Month: March 2021

memoir · nonfiction

Book Review: Miriam’s Kitchen by Elizabeth Ehrlich

Stephanie1 Comment

Reading lists are both the best thing ever and the bane of my TBR. I don’t know that I’ve been able to look at many lists titled things like, “100 Books Coming Out This Year That You Can’t Miss!” or “You Will Literally Die If You Don’t Read These Books!” without my TBR growing exponentially. It’s really the best problem to have, isn’t it? It was a reading list that introduced me to Miriam’s Kitchen by Elizabeth Ehrlich (Penguin Group, 1997). The premise had me hitting that want-to-read button immediately, and interlibrary loan delivered the book into my hands- in a stack of other interlibrary loan books, of course, because, as we know, everything always comes in at once!

It’s not until she’s an adult and has children of her own that Elizabeth Ehrlich begins deeply pondering what her Jewish identity means. Never fully identifying with the religious aspects, she turns to the kitchen of her mother-in-law Miriam, a Holocaust survivor who still maintains a kosher kitchen and cooks nearly everything from scratch. Homemade noodles, chopped liver, all the dishes that Elizabeth remembers her grandmothers laboring over appear on Miriam’s table, and Elizabeth wants to know more. Something in these old ways calls out to her, and at Miriam’s side, she begins to learn and ponder the traditions that have been passed down for millennia through her family. Little by little, she moves toward a kosher kitchen, toward trying out the religious aspects of Judaism, seeing what fits, seeing where she belongs, all the while recounting the stories of her family members- mostly women, but some of the men as well. These people lived through some of the worst violence humanity has ever perpetrated on their fellow men; the miracle of their survival pushes Elizabeth to look deeper, work harder, to create something to pass down to her children. Even if they ultimately reject it, giving them something from which to turn away- and maybe return to one day- feels right.

This is an absolutely lovely memoir. Miriam and Ms. Ehrlich’s bubbes and her mother are women of valor, women who experienced horrors, who weren’t given many options in their lives, but who persevered anyway, doing the best they could with what they had. They exemplified hard work and honor, working both in and outside the home, without many of the tools we take for granted. Seeing all they did without many of the luxuries I own really made me think while I was reading this.

I deeply identified with Ms. Ehrlich’s draw toward certain aspects of Judaism, that pull without fully understanding the why of it. Sometimes you just feel moved toward something that doesn’t necessarily make logical sense- it’s a bit like falling in love, I think. There’s not always a rhyme or reason to it. When she was faced with the daunting task of kashering her kitchen and living a kosher life, she was somewhat dismayed by all the extra work it will take, all the time and emotional labor necessary to remember which sponge is used for wiping up meat spills and which for dairy, all the strength it takes to tell her children no, that we don’t eat that, and then cooking after a long day at work. But still she felt drawn to do it, even knowing the difficulties, and that is something I understood and felt on a visceral level. (Not for the exact same reasons- I’m vegetarian, so that cuts out like 99% of the problem right there, and I live in a house with three non-religious, occasional meat-eaters, so unless I wanted to maintain my own set of pots and pans and dishes, keeping a kosher kitchen wouldn’t really be possible for me. I *could*, but I don’t know that anyone else in the house would remember which dishes were just mine, and I’d end up having to re-kasher them like twelve times a day…)

She’s hard on herself, seeing all the ways she falls short of Miriam’s ideal, but still forging ahead and jumping in with both feet, which I found deeply admirable. So often, we shy away from what intimidates us- I know I’m guilty of this- especially when we know that perfection is unattainable. But she begins anyway, taking the steps to live the life she feels drawn to, and that’s a message to live by.

I wonder if Miriam ever felt intimidated by the older women in her life, if she ever felt that her cooking, her kitchen, wouldn’t measure up. Will Ms. Ehrlich’s grandchildren feel the same as they observe her preparing Miriam’s recipes? Do we all feel like this to some degree, that we’ll never be the strong, capable women our foremothers were? This book raised a lot of questions about how we connect to our pasts and what we carry with us into our futures, what we pass down, and I’m glad this ended up on my TBR. I don’t know that I’ll try any of the recipes in it- some of them sound absolutely delicious, but in terms of heart-healthy cooking, they’re not something I would normally make (thank you SO much, genetic cholesterol levels!). Perhaps one day, I’ll get up the courage…

I don’t see any websites or contact information for Elizabeth Ehrlich; if you’re aware of any, let me know in the comments and I’ll amend this post. Miriam’s Kitchen is the winner of a National Jewish Book Award.

