What I Read: April 2023
Books about reindeer, Ponzi schemes, pirates, and parenting.
April showers brought us plenty of daffodils and a six-year-old this year! Arthur requested a “chocolate chip cake with blue frosting and M&M sprinkles.” His parents stayed up way too late in their execution of said request, but I think we nailed it:
I met four big deadlines for work this past week. We hosted family on Saturday. And tomorrow we leave on a short trip out of town for a few days, our first since… last June? Between all of that and accidentally beginning to lead a Bible study at our church… I’m surprised I read any books at all this month. But I did!
Here’s what I read in April:
Stolen: A Novel
by Ann-Helén Laestadius
I learned about this book via a feature in the New York Times and immediately requested a copy from the library. I love novels where the “place” is as much a character as it is a setting, and this fits the bill. The books is about the Sámi, Indigenous people who herd reindeer near the Arctic Circle in the northernmost parts of Sweden, Norway, Finland, and some of Russia. While fiction, the author based it on her own upbringing as well as current events in the region, where the protections granted to the Sámi from the European governments aren’t enforced well, or at all. The book discusses the struggle to keep a culture alive when its one that isn’t welcome in the greater community. It’s a plot-driven novel that kicks off when young Elsa stumbles upon a poacher killing her own reindeer. She then spends the novel trying to put the traumatic event behind her, while also fighting for justice for her reindeer collective and her family. Content warning: the book discusses mental health and suicide, and highlights the crude language of the online harassment of women.
The Glass Hotel: A Novel
by Emily St. John Mandel
A couple of months ago I read Sea of Tranquility by Mandel and loved it. It held the same atmospheric feeling and lyrical writing as Station Eleven, an all-time favorite. An older release, The Glass Hotel showcases Mandel’s lyrical writing without the sci-fi element. Instead, this novel focuses on an upscale hotel on a remote island, a Ponzi scheme, two half-siblings who crisscross each others storylines, and a dozen characters whose lives are complicated by the people they once were and how they bump into each other later. There’s an appearance from Miranda in Station Eleven, and characters are introduced here that also make a later appearance in Sea of Tranquility. Still, each are standalone novels that don’t need to be read in a certain order. It may not be sci-fi, but the novel maintains an eerie-ness about it throughout. I think it would make a good eerie-but-not-spooky read for fall.
All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenting
by Jennifer Senior
Sarah over at Pantsuit Politics recommends this one often, and I finally nabbed a copy. I liked it, but since it was published in 2014, I didn’t feel like it provided me with any new or provocative things I hadn’t already read elsewhere. The book is well-reported and has a compelling arc, talking about parenting from the point of view of how having children actually affects the parents, and not vice versa. If you’ve never read a book on parenting, this would be a good one to dip your toes in on, but if you’ve read anything in more recent years, I think you can skip it.
Related books I’ve read: Screaming on the Inside; Fair Play; The Family Firm; Hunt, Gather, Parent; Can’t Even.
The Very Nearly Honorable League of Pirates #1: Magic Marks the Spot
by Caroline Carlson / narrated by Katherine Kellgren
What a fantastic narrator!
As I type this, I’m only two chapters in, but it’s a delight.
Goodreads | Bookshop | Libro.FM
Up Next:
The sequel to A Psalm for the Wild-Built came in at the library, so A Prayer for the Crown-Shy is next up on my TBR pile.
I’ve also got a couple more of Emily St. John Mandel’s books to read before I’ve read them all, so those might be a summer project.
What I’m reading with the kids:
We are wrapping up our unit on the water cycle and I’ll share a full list of those books soon, but here’s five of our favorites: Come On, Rain!, Water is Water, The Water Princess, Hey Water!, and Water Can Be.
We’re also nabbing a couple of “Bear” books by Karma Wilson every time we go to the library. We like them all, and the illustrations are just perfect.
We zoomed through Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and promptly watched the 1970s movie starring Gene Wilder which we all loved. Arthur insisted we dive right into Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, so we’re on chapter three right now, I think.
We received a boxed-set of Roald Dahl books {not an affiliate link} for Christmas, so expect to see more here as the year goes by. It’s so interesting to read some of the children’s classics as an adult. As I read them aloud, I find myself tempering some of the story a bit, removing references to guns and shooting and name-calling as I come to them. I’m sure I won’t shield my kids from those things or censor books in that way as they grow older, but for now, I feel like at 6 and 3, they can’t quite separate the fiction from their real lives, and I’m eager to un-glorify some of the things our culture (and especially that of 50 years ago) emphasizes as commonplace and ordinary.
What about you? I’d love to hear how you make decisions about what to read with your kids, and about how you tackle topics like firearms and racism and anti-fat bias in classic literature as you make your way through a book.
I guess I’ll end on that note. Ha! That’s all for April! What are you reading? Hit “reply” and tell me!