman seeking to reset her trajectory midlife--and ordered it for my birthday. It was okay (I don't usually like to say anything negative about books here, but since this one's a Reece's Book Club pick, I think it can handle it). There was *so much* exposition throughout--starting with a many page prologue. Whole life stories of characters and whole histories of groups of people told in pages and pages of summary and information dumping. And while those stories and histories were interesting, they did not read like a contemporary novel. It felt like the author did a lot of research and wanted to reader to know it. Or that she was on deadline and didn't have time to revise the summaries into scenes. Also, the ghost story just kinda fizzled out. 

Anne of Windy Poplars by L.M. Montgomery. This is the fourth book in the Anne of Green Gables series, and the last one that I bought in PEI. I continued to enjoy Montgomery's writing, the saga of Anne's life, and the details of that time on PEI, as I did to through the second and third book, but I also continued to miss the spunky Anne of the original. I don't think I'll go on to read the next four, although I do want to see her and Gilbert finally married.

The Sundial by Shirley Jackson. I'm still going with my Shirley Jackson kick, that was (re)set off after reading her collected letters last month. The Sundial is a strange book (no surprises there!), about a wealthy family who hole up in their big house in anticipation of the end of the world--which was foretold to one of the characters by her dead father. The entire story centers on the interactions and relationships among the characters--the remaining members of the family and a few friends and strangers who come to join their small cult--and their various ways of preparing the future that will come after everything outside of their realm is destroyed. It's wryly funny while at the same time feeling like a cutting indictment of human nature (but what is it saying about human nature, exactly?). And it's a murder mystery without a solution. I'm still pondering what I think of it two weeks after I finished reading.

Flush by Carl Hiaasen. I don't normally read YA or middle grade fiction (now that I don't have  kids around to read to, and if you don't count Anne of GG, which I guess is maybe a YA?), but I was getting a bunch of books ready to go to the library book store, and this book, along with another by the same author, appeared as if they'd never even been opened, and I felt bad about that so I decided to read them both before I sent them on. Flush is about a kid whose dad has gone to jail for sinking a boat that he suspects of dumping pollution into the bay near the characters' home in the Florida Keys. Despite the clear young reading level, the pacing, development of setting and characters, and buildup of suspense, and even the stakes make it an engaging read. What a bummer for my kids that they didn't give it a try!

Nonfiction
The Quickening by Elizabeth Rush. I've always been fascinated by Antarctica, and when I was in my 20s, I looked into going there to work at one of the US research bases, but since I had no useful skills, there wasn't anything I could reasonably apply for. I still don't have any useful skills (why didn't I become a diesel mechanic?), so I probably won't ever make it there, unless I reach a place where I could qualify for a National Science Foundation artist residency. That is how Elizabeth Rush found herself on a boat for several weeks, plying Antarctic waters to study the Thwaites Glacier. In The Quickening, Rush tells the story of this voyage and her interactions with the scientists and crew members on board the boat, while also contemplating pregnancy and parenthood, which she's put on hold for a year in order to participate in the trip, and interviewing her fellow passengers about their birth and parenting experiences. Through telling the story in this way, Rush aims to subvert the typical Polar travel story of white men setting out to discover and conquer the ice caps and replace it with a story of nurturing and care, and seeing Antarctica and its glaciers not as terra incognita, but as an animate, entity, a driver in our human story. It's a beautiful, thoughtful, and engaging read.

The Book of (More) Delights by Ross Gay. I loved this book every bit as much as I loved The Book of Delights. It's the same format: short essays about whatever it is that delighted the author on the particular day of writing--figs, a notebook, a visit with a friend, etc. Totally quotidian things elevated to magic through Gay's *delightful* way of seeing the world. (I almost typed "Ross's" up there, because after reading three books of essays by the guy, I feel like he's a friend.)

Craft & Current by Janisse Ray. I've been following along with Janisse Ray's Journey in Place (which she describes  as a "year-long correspondence course in place-knowing) all year, and I've read three of her books. I like her way of writing and looking at the world, and so was happy to get in on crowd funding this writing craft book. It has some useful ideas and frameworks and ways of approaching writing, which I'm already trying to put into practice, but what I found most interesting were the bits of memoir about her journey to becoming a writer.

