Reading Wrap Up: February 2021

Welcome to the February edition of, My Monthly Reading Wrap Up! 

In case you missed it, here’s what I read in January!

February was another big month of reading for me, mostly thanks to audiobooks. I’m finding it so easy to fly through books when I can read anytime I walk my dog, do the dishes or make dinner. If you haven’t tried audiobooks yet, I highly recommend them. I borrow all of mine from the library, so it doesn’t cost me anything. And I prefer to listen to non-fiction books, so I don’t have to focus on dialogue or plot, which can be tough on audio. My favourite audiobooks are memoirs, especially when they’re read by the author.

Since February is Black History Month, I wanted to read more Black authors. But I failed at that goal. Luckily, nothing is stopping me from trying again next month! A lot of my library holds came through in February, and I had been primarily putting white-authored books on hold. So that’s on me. Sometimes I’ll fall into certain reading trends, like wanting to read travel memoirs or true crime, and find mostly white authors. But that’s not a reason for me to forget about inclusive reading. It’s an opportunity for me to dig deeper to find the underrepresented authors, and to recognize and push back against the fact that only certain stories are being published.

Okay, let’s get to the books! Note that the first three books were read in January, but just after I had already written that month’s blog post.

---

Rage Against the Minivan by Kristen Howerton

Parenting, 272 pages, published 2020

“Can we retire the phrase ‘must be nice’? First of all, it is almost entirely used to passive aggressively cut another person down. Second of all, most of the time it’s an arbitrary comment on someone’s life choices that just happen to be different from yours.”

I’m not sure how I ended up reading a parenting book but I really enjoyed this one! I’m not in mommy blogger or progressive Christian circles, so this was my first introduction to Kristen Howerton. I was pleasantly surprised by how progressive and feminist she really was, and enjoyed that this book was more about her family’s story and less about parenting tips.

Kristen is extremely honest and vulnerable. She opens up about her history of miscarriages and infertility, which was heartbreaking to hear, as well as her postpartum anxiety. I loved how candid she was about the parts of parenthood you’re not supposed to talk about: like wanting to go back to work and have alone time. She also shares about her divorce and single parenthood.

The book begins with Kristen explaining she met her pastor husband at bible college and went on to adopt two Black sons. So I was gearing myself up to have to roll my eyes through all of the religious and white saviour references, but Kristen actually does a great job of tackling these head on. She’s critical of Christianity, in a comical way, and dedicates a lot of the book to white privilege, the harm of colour blindness and the issues of transracial adoption. She even includes this line, which I love, “I meant well. But the road to hell is paved with white women who mean well.”

I’m sure there’s a lot that Kristen gets wrong, and she freely admits that. But I found her story really interesting, her writing funny and her wisdom pretty spot on.

TW: racism, divorce, miscarriage and infertility

Rating: 4/5

---

The Star-Crossed Sisters of Tuscany by Lori Nelson Spielman

Contemporary romance, 378 pages, published 2020

“It’s fascinating, isn’t it, how, when someone tells us something about ourselves – good or bad – we try so desperately to prove them right.”

It’s been a while since I have stayed up until 4:00am to finish a book! But this one totally hooked me. It’s a light and easy read, which was exactly what I was looking for. At first, the dialogue felt a bit cheesy and I struggled with some of the characters. But I was quickly engrossed in the book and rooting for my favourites.

This book is all about love, family and Italy. Estranged Aunt Poppy invites her two nieces, Lucy and Emilia, to Italy with her on a quest to break their family’s curse that says no second-born daughter will ever find love. I especially enjoyed the flashbacks to 1960s Italy as we heard about Aunt Poppy’s story. And the descriptions of Italy transported me right back to my own trips. By the end, I was fully engrossed in the story. I bawled through the emotional parts and couldn’t stop flipping the pages, despite it being nearly 4am. All of the characters grew on me and even though I felt like the book could have ended 100 pages sooner, it was nice to spend more time with the Fontana family.

TW: death, cancer

Rating: 4.25/5

---

Alone Time by Stephanie Rosenbloom

Travel memoir, 272 pages, published 2018

“When you’re not sitting across from someone, you’re sitting across from the world.”

I picked up this book thinking it would be the story of a woman who spends a year travelling the world alone, staying one season in four different cities (based on the subtitle). I expected there to be lots of great travel stories from all over the world. Instead, the author spends one week each in three European cities, and then counts New York, her home, as the fourth city. (To be fair, she does say she’s been to Paris a few times, so longer than a week, and Istanbul, the second city, could be considered part of Asia.)

