February Reading List

Eight books read in February -

Relative Fortunes by Marlowe Benn is her debut novel and billed as being #1 in the Julia Kydd series. In order for Ms. Kydd to take control of her trust fund and live her life as she wants, she must solve a murder. This was a fairly good mystery and I'll probably read the next one if our library gets it.

Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon was his first book I read and liked so much back in the 80's, followed by PrairieErth, which was also wonderful, both of which made me so excited to get River Horse, the book that took me twenty plus years to read. But after finally reading it and totally delighting in it last month, I decided to revisit Blue Highways. What can I say? I loved it just as much, no, more, than the first time. And this time I read it with the Atlas on my lap and a dictionary at hand just as I did with River Horse - triple pleasure.
Here is a sample of one of Heat-Moon's marvelous, descriptive, word pictures: "A small man, tightly and neatly put together, his muscles wound around his bones like copper wire on an armature." His books are filled with such delights.

How I wish I still had my own copy of Margery Williams The Velveteen Rabbit. Its cover looked like this:

and whether it was the difference in the illustrations, or the many years it has been since I last read it, or what was going on in my life then, this reading was so much different than the way I remembered it. Still a remarkable story, one I intended to have on hand when my great-granddaughter Lily visited last weekend, but decided not to. It may have been right for her, but it wasn't the right timing for me.


One Thousand White Women by Jim Fergus is subtitled The Journals of May Dodd. When I picked it up, I thought, even though it is a fictional novel, that it was based on a real woman's journal of her time with one of the Cheyenne tribes. Although I appreciated the depiction of the American West during the mid to late 1870's, I could not buy into the premise of white women sent to become wives of the Native Americans. There is a book two in the May Dodd series, but I doubt I will read it.

I have became a Facebook friend of one the real life friends of my daughter in Portland because I enjoyed seeing her daily posts about her Bengal cats. Every once in awhile she posts a little blurb about a book she has read and is recommending. I have learned to trust her reading choices. Her latest was the woman in the window by A.J. Finn about an agoraphobic woman who spends a share of her time watching her neighbors through the window. When she believes she has witnessed a murder and calls the police, well ..... This was such a good read, the kind of mystery I love.

Bloody Genius is John Sandford's latest Virgil Flowers offering - number twelve in the series. As always, an entertaining whodunit and a quick read.

Jodi Picoult is the author I go to when I am in a hurry or can't find anything new on the shelves. (I'm almost through all her books so I'll have to find some other author to read my way through.) Regardless the subject matter, even when I think it is something I am not interested in, her books are always so engrossing and well written. Off hand I can't think of any other author who handles a story and its characters as convincingly as she does.
 Vanishing Acts and Change of Heart were no exception. Both these books, though written years apart, are about people in prison. Something I didn't even realize when I checked them out. Both were extremely informative and interesting.

Another good month of reading. I will leave you with this epigraph from Blue Highways:

"Then he was told:
Remember what you have seen,
because everything forgotten
returns to the circling winds."
     (Navajo Wind Chant)

"Mine" Says the Cat

For Kari, Ken and Hiro --

The Cat's Song

      By Marge Piercy

Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness.
My lover, my friend, my slave, my toy, says
the cat making on your chest his gesture of drawing
milk from his mother’s forgotten breasts.

Let us walk in the woods, says the cat.
I’ll teach you to read the tabloid of scents,
to fade into shadow, wait like a trap, to hunt.
Now I lay this plump warm mouse on your mat.

You feed me, I try to feed you, we are friends,
says the cat, although I am more equal than you.
Can you leap twenty times the height of your body?
Can you run up and down trees? Jump between roofs?

Let us rub our bodies together and talk of touch.
My emotions are pure as salt crystals and as hard.
My lusts glow like my eyes. I sing to you in the mornings
walking round and round your bed and into your face.

Come I will teach you to dance as naturally
as falling asleep and waking and stretching long, long.
I speak greed with my paws and fear with my whiskers.
Envy lashes my tail. Love speaks me entire, a word

of fur. I will teach you to be still as an egg
and to slip like the ghost of wind through the grass.