Advertisement
nonfiction

Book Review: Independence Days: A Guide to Sustainable Food Storage & Preservation by Sharon Astyk

Stephanie1 Comment

What does your pantry look like? Do you have a dusty can of beans from a year when One Direction was still together, a package of an ingredient you’ve never used and are too intimidated by to open, and not much else? Or are you like me, with a few months’ worth of food stashed away in various corners of the house? This past year has shown us the importance of being prepared for tough times- job losses, shortages, weather events that cut off power and access to stores, all that and more has plagued us (pun intended) as a society, and being prepared for these terrible events isn’t a bad idea. Independence Days: A Guide to Sustainable Food Storage & Preservation by Sharon Astyk (New Society Publishers, 2009) has been on my TBR for a while; it piqued my interested because having a fully-stocked pantry has always been important to me (mostly because I’m lazy and don’t ever want to have to make an emergency run for a missing ingredient!). This seemed right up my alley, so I requested it via interlibrary loan.

Think about this past year, when toilet paper, hand sanitizer, yeast, garlic, and various other products were nowhere to be found on store shelves. How did you fare? Having a well-stocked pantry in trying times could alleviate stress and get you through rough patches caused by job loss, weather events, power outages, economic downturns, illness, pandemics, and all the other chaos that disrupts daily life and may make getting to the store or procuring sustenance for your family difficult or impossible. Changing your diet to one more sustainable to your location, gardening, obtaining food and supplies from more local and sustainable sources, and preserving this food in a variety of ways are all suggestions that Ms. Astyk has for creating a better-prepared life.

It’s a lot of work, true, but so is pretty much anything worth doing, she argues, and stocking your pantry is never something you’ll regret if things go sideways. With in-depth discussions on gardening, locating storage space no matter where you live, recipes, the ups and downs of various forms of preservation, and more, Sharon Astyk has created a basic primer for anyone interested in living a prepared life.

This is a pretty good book for anyone starting out on the journey of planning and stocking their pantry. She lays out some pretty compelling arguments for the need for keeping your larder stocked, and a lot of the scenarios she frets about have actually taken place in the years since the book was published. Her pleas to her readers about the necessity of storing water don’t seem so wild after this year’s devastating winter storms in Texas that saw residents without running water for ages, and storing pantry food isn’t at all far-fetched after seeing the shortages on grocery store shelves during this past year. (I keep at least two full boxes of toilet paper from Sam’s Club in the basement at all times; it wasn’t even something I had to think about last year as I watched people all over the country scramble for even the rough stuff. The only thing I lacked was an adequate supply of hand sanitizer, but that’s because it wasn’t something I normally use. Now, though, I’ll always have some on hand!) Some of the Goodreads reviews seem to view her as a kind of out-there prepper, but I have to wonder how those people handled the crises this past year.

If you’ve been serious about storing and preserving for a while, there’s probably not much to learn here, but this is a great resource for anyone who has realized that maybe it’s not so bad to keep a three-month (or longer) supply of food on hand. Ms. Astyk covers all of the why, along with some of the how, and provides a few recipes along the way. This was a nice reminder of why I shop the way I do, and why my kitchen resembles a small overflowing grocery store.

Visit Sharon Astyk’s website.

Follow her on Facebook here.

nonfiction

Book Review: The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket by Benjamin Lorr

Stephanie5 Comments

I’m one of those weird people who actually enjoys grocery shopping. Of course, the pandemic has changed that a little bit; these days, it’s mostly get-in-and-get-out-as-quickly-as-possible-without-breathing-near-people, but in normal times, I enjoy seeing what’s on the shelves, what products I’ve haven’t tried, what’s on sale. I live by some great grocery stores, so this is always an adventure. It’s because of all this that The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket by Benjamin Lorr (Avery Publishing Group, 2020) ended up on my TBR. I requested it at my library even before it hit the shelf, and there were several people ahead of me! I love knowing I live in a town with such enthusiastic readers.