But this book was still a let down for me. Since the author only spent such a short amount of time in each city (in her home of New York, she took herself on a solo outing once a week), I found a lot of her experiences to be surface level. She filled in the gaps with a lot of research on alone time and the history of the places she was visiting, which I found pretty dry. There’s also a big emphasis on art, which isn’t one of my favourite topics. And she ends the book with a list of resources, like Duolingo and Airbnb, including explanations about why you should use each – I found this part extremely dry and filled with a lot of very common resources best found by Googling.

I wish this book had gone deeper. I wish the author had spent more time in each city so she would have more firsthand stories to tell. And I wish she would have picked more global cities, instead of staying so close to her comfort zone. There were some passages I enjoyed, but I was mostly bored as I listened to the audiobook. As someone who has travelled extensively and gone on a few solo trips, I didn’t find the idea of spending a week in Paris at a boutique hotel alone all that extraordinary…or worth writing a book about.

Rating: 2.5/5

---

Parachutes by Kelly Yang

Young Adult, 496 pages, published 2020

“…and everyone will clap and smile and feel good about themselves, while the world continues to spin in the sexist, racist, classist mess that it is.”

This is the first young adult book I’ve read as an adult and I really enjoyed it. Parachutes is written by Kelly Yang, the author of one of my favourite books from last year, Front Desk (a middle grade novel). This book is about Dani and Claire, two seventeen year old Asian girls from very different upbringings who both go to American Prep High School and experience sexual assault. This book, like Front Desk, is actually based on Kelly Yang’s real life.

While the subject matter is tough, I think Kelly Yang does such a great job sharing this story. The two main characters are so strong and inspiring. There’s a huge focus on female friendships and so much rich Asian culture throughout. I love how this book attacks the idea that Asian people are a monolith – we’re not! And I love how Kelly Yang bravely calls out the authority figures and systems who let Dani and Claire down throughout their sexual assault experiences, and let Yang herself down in her real life.

TW: infidelity, sexual assault, racism

Rating: 4/5

---

Mediocre by Ijeoma Oluo

Non-fiction (race/feminism), 336 pages, published 2020

“Perhaps one of the most brutal of white male privileges is the opportunity to live long enough to regret the carnage you have brought upon others.”

After reading (and loving!) So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo last year, I was super excited to read her latest book, Mediocre. But sadly, I was let down by this one. And I can’t quite put my finger on exactly why! A part of me almost thinks these books should have come out in reverse order – a book about white supremacy would have been more poignant right after Trump’s election and a book about race would have been more poignant after last summer’s racial reckoning. Not to say that either topic is dated (unfortunately, racism and white supremacy are timeless), but I think they would have made more sense in the cultural context that way.

This book is very academic – it starts with a thesis statement the author will prove and shares lots of history to back up her point. I didn’t love that, as I was looking for a more conversational book. I also felt like some of the points could have been made in one sentence, instead of requiring entire chapters. I did enjoy her chapter on Bernie Bros and learned a lot from the football chapter. But others just didn’t resonate as much. There were a lot of great facts within the book but overall I found myself a little bored. I’m not sure if the subject matter was too broad, too focused on white men or what exactly it was, but I didn’t love this one.

TW: violence, racism

Rating: 3.5/5

---

Bringing Up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman

Parenting/memoir, 284 pages, published 2012

“French parents are very concerned about their kids… But they aren’t panicked about their children’s well-being. This calmer outlook makes them better at both establishing boundaries and giving their kids some autonomy.”

What am I doing reading another parenting book? I couldn’t tell you. But apparently my biggest interests right now are planning for the future – i.e. trips and babies – and so this book about an American woman raising her children in Paris ticked both of those boxes.

Bringing Up Bebe is a book I had heard of before, and because I’m reading it nine years after it was published, I did find it a bit dated. I also found it pretty anti-fat with quite a lot of toxic garbage about getting your body “back” after baby. There’s also little to no mention of how race or socioeconomic status would factor into any parenting decisions or methods. My last complaint: I listened to this book on audio and the reader put on a really cringe-worthy French accent anytime she was quoting a French person, which was very off-putting.

Despite all that, I actually enjoyed the book. It was very interesting to hear the differences between French parenting styles and North American ones. It mostly seemed to boil down to the French way being more intuitive and treating children as part of a larger family, instead of the centre of a family whose demands come first. I’m not a parent yet, but that sounds like a reasonable approach to me. I really enjoyed Pamela’s stories of raising her children in Paris and implementing her new learning. There were a few sections in the middle that got a bit dry (too many quotes from too many psychologists), but overall I enjoyed this read.

TW: anti-fat, diet culture, childbirth trauma

Rating: 3.75/5

---

I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are by Rachel Bloom

Memoir, 288 pages, published 2020

“If only I could say that my personality in hindsight was awesome and no one ‘got me,’ but this is disproved by the seventy-two DVDs’ worth of home movies that my mother gifted me on my thirtieth birthday. Thanks to these DVDs, I have concrete proof my personality was pretty insufferable.”

