#IMWAYR February 5th, 2024

Welcome! It's #IMWAYR time again, when bloggers share what they have been reading and find out what others have been up to. Kathryn hosts the adult version of this meme at Book Date. Kellee and Ricki at Unleashing Readers host the kidlit rendition. These are fabulous places to start your search for what to read next.

Last Monday my specialist put me on antibiotics to treat my sinus infection. I've got another week to go. If you've ever had one of these, you know how hard they are to treat. He is sending me off for a scan to see what is going on in there before he repairs the damage done when I broke my nose in 2020. 

I did manage to work for 1 1/2 days last week although I was completely done in afterwards. 

In my creative life, I'm continuing to work on a knitted sweater for my son. I've also  been trying to finish up an order I took for two mice. I've finished up the clothing she wanted, and even though she didn't ask for it, am attempting to make shoes for them. It is really finicky given that the mice feet are at most, one inch long. I will make sure to share a picture of them when I am done.

 

Titles with a 🍁 indicate this is a Canadian or Indigenous Canadian Author and or Illustrator.

Clicking on the title will take you to the Goodreads page of the book.

PREVIOUS POST

FIRST FRIDAY POETRY FEBRUARY 2024

NON FICTION PICTURE BOOKS

4 stars

Crayfish by Lola M. Schaefer January 1, 2002

I was subbing for one of the local teacher librarians last week. She asked me to read a couple of books to the primary groups who would be coming in. 

When I came upon this book, I knew it would be one of them. When I was a girl growing up in this area, there were lots of crayfish (crawdads) in the river and other bodies of water. I haven't seen any in many years, but that might be just because I'm not looking for them. 

This is "a basic introduction to crayfish, focusing on their physical characteristics, habitat, diet, and activities." I wish there had been more about how their eggs are fertilized.
It is a wonderful nonfiction title for beginning readers from prek to grade 2. I appreciate that it has all kinds of important nonfiction text features: labeled photographs, a table of contents, a glossary, an index.

FICTION PICTURE BOOKS

5 stars

Children Make Terrible Pets by Peter Brown September 1, 2010

This is the other book I read to those groups of primary students. If I had read it before, I didn't remember it although I did recall that it is a great read. 

It's a take on children wanting to keep wild animals for pets. In this case, a bear finds a boy in the bushes and convinces his mother to let him keep it as a pet. Like all the other Peter Brown books I've read, the art is charming, it's loaded with humour, and reveals an important lesson. 

MIDDLE GRADE GRAPHIC NOVELS

4.5 stars

Lo and Behold by Wendy Mass, Gabi Mendez (Illustrator) & Cai Tse (Colorist) May 2, 2023

When I first finished this, I was left pondering VR (virtual reality). Part of me worried that spending time in VR is a way to avoid reality and thus, not trying to change negative aspects of it. However, as I reflected more on the book, I realized that in many ways spending time in VR is a lot like reading. Yes it has an escapist component, but sometimes, that's what you need. It's also a way to learn more about yourself and the world around you. Perhaps if we could spend time in an artificial world, we would be able to come back more aware of what is missing and be motivated to change our lives.
This is in essence, what this book is about.
Addie (named after a toirtoise) and her father travel across the country for his summer job, teaching university students working with VR. Her mother, for reasons that are not clear at first, is unable to come with them. After a rocky start, she ends up becoming friends with Mateo, a boy across the hall. The two of them come up with ways to use VR to help patients in the hospital where Mateo volunteers.
There is a lot going on in this book. At the same time as we learn about VR, we learn about space travel, the longest living tortoise, opiate addiction, death, grief, and forgiveness.
I really appreciated the diversity of the characters and the authenticity of the relationships between them.

ADULT/YA FICTION

4 stars

Moon of the Turning Leaves by Waubgeshig Rice & Billy Merasty (Narrator) October 10, 2023 🍁 

This is a sequel to Moon of the Crusted Snow. In the first book we learn that something has destroyed the electrical grid, the world has gone dark, and is experiencing an apocalypse. A small Anishinaabe community in the north, after dealing with destructive outsiders and the deaths of many of it's members during the first winter, has survived.

The remaining people decide that in order to survive they will need to move to where there are better food sources. A group of six set off south to find out if they will be able to return to their original territory on one of the great lakes. Their journey is fraught with all kinds of dangers. Some come from the land itself and others from the humans they run into on their journey. Not all of them make it. 

A couple of times I became so terrified for these characters that I had to skip forward in sections of my audiobook. 

ADULT/YA NONFICTION

5 stars

Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon (Author & Narrator) October 2023

So far this is one of the two best books (fiction and nonfiction) I've read this year. It's in a tie with Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will by Robert M. Sapolsky.

It's a paradigm shift that takes a deep look into the evolution of our species from the perspective of women's biological needs and the role they play in society. It examines the intersection of biology, sex, gender, culture, and evolution.
The writing is brilliant - full of scientific information, but also cosy and intimate, like when she refers to a Morganucodon, a rodent that lived 200m years ago in the Jurassic period, as Morgie.
She's going to piss a lot of people off with some of her thinking, like the fact that trans women are really women, but who really cares.
Everyone should be paying close attention to the chapters on love, especially with regards to the nutritional needs of girls and women.

4 stars

Almost Brown: A Mixed-Race Family Memoir by Charlotte Gill June 6, 2023 🍁

I'm really looking forward to talking to my book club about this book. Charlotte Gill writes about her life as the child of an English mother and Sikh father.
The book is both personal, and global. It addresses the reality of racism at both micro and macro levels. On the one hand it's an exploration of a family trying to navigate their way through the remnants of two worlds, and fit into a third. It's a tale of family and relationship dissolution. In the end it's about forgiveness.
It's also examines the impact of systemic racism in our cultural institutions and what that is like at a personal level. She writes about her experience of being half brown, of being a member of the diaspora and not really fitting in anywhere and of dealing with racist experiences associated with her skin colour.

CURRENTLY

Bad Actors by Mick Herron May 2022

The Librarian of Auschwitz (Graphic Novel Version) by Antonio Iturbe, Salva Rubio (Adaptation), Lilit Zekulin Thwaites (translator) & Loreto Aroco (Illustrator) January 2023

Things in the Basement by Ben Hatke August 29, 2023

UP NEXT (MAYBE)

Of Manners and Murder by Anastasia Hastings February 7, 2023

The Faint of Heart by Kerilynn Wilson June 13, 2023

Stazy and the Magic List by Nancy Hundal October 15, 2023  🍁

January Reading Update: 

I read 16 books (3569 pages)

graphic novels 3

picture books 2

nonfiction picture books 2

middle grade novels 4

YA/adult novels 3

YA/adult nonfiction 2

BIPOC authors 7

READING GOALS 

#MustRead2024 3/25 one on the go

NonFiction 4 

Canadian Authors 5/50

Indigenous Authors 2/25 

Goodreads Reading Challenge: 19/200