Think of the grocery stores you shop at- a chain? A big box store? A specialty store like Trader Joe’s, a co-op, maybe a store with lots of organic products like Whole Foods? Maybe you’re one of the few people who still have a local store. Regardless of where you purchase your food, there are rules as to what food ends up on the shelf. The supply chain, as we’ve seen throughout the pandemic, is a machine with many parts, but each part is far more precarious than the average American might expect.

From the studied beginnings and growth of Trader Joe’s to the exploitation of American truckers, from the numbers-and-hustle game of getting a product on store shelves to the exploitation of Thai shrimp workers, Benjamin Lorr covers the profits-over-all system of food shopping in the US and how we as consumers participate in this system simply by our need to eat. Were you aware that a large portion of shrimp in the US is produced via slave labor? Did you know that around 90% of new products end up failing each year, and that the producers of each product must pay to get their products on the shelf? How much do you know about how exploitative the trucking industry is, and how the men and women who deliver everything you consume and use might not be making any money at all, but might instead be paying to work? Almost every part of the machine that works together in order to fill our grocery stores has a dark story that we don’t necessarily see or think about, and it’s all laid out here on the pages of this book.

I went into this book expecting to learn solely about grocery stores, but I came out of it better informed about the horrors of the supply chain that makes American grocery stores possible. Absolutely every cog in this machine runs on exploitation, from the lowest paid shelf stocker to the one-handed Thai slave who works 20 hours a day on a shrimp boat, to the person who has developed a great new product and who has run themselves ragged and put their life savings into trying to get that product into stores. Other than the high-up CEOs and high paid businesspeople at big box stores and mega corporations, American grocery is built on the suffering of people around the world, including Americans.

This is one heck of an exposé, and it’s a pretty depressing read- it’s a necessary one that will change the way you look at grocery stores and the products on the shelves, but it’s a book that will have you questioning your participation in such a terrible system. (I didn’t plan it this way, but the book I picked up immediately after finishing this discusses ways to extricate oneself from this system to the extent possible, since we’re all bound to it in some part.) I did wonder how the pandemic’s affect on the supply chain would have affected the book (toilet paper, anyone?); an additional chapter in future editions would definitely make a great addition, but that might actually be its very own book.

The Secret Life of Groceries will force you to examine the ways you participate in a system that harms so many, and it’ll have you pondering exactly how these stores and corporations are manipulating you through their marketing strategies. Ethical consumption is the responsibility of everyone who can financially manage it, but the modern grocery store has made that a massive, massive challenge, and Mr. Lorr has proved that in this book.

Visit Benjamin Lorr’s website here.

Follow him on Twitter here.

nonfiction

Book Review: Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz

Stephanie3 Comments

Sometimes books end up on my TBR because people I love have read and raved about them, and that’s how I came across Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz (Vintage, 1999). My friend Sandy had read it years ago and mentioned it in my parenting forum- she may have even recommended it directly to me as something she thought I’d like. Onto my TBR it went! To be honest, if I’d seen the publication date, I may not have read it; I was a little iffy about starting it when I did see it. Not because I have anything against older books, but sometimes older nonfiction can be out of date and irrelevant. Not so with this book; if anything, this book reveals how long today’s problems have been simmering. It should have served as a massive, massive red flag when it was first published.

The American Civil War, fought from 1861 to 1865, is still a source of deep fascination for many Americans (and some non-Americans, as Mr. Horwitz shows!). From amateur history buffs to hardcore reenactors, from condescending politicians to red-faced parents screaming in stuffy high school gyms about Confederate flags and racist high school mascots, so many people think they know exactly what the Civil War was fought for and what happened at every step of the way. Some of these people get it. Others have rewritten their own version of history and have dedicated their lives to living in a way that honors that revised history. For so many people, for a multitude of reasons, the Civil War didn’t end and it’s still being played out in various forms today.

