Books I Read in October

Happy Hallowtide! What'd y'all dress up for Halloween? How's your All Saints' Day so far?

October was a pretty crappy month for me, and that's reflected in my reading. What did you read?

1.  The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 by Rashid Khalidi – comprehensive and detailed (maybe too detailed). I especially liked the mix of historic research and personal reflections from someone who was there. Highly critical of everyone involved, including groups he says he was part of, and also surprisingly generous and empathetic to everyday people on the other side. I learned a lot.
2. The Burry Man’s Day by Catriona McPherson – did not finish. For whatever reason, this “rich person solves murders in the 1920s” story did not work for me.
3. Ruddy Gore by Kerry Greenwood – the thing I thought most while reading was what theatre employs so many staff nowadays? Anyway, it was a good mystery and I like reading about old-timey theatre, but that was my primary wonderment.
4. The End of Empathy: Why White Protestants Stopped Loving Their Neighbors by John W. Compton – this was quite the doozy at this moment in my ministry. It’s about the decline of the institutional church in America, and how as the individual succeeded the institution, the ability for the church to urge or indeed require personal sacrifice for love of neighbor ended. Like Khalidi, he is too detailed for the non-specialist, and I engaged the Christopher Beeley method of reading but his analysis was good and useful even as it was depressing. Tl; dr it’s always been racism, racism killed the mainline 50+ years ago and all our handwringing about church decline since fails to deal with the real problem.
5. Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – this books rests in a genre that I always say I don’t read, that it’s not for me. What a surprise then to have loved this book! There’s not much in the way of plot, it’s just four women telling stories of their pasts and their feelings and perspectives. But the prose is beautiful, the women so complex and interesting, that I was propelled forward as much as any page-turning thriller. I also shrieked at her skewering of the pious class in America. I have met those people (I have been those people at least once in my life), and her take on them is scathing and hilarious and I loved it so much.
6. Urn Burial by Kerry Greenwood – super silly and Christie-like and delightful
7. Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid – entirely predictable and eminently readable
8. Good Work: Christian Ethics in the Workplace by Esther D. Reed – a really fabulous short strong defense of economic ethics from a Christian perspective
9. Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett (audio) – all the best strands of each mini-series are coming together (except the witches, who’ve been exiled to Tiffany Aching for some reason), but also some of the fun quirks that make Discworld *Discworld* and not just alt-England have been shaved away. I’m glad to have finally discovered this series in middle age, and plan to return to it often.
10. The Trespasser by Tana French (audio, re-read) – this happened last time I listened to it – I was completely sucked in from moment one. I didn’t want to do anything but listen to this. I quit reading everything else. I quit watching Buffy. I put it on sleep timer and fell asleep to it every night. The last five hours are just the lead detectives listening to 5 different versions of what happened but it’s so compelling. Only read/listen if you’ve got time to get stuck in.
11. Vera Wong’s Guide to Snooping (on a Dead Man) by Jesse Q. Sutanto – what a cozy, readable mystery
12. Into the Bright Open: A Secret Garden Remix by Cherie Dimaline – it may just be that I’m less familiar with/love The Secret Garden less than P&P (or that I already love the musical more than the original so I’m happier with adaptation) but I really enjoyed this remix. Very clever resetting of Georgian Bay as Yorkshire, and Métis as Northerners, with a stepmother rather than an uncle hiding away the “ailing” Métis Colin (who’s a girl in this version). I felt the beats of the original hit within the new setting and the characters felt alive and real rather than fantasies. I knew I liked Cherie Dimaline.
13. Park Avenue by Renee Ahdieh – I loved it. I loved the writing style, I loved the characters, I loved the backdrop, I loved everything about it.
14. Raisins and Almonds by Kerry Greenwood – this was not at all as I was expecting and it wasn’t my fave, though the conversations about 1920s Zionism were really interesting
15. Terry Pratchett: The BBC Radio Drama Collection by Terry Pratchett (audio) – these were fun, but I’m not sure how legible they’d be if you weren’t familiar with the books. Definitely the final one was a book I hadn’t read and it wasn’t easy for me to keep up.
16. Sisters in the Wind by Angeline Boulley – a wee bit too overstuffed. Some threads were never really resolved. But it was compelling, page-turning, readable. I loved the main character.
17. Death Before Wicket by Kerry Greenwood – this one was not cotton candy. It was a rich text, a clear homage to Sayers. Highly recommend.