February 2019 Wrap-Up

Reading Wrap:

  • Total books toward reading goal so far: 18/105 (2 ahead of schedule!)
  • Total books read this month: 10
  • Poetry book read for Poetry Challenge: Season of the Second Thought by Lynn Powell. Lovely nature-based poetry with a wry pushback-against-religious undertone. Lots of fine poems in the collection, picked up randomly off the shelf and glad I did. A taste of all the seasons during a month that has been too wintery.
  • Best audiobooks of the month: On the Come Up by Angie Thomas, read by Bahni Turpin (I adore Bahni Turpin and loved Thomas’s first novel, so I’m not surprised) and The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah. Both were so immersive I had trouble unplugging from them.
  • Other bests of the month: I had a really good reading month, which I desperately needed. The Friend by Sigrid Nunez was exactly the genre-breaking, heart-breaking novel I needed, and I chewed through The Nix in less than a month, which had been on my TBR forever. If you want a David Foster Wallace-esque book, but with more heart and firmer narrative structure: you’ve found it in The Nix by Nathan Hill. Finally, I loved Whiskey & Ribbons by Leesa Cross-Smith. It was a multiple POV love story–really, love in every formulation.

Writing Wrap:

This was kind of a fallow month for me, which I think I needed. I wrote a few shorter pieces, essays and humor mostly, and did a bit of editing, but I think I needed a creative recharge. I’m considering myself fallow, but receptive, and I’ll hit the longer works again soon.

Life Wrap:

This month I quit Facebook, had too many snow days, got very little sleep due to a sick baby, went to lots of meetings, counted piles of box tops for my kids’ school, made lots of phone calls for volunteer work, and generally felt a little burned out. These long, cold days need to brighten soon, and I think they will. The seed catalogs have started arriving and mentally mapping my garden brings a smile to my face. Other bright spots of the month include watching Jeopardy! with my husband, starting Harry Potter with my oldest kid, and watching my baby learn to pull himself up and navigate around the furniture.

Also InspiroBot, which never fails to be weird

Thank you InspiroBot

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