Poetry
Indwelling by Libby Maxey. When my former co-editor at Literary Mama came out with a second book of poetry this summer, I ordered it right away, and then promptly lost it among a pile of books and papers. Amid a subsequent flurry of cleaning and reorganizing, it resurfaced and I've been savoring a poem or two a day all month. Libby's (I can use her first name because we really are friends) writes in sonnets and other traditional forms, which gives the poems a pleasing feeling of timelessness. While at the same time, it's thrilling to discover within the strict structures of these poems thoroughly modern and everyday moments, like a truck stuck in the snow, an encounter with a turtle in the grass, sheets hanging on the line in winter, cheese purchased at a farm stand, the things left behind in an abandoned house. The combination weaves together the past and the present, history and personal experience.

Audiobooks
C and I listened to the fourth Rivers of London book by Ben Aaronovich, Broken Homes. But it was a challenge, because we've been listening after we go to bed at night, and C kept falling asleep, because he's back to teaching and getting up early, and we'd have to replay half of the previous night's selection every night, and we were both confused about what was going on. A long drive to Massachusetts and back helped us through a big chunk of the book, but I think we'll have to wait until we need to drive a long ways before picking up with book #5.

Because I listened to the whole Thursday Murder Club series (over and over again), I felt compelled to get the latest Richard Osman book, We Solve Murders via audio as well. Also it was narrated by Nicola Walker, which is reason enough. The book, which is the start of a new series, is every bit as delightful as the TMC books. A bodyguard, her retired-cop father-in-law, and a world-famous thriller writer go on madcap caper from South Carolina to St. Lucia to Ireland to Dubais with assassins and cartel bosses and money launderers chasing after them, and vice-versa. Yes, the bodies do pile up, but it's all in good fun. Nothing gruesome or disturbing. Just highjinks and hilarity. 

This month's towering book stack takes me back to those endless summers of childhood, when I had nothing but time, and I'd lug armfuls of books home from the bookmobile to read away those lazy August days. Let's start from the bottom of this pile.

L.M. Montgomery. C and I went to Prince Edward Island to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. In preparation, I reread Anne of Green Gables, and the only copy I could find was this enormous annotated edition. Some of the annotations were helpful (when they noted, for example, what real-life towns Montgomery's made-up towns were based on), while others were kind of obvious. The volume also includes a biography of Montgomery, which I found fascinating and good preparation for visiting the Green Gables Homesite. While in PEI I purchased a partial set (the first four books) of the Anne series, in nice hardcover editions, and read the second two (Anne of Avonlea and Anne of the Island), plus half (so far) of the fourth. I'd never before read beyond Avonlea, because I always found that Anne lost too much of her spunk after the first book and became too much of a goody-goody. Rereading Avonlea and Island, I still find that to be true. (But at least I know now why--she married a Presbyterian minister after writing Anne.) Another book I picked up at one of the historic sites on PEI is The Alpine Path, which starts out as an autobiography of Montgomery's writing career, but ends up a travelog of a honeymoon trip to Scotland. I enjoyed her impressions of her travels, but I was disappointed that she didn't continue to write about writing--I would have been interested to know how marriage and motherhood affected her writing.

Shirley Jackson. I took myself on a little pre-birthday shopping trip a couple weekends ago and popped into a bookshop, where I happened to run across The Letters of Shirley Jackson. I'm a huge Jackson fan, and this collection of her correspondence was a fascinating read. After the initial bunch (love letters to Stanley written during school breaks from college, which are a little cringe-worth, and I can't imagine her wanting to have them published), they are mostly to her parents, her agents, and a few friends. Her letter writing possesses all the characteristics of her nonfiction writing about raising children (collected in Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons)--witty, clever, and charming. Only a handful of (likely unsent) letters delve into the darkness of her fiction world, letters in which she alludes to poor treatment from her parents and her husband. These and the references to drinking, prescription pills, diets, and a spell of agoraphobia and subsequent therapy hint at the unhappiness and instability behind her incredible writing productivity and the likely causes of her untimely death. Reading Jackson's letters made me want to revisit her fiction, so I picked up a short story collection called Dark Tales, which includes many of the Jackson's delightfully creepy stories. I need to go back and reread many of them to learn how she's able to instill that pit of dread in the reader's stomach from the first word.

Nature Writing. I picked up a copy of Janisse Ray's essay collection Wild Spectacle. I follow Ray's Substack (Trackless Wild and Journey in Place), and I really enjoy her outlook on life and her approach to appreciating and preserving wild places and communities in all their guises. This book includes many tales of travel and adventure and learning from the natural world and the people who inhabit it in different locals around the world.

