Reading post: Books from the pile by my nightstand, part 2

February has ended, so it is time for another reading update. I chose five more books from the pile by my nightstand to read in February, four of which I finished in February (I finished the fifth today, March 1st).

1. The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. An excellent book, a painful book, which I have already written a lot about in other blog posts. I had so much trouble getting through this, but it is worth reading (if you're not inclined to depression). I'm keeping it, although I'm not sure where to put it. Right now, it's on a shelf on Rocket Boy's side of our bedroom, where a lot of serious nonfiction lives. He doesn't pay a lot of attention to those shelves, other than occasionally picking a book off them to read, so I think it can stay there for now.
   
2. Becoming by Michelle Obama. I found this in a little free library a while back, and since I'd always planned to read it, I nabbed it. I've also written about this already, but I'll just note here that it was good -- parts seemed a little too perfect, a little too smoothed over, but other parts felt very honest. I was going to put this back in a little free library, but now I feel like I want to keep it, so I'm trying to find room for it on the biography shelves. There is not actually any room on the biography shelves. This is a problem without a solution.
   
3. There There by Tommy Orange. Thinking about why some of the books in the pile sit there for a long time and don't get read... I heard about this when it was published and was very interested to read it -- a modern-day novel of Indians written by someone other than Louise Erdrich! But somehow I didn't get to it. Then I saw it in a little free library and grabbed it. But I still didn't read it. I know what I was worried about: I thought it had been over-praised and therefore wouldn't be very good, and also I thought it would be depressing. In fact, it's neither. I mean, it's a first novel, but it's much better than your average first novel. And even though the characters all have terrible lives, it's not truly depressing. What makes it not depressing is that you can tell the author, Tommy Orange, loves his characters. The book's title, There There, refers to Gertrude Stein's comment about Oakland: "there is no there there." But I felt as though it was also the author saying to his characters, "there, there," i.e., don't worry, it's going to be all right. Now, do I keep this? I was planning to return it to a little free library, but right now it's on my Indian books shelf (which is half of a double-stacked shelf that I have to do something about someday). Maybe I'll keep it a little while longer...
   
4. Fatal Remains by Eleanor Taylor Bland. The last Bland mystery I own, but not her last -- she wrote three more, so now I will have to track them down. I thought this would be my last book of the month, but I read it very quickly. It's an interesting installment in the series, including a lot of Black and Indian history, very appropriate for Black History Month. The mystery itself -- the identity of the killer -- was so not the point of the story that I kind of forgot about it. When the killer was revealed I was like, ho hum, who cares? The interesting mystery was the Black and Indian history. Anyway, I'm keeping it! Maybe someday I'll donate my nearly-complete Eleanor Taylor Bland collection to someone...
   
5. Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston. An anthropology/ethnography book, sort of -- a collection of stories she collected in Florida and elsewhere. Not at all what I thought it was going to be -- it's more like fiction than anthropology. But then it got more ethnographic. And then more fictional again. And more ethnographic. Anyway, it's an odd book, and I'm not sure I'd recommend it to anyone. But (shhh) I'm keeping it.

So, five more books read and they've all moved from the pile by my bed to our bookshelves -- NOT the goal here. I'm hoping to do better this month, actually get rid of some books.

For March, I have picked out five more books from the pile by the nightstand (see photo). I decided that since I don't read books by white men very often anymore, it was time to read some books by white men. So that's what these are: books by white men. I am really hoping that I won't like some of them and can send them to Goodwill without finishing them. But we'll see. They might all be good.

This isn't the end of the pile, but it's all I'm going to read from it for this year's Challenge, unless I give up on some of these quickly and decide to replace them with others from the pile. In April, May, and June, I plan to read books-I've-never-read that are sitting on the bookshelves in our bedroom. That is, books that have somehow earned a place in the permanent collection without ever having been read (by me). We will see how that goes. (And from July to December I plan to read books from elsewhere in the house.) But for March, I'm still working on the pile by the nightstand.

I was able to talk my book group into reading one of these (Loving Little Egypt by Thomas McMahon), so I don't have to add an extra book group book to my reading list this month. But it is time to read another presidential biography, so per Steve's recommendation I have requested William McKinley and His America by H. Wayne Morgan from Prospector and it will arrive someday (it's coming from the University of Wyoming and is already "in transit").