Tony Horwitz travels all over the South, visiting battlefields, gravesites, reenactments, museums, and the people who are still living out the consequences of Americans fighting Americans. He covers the tense racial climate that persists in this country, that we never really dealt with and that will continue to persist until we do. He follows a few hardcore reenactors who wear grimy, period-appropriate costumes (that they don’t wash, for authenticity, right along with their bodies…ew) as they tramp across various battlefields in the heat of a southern summer. He profiles a murder that happened because of a Confederate flag, a woman makes a career of performing as Scarlett O’Hara (and is beloved by the Japanese, who apparently adore Southern culture), and visits dusty museums with sometimes bizarre period relics.

There are so many times where this book fairly screams out, “You should have seen this coming, 2021 reader!” The hatred, the racial tension, the division, the utter selfishness and concern for no one but oneself, all of this is right there in the text and makes it fairly obvious that the rise of Donald Trump and the cult that follows him was inevitable and shouldn’t have surprised anyone. It wasn’t a surprise to me, based on other things I’ve followed for most of my adult life, but this book lays it all out there and makes it utterly, utterly obvious in a way that’s honestly pretty depressing.

You don’t have to be a history buff or love the Civil War in order to read this, but it helps. Tony Horwitz has an almost jovial writing style that makes the reader feel as though they’re riding in the car next to him, tramping along beside him on a Virginia battlefield, and listening to him interview his various subjects. He goes places that I wouldn’t feel safe or comfortable in, even after his interviewees make hideous antisemitic comments (Mr. Horwitz was Jewish), and his bravery here is to be admired. This book is a fascinating look at what some people take away from history, what they choose to cling to, and what we as a country can’t move on from. Perhaps we don’t really want to.

There are other Tony Horwitz books that I’d like to read, but as he died, far too young, in 2019, my brain is already screaming at me to space them out, to make what he left for us last, so I don’t know when I’ll pick up another of his books, but this definitely won’t be my last. His style and clarity really spoke to me, and I’m looking forward to reading more of his insights.

Tony Horwitz, who was married to author Geraldine Brooks, died in 2019. Visit his website here.

nonfiction

Book Review: The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South by Chip Jones

Stephanie1 Comment

The US has a terrible past (and present) in regards to racism. Scratch the surface of just about any topic and you’ll reveal its racist roots- it’s an unfortunately truth, because things didn’t have to be things way, but we let it, and the only way to change things going forward is to confront what we’ve been and resolve not to be that again. The history of medical research leading up to the miracle of modern organ transplantation is no different, and after discovering The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South by Chip Jones (Gallery/Jeter Publishing, 2020) in a Book Riot email, I knew I had to read it. Onto my TBR it went.

In 1968, William Tucker, a Black man from Virginia got a received a strange phone call about his brother Bruce- something about his being in the hospital, and a bizarre comment about them taking his heart. After scrambling for information that no one seemed to want to provide, William learned that Bruce had died following a head injury. The hospital had never contacted anyone from the family, despite William’s business card with his phone number being in Bruce’s wallet upon his arrival at the hospital, and stranger still, they had removed his heart and kidneys without permission in order to use them for transplants, a new and still very much experimental procedure at this time. William was horrified at this desecration of his brother’s body and contacted a lawyer.

But medical experiments (often ones that lead to groundbreaking research and treatments) have a deeply racist history in the US; the progress medical science has made has often been built on brown and Black backs and bodies, quite often without their consent. Chip Jones delves into the history of Black grave robbing by medical schools for research purposes and how that led to William Tucker’s missing organs. His case went to court, and the outcome ultimately led to a change in legislation when it comes to organ donation and consent, but the history is there and cannot be erased, nor should it be hidden. The Organ Thieves shines a light on a subject a lot of people most likely know very little about.

Organ transplants have featured heavily in the books I’ve read throughout my life. In the 80s and 90s when I was growing up, I read Why Me? by Deborah Kent (about an adopted teenager who receives a donated kidney from her biological mother) over and over again, and plowed through a ton of Lurlene McDaniel’s medical dramas for young adults, which often featured teenagers who were awaiting donated organs. And of course there was Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper, and recently, Rachel Solomon’s Our Year of Maybe. But I never really knew the history of transplantation, the many failures and deaths it took to get to the place where receiving a donated organ meant a new lease on life, the difficulties doctors first had in recognizing the symptoms of rejection, and what this all meant for Black patients. They were aware of the grave robbing and knew this would have bigger implications, and unfortunately, this proved to be true. And all of this and more (such as history of the Tuskegee study) has led to the hesitancy of Black people in taking the Covid-19 vaccine. History never dies; its consequences ring throughout time like the loudest of bells.

