As I wrote for 2023, my reading stopped. Like. Completely. With help from my therapist and a dogged determination to eliminate stress and distractions, I am slowly clawing back the peace I want in my life. I am, minute by minute, battling for time to read again. I am astonished at how quickly and how completely time to relax and read left my life and I am so grateful to slowly be getting it back in 2025. For now, I did at least complete a couple of books in 2024, and they are some of the best books. It is something.
- Black Girl Unlimited. The Remarkable Story of a Teenage Wizard by Echo Brown. I finally finished the book! Moving last year in July put a stop to my book reading. There was too much going on. It took a very long time to get back to it. Echo gives her name to the main character in her book, a teenage girl trying to survive in a financially poor community with a mother addicted to drugs and a brother who starts selling them. Echo finds out that she is a wizard like her mother, and the structure of the book is to make chapters out of each lesson she learns. Of course she takes her superpowers seriously and learns to temporarily stop time and lift black shrouds from people who are being smothered with despair. We learn about some of Echo’s past and then move with her as she creates a powerful new now for herself and lets some of her very closest people in on the secret of her powers. She even finds another wizard teenage girl like herself and together they make magic in their community. This book is about drastically terrible life challenges suffered by many kids in America, and instead of giving up, talks about how hope and survival is possible with a lot of work to find ways to knit together a village that can get you through it, as you find allies, one at a time. But it’s told from the fantastical perspective of the wizard casting her spells, and the glossy sheen hides the worst of the pain so that the story is always accessible for the gentle-hearted.
- Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune. This was a creative and wonderful book. The best thing about this book, for me, is that it gave me another perspective to think about what happens when we die. I’m not familiar with the author, who has written many stories. The writing is very simple and sentences and comments are often predictable. I would place this firmly in the YA category based on the writing, which at first was so silly and stereotypical that I almost quit reading. The unlikely setting is a tea shop, where the dead go to spend some time between life and the afterlife. They stay at the tea shop with Nelson, Mai, Apollo, and Hugo, who help the deceased make peace with the idea of death, before moving on. It’s not an easy transition, and the characters in this story have a range of examples of how complicated it can be to realize you are dead and then decide to go on to the next step. The people at the tea shop are all deeply caring and sensitive people, and committed to helping the dead with this new reality, but they are humans (or used to be humans) after all, and don’t have all the answers. The main character is Wallace, who does admit he was an asshole in life. He is pissed off about dying and when Hugo tells him he can take as much time to move on to the next thing, Wallace settles right in at the tea shop, with no inclination whatsoever to move on. He realizes he never actually lived, and the idea of dying is simply too much to take. Wallace lives a lifetime in a few months, and it becomes a sweet story. He does finally, find the peace and purpose he needs to make the decision.
- Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. The story is set in a small town in Washington state, and is told through relatable people (and one relatable giant pacific octopus) who each have assets and hang-ups. In the audio version, Marcellus the octopus is read by a man, Michael Urie, and the rest of the book is read excellently by Marin Ireland. The writing is executed so well that I was drawn in quickly, though one of the main characters is a self-absorbed obnoxious boy and the other main character is an older woman suffering from so much pain and loneliness that she shuts out people and a better life. The third main character is Marcellus, who lives in an aquarium and makes outstanding deductions by simply staring out the glass of his tank and paying attention. The supporting cast is just as well written and I couldn’t help myself but begin to care deeply. I wanted the grocer to get through to his crush. I wanted Tova to find her grandson. I wanted Cameron to stop being a shit and start using his brilliant brain for good. I wanted Marcellus to be loved and appreciated in his last days of life. Despite so many potentially depressing story lines (an apparent suicide, child abandonment, loneliness) is a feelgood and often hilarious story (for example, Marcellus keeps track of how many sea creatures are in the other tanks in the aquarium and sneaks out of his tank to eat the ones he think won’t be missed and sneaks back – usually without being caught). You will forgive yourself when you see yourself in the characters – each of them was needed to make it all work. Everyone did something small that made the whole community better. An all around marvelous book with a satisfying conclusion.
- America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization by Graham Hancock. Hancock has a simple premise: let’s assume human have had intelligent civilizations with advanced technology for much much longer than archeologists have ever imagined, then let’s re-examine the facts looking for evidence of it. While he rightly points out that anthropology is a fuzzy science, and points out when his conjectures are speculation, even then, astonishingly easy to believe conclusions can be made. He says, in effect, “we’ve speculated that humans couldn’t possibly have had advanced civilizations before X date, why not speculate that they could have?” Hancock is convinced that our ancestors tens of thousand of years ago were not bewildered, bumbling humans in awe of everything they saw, but rather there were multiple lineages of modern human like people all relocating, innovating, trading, having sex, and generally making sense of geometry, astronomy, and agriculture. There are civilizations that rose and fell, and civilizations that adopted older technology though they didn’t really get it, and generations that re-purposed old monoliths that couldn’t have built them, and none of it was linear or predictable. He proposes for our consideration something that I, a trained anthropologist, know well: anthropologists for some dumb reason have usually insisted that the current theory is the only possible theory that could ever work. And that lasts until hard evidence becomes irrefutable, at which point the next theory becomes the only possibly theory that could ever exist. It is to the detriment of the entire field of study that this habit never changes, and figures of respect and authority who declare “that’s impossible and ridiculous” are holding us back from vast amounts of discovery. It is very engaging to have an entire book dedicated to the mental commitment that my own Native ancestors of North America could very possibly have had technology and cities larger and more accomplished than the great Old World civilizations. It soothes my scientific mind to have someone say that human history was never linear. Europeans did not introduce advanced technology for the first time in the Americas. No one can claim to be on a path farther along in evolution than someone else. It’s not pure science, but more like a lay person uses science to follow a premise, and earnestly presents his case. I definitely enjoyed reading and appreciate this one.
- The Love Prescription by Dr. John Gottman and Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman. This one I began on the recommendation from my therapist. I was still really struggling to shift from my life alone in vast amounts of peace and quiet and solitude, to 24×7 with a man I love, who talks a lot, who works beside me all day every day because we only had one room for an office, he doesn’t value housekeeping in the same ways that I do, etc etc. And I was doing what I always do when I’m under stress: I strike at who is closest. I was growing so frustrated with him and losing my joy at being in love with him. I became desperate to change course before things broke. The love prescription was just right for me. I WANT to continue to be in love with Pedro. I know all the reasons I’m crazy about him are still there and my frustration is mostly because I’m learning how to live with him – not because there is something wrong with him. The book helps a lot. Each chapter gives a different topic to focus on, to help communicate my needs, communicate my pleasure, to redirect when I’m frustrated.
- Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver {in progress}. This is a magnificent saga of a boy who grew up disadvantaged and privileged in ways that I could easily relate to, and I saw some of his paths similar to mine. Though his story was much more difficult. He was born poor, to an uneducated single mother who didn’t do a good job at mothering. He went into foster care, was abused in multiple ways for multiple years. He became a high school football star, and he honed his talent in making comics. After a life-altering injury, he became addicted to drugs and despite how hard he worked, the drugs just bled him dry. All the beautiful relationships he had built were destroyed over time, till he was only a shell. It’s the kind of thing that can be a crossroads for a person. I continued to relate to his moment of reckoning; how it came to be, what he noticed. Despite its length, and my difficulty finding time to read, it was always engaging.
Conscious Engagement 