Rachel Bloom is best known as the lead on the TV show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend which, surprisingly, I’ve never seen before. But it sounds right up my alley, so I’m going to need to go binge it. Despite not really knowing who Bloom is, I enjoyed this book. It’s funny, but not laugh out loud, and Rachel is extremely vulnerable throughout.

In typical celebrity memoir style, Rachel shares stories of her upbringing and eventual turn in the spotlight. She touches on some heavy subjects, like heartache, bullying and mental health, and includes a few too many toilet/body jokes for my liking. But again, I still found it really enjoyable and found Rachel pretty relatable. I think the aspect of this book I found most impressive is how many different formats Rachel includes. She’s got letters, an interview, poetry and even an entire musical. Luckily, I listened to this book on audio so had Rachel herself singing to me, but I have no idea how that musical would work on the page.

TW: bullying, mental health, death

Rating: 4/5

---

The Killer’s Shadow by John Douglas

True crime, 304 pages, published 2020

“For criminals for whom the act of killing is the most important aspect of their lives – the aspect that gives their lives meaning – it is emotionally difficult not to be publicly associated with the murders.”

One of the first books I read as an adult that got me back into reading was Mindhunter by John Douglas. I hadn’t read much true crime before that and totally loved it. Since then, I’ve read most of John Douglas’s other books and they’ve been hit or miss. This one was definitely a miss!

My favourite part about John Douglas books is learning more about criminal profiling, as John started the real life Criminal Minds unit at the FBI. But this book had very little of that. While some of his other books cover multiples criminals and theories, this one covered just one criminal. The cynical part of me is saying that this book was only written/published in 2020 in order to take advantage of the interest in anti-Black racism. And probably the last person we need commenting on anti-Black racism is an old white man retired from law enforcement. Suffice to say, John Douglas’s epilogue where he directly speaks about racism was far from groundbreaking.

To be honest, I found this book boring. The cases are old (primarily from the 70s) and [SPOILER ALERT] the criminal is already known to law enforcement at the beginning of the book and then arrested only a few chapters in. So the rest of the book has absolutely no stakes. As horrendous as the crimes and murders were, I found the book super flat with no emotion. Honestly, I couldn’t wait for it to end.

TW: murder, racism

Rating: 2.5/5

---

The Panic Years by Nell Frizzell

Memoir, 336 pages, published 2020

“Who you are? What do you want? Those questions will rip you apart but the answers will knit you back together.”

This book is all about the time in a woman’s life when she’s deciding about things like her relationship, her career and, the big unchangeable decision, kids. Author Nell Frizzell walks you through this time period and shares her own journey through it and path to (spoiler alert) motherhood. As I’m entering this period of life myself, I found this book super relatable. A lot of the feelings and concerns Nell shared I totally recognize in myself.

I appreciate that Nell points out her privilege and acknowledges that she’s writing this book as a well-off, educated, cis, hetero, white woman. She does involve a few other perspectives, like a trans single father and an older gay woman who didn’t have children, but as this book is a memoir, it’s mostly about Nell’s experience.

There were a few points where I was rolling my eyes a bit at Nell. Her tirade against baby showers was a little melodramatic. And when she was first introducing the idea of children to her partner, she kept tip-toeing around it and I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t just talk to him. But for the most part, I was nodding along with what Nell was saying. I loved that she spent time talking about how her own pregnancy made her strongly pro-choice, the power in owning female anger, and the realities of postpartum mental illness.  Her chapter about her birth, and hearing her baby’s voice on the epilogue, were both very touching and emotional.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book and would love to read another book by Nell on her parenting adventures. I think it’s a great read for any woman who is thinking about kids and other big life decisions. Even if you don’t totally relate to Nell or even if you don’t end up having or wanting children, I think you’ll find something in this book that resonates and make the flux (as she calls it) less lonely.

Rating: 4.5/5

---

Best book of the month

Overall, my favourite book of February was The Panic Years by Nell Frizzell. I really related to this book and enjoyed the audio version a lot. I also loved The Star-Crossed Sisters of Tuscany – a close second!

Annual reading stats update

Here is a quick update on my 2021 reading stats!

• Total number of books read: 16 books
• Total number of pages read: 5227 pages
• Fiction vs non-fiction: 2 fiction & 14 non-fiction
• Male vs female authors: 4 male & 13 female (one book had two authors)
• Diversifying my reading: Of the 17 authors I’ve read this year, four are BIPOC and zero are LGBTQ+. Wow, I really need to do better on this!

 

What was the best book you read this month?