There’s even more racist medical history that Mr. Jones doesn’t touch (the history of gynecology is utterly horrifying), but what he does cover is bad enough. The trial that covered the removal of Bruce Tucker’s organs without family consent is a complex read; the trial itself raised many questions and led to necessary changes in legislation, but at a heavy emotional cost for the Tucker family and the many others who came before them. So much of our progress as a society- maybe all of it- has been made at the expense of others.

At times, the story gets just the tiniest bit dry, but The Organ Thieves is so important that pushing on through is necessary and rewarding- you’ll be better informed, a better ally, better at knowing what shouldn’t be. If you’ve ever read or watched a medical thriller or drama and enjoyed it, or benefited from organ transplants or medical research that came from corpses dug up in the dead of night (and this is probably everyone), this is a book you should be aware of. We owe those unnamed people and Bruce Tucker that much.

Visit Chip Jones’s website here.

fiction · romance

Book Review: Fix Her Up (Hot & Hammered #1) by Tessa Bailey

StephanieLeave a comment

Time for a romance fix! I put Fix Her Up by Tessa Bailey (Avon, 2019) on my TBR after listening to some of the podcast that Tessa Bailey cohosts (Read Me Romance; warning: the heat levels are pretty intense in some of the novellas they read. If you’re more of a fade-to-black romance fan, this probably isn’t for you). I was curious as to what her books were like, and this was what my library had of hers. (I did ask a librarian this past month on their virtual chat feature, and they said that it’s totally fine to request books via interlibrary loan these days; it’s just taking longer, so I feel a little better about maybe requesting a few books from other libraries now! I was holding out because pandemic, and everyone’s stressed and I didn’t want to add to any of that at the library, but now…!!!) This book ended up being kind of a mixed bag for me, honestly.

Georgie Castle is the youngest Castle sibling, a clown (literally; she performs at children’s birthday parties), and practically still a kid at 23. Her parents, her older siblings, and everyone in the town still treat her like a child, and she’s pretty fed up with it. When her brother’s best friend and retired professional baseball star Travis Ford comes home for good after too many shoulder injuries permanently bench him, Georgie is dismayed to find that Travis- the object of her fantasies for a decade now- still sees her as her brother’s pesky little sister. Not for long, though. Georgie’s all grown up and Travis is starting to take notice.

Georgie’s faith in Travis is helping him grow into the man she always knew he could become, but he can’t move forward with his career without rehabbing his bad boy image. No worries; fake-dating Georgie should prove that he’s not the playboy he once was, right? They can mess around and still maintain some boundaries. But feelings run deeper than that on both sides, and Travis needs to reckon with his past before he’s able to make any sort of commitment…

Hmm. This wasn’t a terrible book; I liked it for the most part, but didn’t love it. I’m not a huge baseball fan, so that part didn’t do anything for me (hockey, sure; I enjoy a good hockey romance, but not really baseball or football). And the best friend’s sibling trope has always kind of felt icky to me. Sure, maybe that’s an issue when you’re still in high school, but by the time you’re all legal adults, no one should have any say over whom their sibling dates or sleeps with- that’s just weird, yo.

Georgie as a heroine was…just kind of okay. Nothing special. I’m no huge fan of clowns, so her clown business kind of freaked me out (and there was a line in there about performing for bat mitzvahs, which threw me off a little; I don’t know of many thirteen year-olds who would want a clown performing at their bat mitzvah, but okay…). She made her living doing children’s birthday parties and was able to purchase an inexpensive house by doing this, but the numbers there didn’t really add up for me. How did she pay for a car? Car insurance? Health insurance? Food, electricity, heat, water, those stupid expenses like a flat tire or the refrigerator dying unexpectedly? My brain always wants to know these kinds of little things when characters have non-traditional employment (health insurance is a big worry when it comes to self-employed characters for me!), and I didn’t feel like this was covered adequately. Exactly how much can one person make when solely performing as a clown at children’s birthday parties? This really threw me out of the story.

