I especially enjoyed Nick Hornby’s book Ten Years in the Tub. With that in mind, I thought I’d post an entry inspired by Hornby’s in which I list things bought and borrowed, things read, and comment.

Books Acquired from the library

  1. Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson (audiobook)
  2. The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang
  3. The Leavers by Lisa Ko (audiobook)
  4. Into the Beautiful North by Luis Alberto Urrea (audiobook)
  5. Say You’re One of Them by Uwem Akpan (audiobook)
  6. Charcoal Joe by Walter Mosley (audiobook)
  7. Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
  8. Circe by Madeline Miller
  9. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (audiobook)
  10. The Leavers by Lisa Ko
  11. The Residue Years by Mitchell S. Jackson
  12. What They Found: Love on 145th street by Walter Dean Myers

Books Purchased

  1. Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis
  2. The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen
  3. Dreamland Burning by Jennifer Latham
  4. The Short Stories of Ernest Hemmingway
  5. The Pigman by Paul Zindel
  6. Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend by Larry Tye
  7. The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers by Bridgett M. Davis
  8. Dreamland Burning by Jennifer Latham
  9. One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams Garcia
  10. The Short Stories Volume III by Ernest Hemmingway
  11. Frederick Douglas: Prophet of freedom by David W. Blight
  12. My Brilliant Friend: The Neapolitan Novels Book 1 by Elena Ferrante
  13. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  14. So Much Things to Say: An oral history of Bob Marley by Roger Steffens and Linton Kwesi Johnson (later returned)

Books Read

  1. Charcoal Joe (An Easy Rawlins Mystery) by Walter Mosley (audiobook)
  2. Your Duck is My Duck by Deborah Eisenberg (audiobook)
  3. Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend by Larry Tye (audiobook)
  4. Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson (audiobook)
  5. Bud, not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis (audiobook and ebook)
  6. The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers by Bridget M. Davis (audiobook)
  7. Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (ebook and audiobook)
  8. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (audiobook and ebook)
  9. One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams Garcia (audiobook and ebook)
  10. Dreamland Burning (ebook audiobook)
  11. The Library Book by Susan Orlean (audiobook)
  12. The Residue Years by Mitchell S. Jackson (audiobook)
  13. Greek Religion by Walter Burkert

Looking at the list now, I see that, despite some great success in finishing books, I still purchased more. On the plus side, a lot of the things did come from the library.

I have started reading a lot of audiobooks and restarted an audible subscription. I originally purchased a subscription for my father in late 2002; he did not use it and passed it and the Audible Otis on to me and I used the subscription for a couple of years. The Otis was a pre-iPod mp3 player that worked well with audiobooks but was discontinued many years ago.

I discovered that I still had quite a few audiobooks left in my account that I could still listen to. And amazon bought audible about ten years ago and now my amazon account is linked with my audible content. There were a few hiccups in migrating my old content and audible gave me some compsenatory credits to smooth things over and that explains why I ended up with quite a few audiobooks purchased in February.

I also recommend overdrive through the public library as a low cost method of getting ebooks and audiobooks.

My reading in February reflected the fact that it was black history month. I did my best to stick to the theme. Bud not Buddy was a great lighter book that is a middle grade reader or chapter book written for an elementary school audience. It is good to read children’s books as a switch from adult books. It focused on a ten year old boy walking from Flint to Grand Rapids in search of his father, who he believes is a jazz band leader. One Crazy Summer and Brown Girl Dreaming were other great middle grade readers I read in February.

Overall, I think every one of the books I read this month was worth reading and I think I broadened my black history horizons with biography (Satchel), memoir (Fannie Davis), young adult fiction (Dreamland Burning) detective story (Charcoal Joe) and literary fiction (Sing, Unburied, Sing and The Underground Railroad). That is, in addition to the middle grade readers I already mentioned as worth reading.

March is women’s history month and I am already getting a start on the theme.