Poetry. Since about April, I'd been reading about a poem a day from You Are Here, the anthology of nature poetry collected by US Poet Laureate Ada Limon. I had a routine of walking our trail, sitting on the bench overlooking the river, making a sketch or some observations, writing a short poem of my own, and reading one from the book. Around mid-June, when bugs and poison ivy came out and the trail became overgrown, I fell out of my habit, and had to work at remembering to read a poem here and there, but finally this moth finished reading them all. There's a wonderful range of poetry styles, subjects, and approaches to writing about the natural world among this collection, and I expect I'll return to it again and again.

Mystery. From the $2 shelf at the used bookstore, I picked up Garden of Malice by Susan Kenny, an author I'd never heard of, although it appears she is (was?) local (having taught at Colby College). This book was a little reminiscent of a Barbara Michael's-style modern Gothic, with the heroine traveling from the US to England and finding herself ensconced in a big, brooding house with a bunch of kooks. Although the story itself was a little far-fetched (why did no one call the police with people dropping dead all over the place), I enjoyed it. 

Audiobooks. A friend recommended the audiobooks of The Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch (narrated by Kobna Hodbrook-Smith). They're police procedurals with wizards, magic, river spirits, and all kinds of mayhem and hilarity (despite the murders). Think Harry Potter meets Inspector Morse meets Monty Python. C and I started the first one (Midnight Riot) during a drive to Vermont in July and finished it and most of the second one (Moon Over Soho) during our drive to and from Canada this moth. We finished Soho and most of the third book (Whispers Underground) by listening to a chapter or two after we go to bed at night. Either the third book is a lot more confusing than the first two, or one or the other of us keeps dozing off while we listen, because we're both kind of lost as to what's going on. I think I'm generally not great at aural processing, because even when I was a captive audience in the car, I was often lost as to what's happening. So when I saw a copy of Midnight Riot at the used bookstore, I snagged it and read it (which didn't help with my confusion over Whispers, because I was reading it concurrently with listening to that one), and I felt a lot clearer about the complicated story. I really love Hodbrook-Smith's narration (he does an amazing job with all the voices), so I want to stick with listening to the rest of these books, but I think I'm going to have to read them as well to clear up any confusion.

Finally, I had a lot of household projects going on this month--painting and cleaning and sorting and rearranging (including going through every single one of our books, getting rid of about six bags full, dusting the remainders, and organizing them neatly back of their shelves. To make these tasks a little less tedious, I re-listened to The Thursday Murder Club series by Richard Osman (The Thursday Murder Club, The Man Who Died Twice, The Bullet that Missed, and The Last Devil to Die). I've made a habit of listening to these every fall when a new book in the series comes out, but since there won't be one this year (Osman has a book from another series coming out instead), I was happy to have an excuse to listen to them again. They never get old.

​Phew! That's a lot of books. What have you been reading this month?

This month was heavy on the crime writing--I have two books of essays going, but they're both going slowly, and I'm not done with them yet. So with one exception, it's been all mystery all the time (and isn't that how summer reading is supposed to be--light and fun?).

The Exception
Outer Order, Inner Calm by Gretchen Ruben. I like to have a small book with very short sections handy for when I have only a minute or two to read, and this month's selection was a reread, intended to help my through to the finish line on the whole-house cleaning and decluttering program I've got going this summer. There's some very helpful advice in this book (although, honestly, nothing that's not common sense, but it helps to have it stated clearly), and also a few things that don't really appeal to me. But since each suggestion is a page or less in length, each one is easy to digest and either adopt or disregard.

Crime Fiction
First, two more books that I picked up at the Crime Wave conference: Muddled Through by Barbara Ross and Death in a Blackout by Jessica Ellicott, both authors whose books I've read and enjoyed in the past. Muddled is part of the Clam Bake series, which take place in a Boothbay-Harbor-esque coastal Maine town and are culinary cozies, and Blackout is the debut of a new series by Ellicott, about a young woman who becomes a police constable in England during World War II. Both fun and engaging reads with classic whodunit structures and great twists at the end.