The female friendships in this book didn’t really gel for me. Bethany, Georgie’s older sister, is bossy and irritating; Rosie, another woman who joins their group, is passive and uninteresting (the next book in the series focuses on her and her husband, which surprised me; I didn’t find her intriguing enough to want to read an entire book about her). The women form a club to band together and support one another towards achieving their goals, which was a good idea, but the execution of it felt stiff and awkward, and there were some seriously weird scenes with their brother Stephen’s wife, Kristin. I had a hard time not skipping over some of this, to be honest.

Travis was…also just kind of okay. Hometown athlete/Lothario returns after injuries force him out of the game; every woman in town wants to hop on board; he feels like a failure. Lots of family issues going on here, but the focus is mostly on his father; what happened to his mother isn’t really mentioned, and I felt left hanging by this. His dirty talk goes from steamy to wait-wtf-did-you-just-say-ew and back again. There are scenes where he and Georgie defend each other, in front of both townsfolk and Georgie’s family, that felt kind of forced and ridiculous. He wasn’t anything swoonworthy, in my book, just…okay. Cocky athlete isn’t my type unless there’s more to him, and it didn’t help that Travis was just constantly held up as the high school sports hero made good. Yawn.

Fix Her Up was, as a friend of mine said, a nice distraction, but it wasn’t anything super special, and there were times where it struggled to hold my attention. I probably won’t continue on with this series, but the writing was okay enough that I’d give Tessa Bailey another chance with a different set of characters.

Visit Tessa Bailey’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

Monthly roundup

Monthly Roundup: February 2021

Stephanie4 Comments

It’s March…again. Did last year’s March ever really leave, though? Isn’t this really just March II: The Marchening? It’s all been one hideously long March, hasn’t it? What a weird, weird year it’s been.

February went by in a massive snowstorm here. It snowed, and then it snowed some more, and then it snowed a little more and it just kept snowing! (See below for a picture of a waist-high snowdrift in my backyard!) I was also plagued with migraines and a flare-up of my back, so while we were all cozy and tucked in at home, I was also tucked in with a whole heap of pain. Not the greatest month, but I’m still here, and still reading, albeit slowly. Migraines don’t make for the best of reading conditions, and some of the books I read this month slowed me way down, but that happens. Hopefully your February was a little smoother than mine!

Let’s get this recap started, shall we?

What I Read in February 2021

1. The Pauper and the Prince by Mark Twain (no review; read out loud to my daughter)

2. The Boyfriend Project by Farah Rochon

3. A Girl Named Anna by Lizzy Barber

4. The Revisioners by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton (no review; read for book club)

5. Wayside School Beneath the Cloud of Doom by Louis Sachar (no review; read out loud to my daughter)

6. The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn

7. The Secret Language by Ursula Nordstrom (no review; read out loud to my daughter)

8. Banned Book Club by Kim Hyun Sook, Ko Hyung-Ju, and Ryan Estrada

9. Moxie by Jennifer Mathieu

10. Life’s Too Short by Abby Jimenez (review to come)

11. The Edible Front Yard: The Mow-Less, Grow-More Plan for a Beautiful, Bountiful Garden by Ivette Soler (no review)

12. Paddington at Large by Michael Bond (no review; read out loud to my daughter)

13. Fix Her Up by Tessa Bailey (review to come)

Slowish month, but that’s okay, I had a lot of challenges. The Lost took up quite a bit of time- eight days, I think, which is a significant portion of a short month! I didn’t review The Revisioners; it’s outside of the scope of my normal reading and more literary than I usually tend towards, so I didn’t feel as though I totally understood it as well as I needed to in order to write a competent review. And I didn’t review The Edible Front Yard; I was more just looking for some gardening inspiration. My daughter and I got through a ton of books together this month, though! 😊

Reading Challenge Updates

Banned Book Club and The Prince and the Pauper were for my parenting group reading challenge! Four left for this challenge. The only books I read from my own shelves this month were the ones I read to my daughter; I’ll try better to get to my own books a little more in March!

State of the Goodreads TBR

Last month, I clocked in at 187 books; this month, I’m down to 179!!! I’m pretty excited about that. Six of my books this month came from my TBR. I took a few off, including one I started from the library but that just ended up being so terribly written that I couldn’t bring myself to continue. It happens!

