What I Read: February 2022

Here's everything I read this month!

Mar 02, 2022

I read a lot this month! So I’ll keep this intro short, except to say that this newsletter was delayed a day and is a bit abbreviated in places (thanks, food poisoning). March will end better, right?!?

On to books!

Here’s what I read in February:

Matrix: A Novel

by Lauren Groff

After reading Groff’s Fates and Furies and being astonished at the creativity, I knew I wanted to read Groff’s next release, even though I knew nothing about it. I assumed it was futuristic with a title like Matrix, but was astonished to find it’s about nuns — yes, nuns — in the 12th century in an abbey in England. Specifically, about a slightly historical woman named Marie de France who is sent away from the court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of King Henry II, to run an impoverished nunnery. Groff deftly weaves together an incredible story of faith, love, power, and survival over six decades from said abbey, and not a single page drags on. The jacket copy describes the book as “Equally alive to the sacred and the profane…” and I think it a most accurate statement. While it is about nuns, the story is not without sex, so reader beware.

[An aside: I snagged this off my library’s Lucky Day shelf, which is where they’ve got a sampling of new releases with long hold lines and if you happen to grab it off the shelf before someone else does, it’s your “lucky day”. Aren’t librarians just the best?]

Goodreads | Bookshop

My Monticello: Fiction

by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson

This was a debut short story collection, and while I didn't love all of them (who ever does?), the title novella at the end is a fantastic look at what it might be like to be a Black descendent of Thomas Jefferson sheltering in his historically preserved home, Monticello, as the world falls apart. The story “Virginia is Not Your Home” was maybe my favorite of the collection. Well worth a read.

Goodreads | Bookshop

Happiness for Beginners

by Katherine Center

I first read a Katherine Center novel last August, and I’ve since read two more. These are easy, comforting fiction, without being superfluous or fluffy. It’s the perfect sweet spot for a rom-com, in my opinion. This novel has a few overlapping characters with What You Wish For, and it was fantastic to go back in time to hear more about them (although, this book was released first, so it was maybe only I that was going back in time). Helen is recently divorced and ready for an adventure to propel her into the next stage of life. Jake has been infatuated with Helen since the day he met her — on her wedding day. But he’s also her annoying little brother’s best friend, and therefore, completely annoying himself (at least as far as Helen is concerned). When they wind up on the same wilderness survival course in Montana, Helen makes Jake vow to pretend they don’t even know each other, and the rest is, as expected, the trip of a lifetime.

**Content warning: this novel does briefly discuss miscarriage in a few instances.**

Goodreads | Bookshop

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind & Body in the Healing of Trauma

by Bessel van der Kolk

This book should probably be required reading for everyone on the planet. Bessel van der Kolk discusses his decades spent in researching how trauma affects the brain (and therefore, the rest of the body), how people can heal from it, and the consequences that result when they don’t. The information in this book is essential both on an individual level and a community level: so much of an individual’s trauma reverberates out to the wider community and down through generations. In helping to heal the individual, we can help heal society, and vice versa. It’s 450 pages long, but I swear it doesn’t feel like it. The science never gets too overwhelming, and the stories propel it forward.

**Content Warning: This books discusses traumatic events generally and specifically in the lives of van der Kolk’s patients. Child abuse, sexual assault, rape, molestation, violence, war, and other traumatic events are mentioned and described throughout the text, never in an effort to be sensational, but they can (and should be) hard to read about all the same.**

Goodreads | Bookshop

Rewilding Motherhood: Your Path to an Empowered Feminine Spirituality

by Shannon K. Evans

My friend Ashley Brooks sent me this book, and it really met me right where I am. Evans discusses how as a society, we tend to constrain mothers to smaller and smaller boxes and then celebrate their sacrificial natures, when in reality, women were never made to shrink themselves, but to grow into the identities that God has for them as people and women and mothers and … every other role that God has called people into throughout history. The book is well-written and empowering, and the perfect read for any woman (moms specifically) who doesn’t feel like the box she’s in is quite big enough any longer. Evans gathers wisdom from both evangelical and Catholic traditions, and — don’t let the pretty cover fool you — doesn’t shy away from speaking hard truths about privilege and power.

Goodreads | Bookshop

The Travelers: A Novel

by Regina Porter

This was a sweeping and intense story that follows a cast of characters across many decades and generations, weaving together the Vietnam War, bits of the Civil Rights movement and the Great Migration, life in the South, and America in the present day. It is well written, however, the novel is very literary — Porter is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop — and I struggled to connect to many of the characters throughout their many addictions and affairs. Porter is also a playwright, and that talent shines through in this novel, where chapters are labeled as “Acts” and the settings are often characters in themselves.

I think this is one that fans of Pachinko would find as a good next read for them, and I found it an interesting read following The Body Keeps the Score — the way the characters’ trauma carries through their lives and into the next generations was illustrative of what that text was trying to demonstrate.

Goodreads | Bookshop

Nobody Will Tell You This But Me: A True (as told to me) Story

by Bess Kalb

I thought this was a really inventive memoir. Kalb writes in her recently deceased Grandmother’s voice, and that woman’s personality leaps off the page. It was laugh-out-loud funny at times, and also incredibly heartfelt in others. Kalb’s love for her grandmother shines through, and the overall story follows several generations of Jewish women through hardship and happiness, tough mother-daughter relationships, and ones that heal, too — all in less than 250 pages.

The narrative structure reminded me of Half-Broke Horses by Jeannette Wall, where she tells a fictionalized version of her Grandmother’s life in novel-form. Both are excellent.

Goodreads | Bookshop

Don’t Mom Alone: Growing the Relationships You Need to Be the Mom You Want to Be (audiobook)

by Heather MacFadyen

I listened to this on audiobook as I spent a chunk of time in the car and it was a good choice. MacFadyen reads it herself, and as the book is an extension of her podcast of the same name, it felt familiar. I’m not sure it had any earth-shattering information for me, but it was a good, solid reminder that growing as a person and a mom and a parent takes intentionality and relationships — something that has been severely hard to come by during the pandemic.

Goodreads | Bookshop