After the conference, I decided I needed to familiarize myself with more Maine crime writers, and picked up two more books at the local book shop: Body Double by Tess Gerritsen and The Poacher's Son by Paul Doiron. Both authors I have known about for many years, but I've avoided Gerritsen's books because I figured they'd be more gruesome than I what I normally care to read (one of her protagonists is a medical examiner). And I figured Doiron's books would be all about huntin' and fishin', since his protagonist is a game warden. Body Double, while excellent, did verge on too gruesome, although the details of the autopsies and bodies didn't necessarily bother me; it was more the psychopathic killers, their choices of victims, and their motivations that turned my stomach. I prefer a nice, tidy poisoning or strangulation for a good, solid reason (inheritance, revenge, jealousy, etc.), and a bit of humor or the ridiculous to lighten the mood. Doiron's book did have just enough humor in it to leaven the heavy story, and while there was plenty of huntin' and fishin', the protagonist proved to be a nuanced and sensitive character. And I love me a protracted, multi-peak climax in a story, and this one had a small mountain range. So I'll be reading more.

From the used bookshop, I picked up The Tuscan Child, by Rhys Bowen, which was in the mystery section (and her other books appear to be mysteries), and it was set up like a thriller, but there wasn't much of a twist with regard to whodunit, the suspense wasn't super intense, and the climax was brief. Still, it was an interesting story, with a double timeline of late-WWII and 1973, in a setting of Tuscany (though I would have preferred more details about the countryside and fewer about the food). From the $2 bookshelf at said bookshop, I grabbed Larkspur by Sheila Simonsen, a classic whodunit published in the early 1990s. I'd never heard of this author before, but I liked her main character, her voice, and her style. (Humor, people! It's the perfect complement to murder!) And from the 50 cent shelf I picked up The Piper on the Mountain by Ellis Peters. I've read a number of Peters's Brother Cadfael murder mysteries, but I think only one of her contemporary (1960s) books. This one was a combo spy thriller/murder mystery and it is a masterclass in the buildup of suspense and in the protracted climax. Really stellar. It is interesting, though, to note how much outside of the characters the narration often was at that time, while now we want to be right in there with the protagonist. (It takes over half the book to realize who the protagonist is going to be!).

That's it for July--a summer of murder and mayhem. Now I will be toning it down as I read in anticipation of a trip we'll be taking next month. More on that in August's post!

Lately I've been trying to come to terms with my writerly split personality--nature writer and crime writer--but looking at this month's list (and probably every reading list I've made for the last ten years), I see that it comes directly from having a readerly split personality (nature writing and crime writing)--duh! And no more than I'd give up reading one kind of book should I consider giving up writing one kind of book. So that's settled!

Nonfiction
I've been trying to be better about reading books that other people loan or give to me right away rather than let them gather dust on the shelf for a few years before I get around to it. Owls of the Eastern Ice by Jonathan Slaght is one that a friend passed on to me sometime this winter, and I finally sat myself down to read it this month, and I'm glad I did! It tells the story of the author's several years (5 or 6) doing field work in eastern Russia to find, study, and protect the population of Blakiston's fish owls that make their home in the far eastern part of that country. Slaght depicts many harrowing adventures (snowmobiling over rivers on which the ice is ready to break up, nearly becoming plowed into a logging road, sitting up all night in the freezing cold waiting for owls to set off a trap, trying to keep up with Russians drinking), and his descriptions of the owls and his encounters with them are wonderfully rendered. He also succeeds in his research, developing a realistic conservation plan for these rare and fantastical creatures.

For several months, I've been reading little snippets of Sibley's Birding Basics by David Allen Sibley, in an effort to improve my birding skills. It's an interesting book, but there is nothing basic about it--a better title perhaps would be Sibley's Deep Dive into Esoteric Aspects of Bird Morphology--but it was still a worthwhile read, and though I don't feel any more well-equipped to discern the molt phases of any particular bird species than I was before (nor do I necessarily feel any more compelled to), I at least know that there are different molt strategies among different groups of species.

Fiction
A River Runs through It by Norman Maclean. I list this under fiction, because he calls the collection a novella and short stories, but I wonder how it would be classified if he were writing today. (Something like David Sedaris's "true-ish" stories?) It's a book that I have known about since forever, of course, without ever giving it much thought, except that I attended a seminar once in which the speaker claimed that it's the best horror story ever written, which I found intriguing (since it's obviously not horror). I picked it up recently for a dollar or two at a used bookstore and brought it with on our camping trip last month to read to the boys, if they'd let me. As it turned out, I was at the tail end of a cold, and kept coughing as I tried to read out loud, and they didn't have the patience for Maclean's very drawn out descriptions of fly fishing, so after the first night they declined to hear more and had me read instead from a collection of Grimm's Fairy Tales that E had brought along. I, on the other hand, was totally drawn in by Maclean's writing, despite having less than zero interest in fly fishing (and even less in other kinds of fishing), and now I see what that speaker meant--Maclean had an absolute gift of building up suspense, not only in ARRTI but also in the shorter stories in the collection, and I need to go back and reread them see how he did it.