Books I Acquired in February 2021

I won a prize package from the Writing Slices blog, which included a copy of Cash Flow for Creators by Michael W. Lucas (and a bunch of other cool stuff! Thanks, Alex!!!). I think that was it for the month; we’re still not going out anywhere, and it’s been too cold and snowy to visit any of the nearby Little Free Libraries.

Bookish Things I Did in February 2021

It was a pretty good month, bookish-event-ly speaking! I attended a Zoom presentation by Talia Lavin, author of Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy (which I haven’t read yet, but it’s on my TBR). SUPER fascinating presentation about an extremely disturbing topic. I also attended a Zoom presentation by author Jodi Eichler-Levine, author of Painted Pomegranates and Needlepoint Rabbis: How Jews Craft Resilience and Create Community. It really made me miss crafting seriously (which I haven’t had time for this past year!), and it made me think about possibly getting together some sort of crafting group when all of this is over. I attended an online interview of Tara Westover, author of Educated, presented by our local parent education group. The quality wasn’t great, unfortunately; the sound and video weren’t synced up, which made it a little hard to follow along, but I enjoyed it nevertheless. I signed up to attend my library’s virtual Own Voices book club Zoom, where we would discuss The Revisioners, but I hadn’t realized that that date fell on Purim, so I opted to skip the meeting and virtually attend Purim services instead. I tried, though! And I did read the book! And, while not entirely book-related (though I did add one book to my TBR mentioned during the second presentation), I did attend two virtual tours of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Israel (phew. Even virtually, it’s heavy. I held it together during the first presentation until we got to the Children’s Memorial, and then I lost it).

Current Podcast Love

Still moseying through Judaism Unbound with Dan Libenson and Lex Rofeberg. I’m behind in Leaving Eden with Gavriel Ha’Cohen and Sadie Carpenter; between migraines and my back being messed up, I haven’t had any good exercise time lately, so no time on the bike to listen to this awesome podcast. Hoping for better in March!

Stephanie’s Read Harder Challenge

On hold until life goes back to normal!

Real Life Stuff

Phew! What a month. Snow, snow, more snow, lots of Zoom presentations, a little bit of reading, a WHOLE lot of pain (boooooooooooooooooo). I’m not sure if my back is acting up because I’ve spent so much time not moving due to migraines, or because of the constant weather fluctuations around here (we’ve recently gone from temperatures in the single digits to some days in the 40s and 50s, which is normally a huge problem for my pain levels), or because my back just feels like being a jerk, but I’m hurting pretty badly right now. But it was the migraines that sent me back to the doctor a few days ago. I had one last month, and then another one this month that just. wouldn’t. die. I hate it when my back hurts, but I actually prefer that over migraines. Migraines just ruin every single thing about the entire day and leave me feeling crummy for several days afterwards. The migraines probably aren’t helped by my stress levels; my girl cat’s sensitive stomach has been acting up. She’s old and probably doesn’t have a ton of time left, so I’m doing everything I can to keep her happy and comfortable, but it’s still hard.

Still no vaccines on the horizon for us, but both my parents have received their first shot, and I was able to help my mother-in-law secure an appointment! She got her first shot a few days ago as well. That made me super excited. 😊  The more people protected, the better! Next comes shot #2 for all of them; it seems like that’s the tough one with the higher instance of side effects, so I’m crossing my fingers they’ll breeze on through.

What’s on the calendar for me in March? Two more presentations from Yad Vashem, what should be my final study session with my rabbi, a doctor appointment for my son. Hopefully less snow and some above-freezing temperatures for us. I’m SO ready to put my swing out on the back patio and spend my days reading there. That probably won’t happen until late May; the weather around here can be seriously temperamental until very late spring (we’ve even had some stupidly chilly Junes!), but I can at least pull my folding chairs out onto the front porch and read on the warmer days, and heck, I’ll take that. Digging in the garden probably won’t start happening until April, but a girl can dream, right?

We’ve circled back around and made an entire year of this pandemic, folks. Be gentle with yourselves; it’s not easy to think of all that we’ve lost over this past year. But keep looking forward; this will end one day, we’ll get through this, and really, there’s so much to look forward to. Hang in there, my friends.