The Road to Dalton by Shannon Bowring. I picked this book up at a reading I attended last summer that a couple of friends of mine were also a part of, and it won the Maine Book Award for last year. The story follows many characters (there must be 5-10 different points of view) through about a year in the early 90s in Aroostook County, Maine, showing their various challenges and prejudices and heartaches.

If She Wakes by Michael Koryta. Koryta was awarded Crime Master at the Maine Crime Wave conference, which I attended a couple of weeks ago. I wasn't familiar with his work before, but picked up this novel, which is one of a few that take place in Maine. This book also has several point of view characters, which isn't my favorite form, but he pulled it off very well. One of the POV characters is in a coma, which was a fascinating thing to attempt--successfully, I might add--and two others were assassins. And, despite the assassins and several not-very-nice individuals in the book, he manages to keep it light with a fair dose of humor, and despite these two killing a lot of people, it didn't come across as grotesque or gratuitously violent, for the most part. I will definitely read more of his books in the future.

The Ebony Swan by Phyllis A. Whitney. I picked this book up at a used bookstore some time ago, because Whitney provided blurbs on pretty much every Barbara Michaels book, and I've been craving more old-school suspense. I have to admit (and I'm sure Ms. Whitney won't mind, being deceased and also extraordinarily successful before she died) that I found it pretty dull. I read the first couple of chapters and set it aside for months before forcing myself to pick it up again. It moves very slowly, the voices used for the two POV characters are indistinguishable and extremely emotionally distanced from the reader, the suspense build up is very subtle, and the crisis/climax is quick and not very thrilling. I did get engaged with the story about 1/2 to 1/3 of the way through, but it was a slog to stick it out that long. But props to PAW for still writing when she was almost 90. I might look for a much earlier book by her, to see if it's any more exciting.

After I retired my old blog at the end of last year, I thought I was done with writing a monthly synopsis of what I've been reading, but I guess I just can't quit! For the last couple of months, I tried squeezing it into my newsletter, but there just wasn't room. So now I'm back to blogging about books! Here's what I read in May:

Fiction
I'm still on my mystery/crime kick, and read a pretty broad range this month:

• Toucan Keep a Secret by Donna Andrews, which is a cozy/whodunit with humor and madcap antics. I like that Andrews' books are lighthearted mysteries and that the heroine is always juggling caring for kids (twins!) plus about four jobs while also solving murders.
• The Five Year Lie by Sarina Bowen, a "domestic thriller" (I haven't quite figured out what this new subgenre means--does domestic refer to the stories being about concerns of the home or the fact that there's no international element to the events?). I really like Sarina on the #AmWriting podcast, but her genre up until now has been romance, which interests me not at all, so I was excited that she branched out, and I enjoyed this book very much.
• The Midcoast by Adam White, which is really more of a book club novel than a mystery, although there is crime involved (it would be called "women's fiction" if the main characters were women and not men), about a lobsterman who gets involved in drug running/organized crime, told from the point of view of a secondary character who lives in the town (a town not far from where I live!). It's a little on the slow side, if you're used to heart-racing thrillers, but the deep dive into place and this one family's rise and massive downfall is compelling to the end.

Multigenre

• Last year I was invited to teach a class through a project called Writing Waterville, which involved four workshops and the publication of a chapbook of writing that arose from those workshops, also called Writing Waterville. At the end of last month, there was a launch event where the books were distributed and contributors read from their pieces. It was really great to see the huge range of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction that participants generated and to have the chance to contribute myself. Big shoutout to Catie Joyce-Bulay and Tyler French for pulling it all together. Being a writer in a rural area can be so isolating, and it's wonderful that these two are putting in the work to build a writing community in central Maine.

Have you discovered the Shepherd book recommendation site yet? There you can find curated lists of books recommended by authors in an astonishing range of categories: mystery novels with a strong sense of place; books about women who went on adventures and changed their lives; detective novels that keep you laughing. If there's a very specific kind of book you love to read, there is probably a list on the site to match! I was invited to put together a list of books that shared something in common with my book, Uphill Both Ways, and I came up with the category of "the best books about women in the wild." It was fun and challenging to narrow it down to five books--I ended up choosing four that have been pivotal in my development as a reader, a writer, and a person, plus one that I only read recently but which I think will prove to be equally life-changing. You can check out my list and why I chose each of the books here.