Curious, Healing

Books about healing, business, and fun

“brown girl dreaming” by Jacqueline Woodson

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Recommended to me by: Reading Jaqueline Woodson’s children’s book The Day You Begin

In spare, elegant poetry with each word exactly as it needs to be, Jacqueline Woodson takes us back before her birth in her family history, and then slowly forward in time. She shares her sensory experiences as a young child in Ohio and then in the South, and later after her family moved to Brooklyn, NY. The writing is lyrical, gripping, joyous, painful.

Life is dangerous for a Black family in the 60s and 70s, and she grieves for relatives as they die, at the same time as she struggles with reading in school and bonds with a neighbor girl as Forever Friends. She is aware of the struggle for civil rights, and participates as much as she can.

Highly recommended! Every word is worth reading, through the acknowledgements and end notes all the way to the photographs of family members as children at the very end.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Secret of the Ron Mor Skerry” by Rosalie K. Fry

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Recommended to me by: Sanguinity

10-year-old Fiona McConville doesn’t thrive in the city, so she’s sent back to her beloved islands to live with her grandparents. Imbued with the fierce magic of the sea, this book shows what can happen when children and adults are attuned to the sea and to each other. The events in the story are not always gentle, but the storytelling is gentle and everything comes right in the end.

The pen and ink illustrations are also delightful. Highly recommended! Originally published in 1957.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Just Being at the Piano” by Mildred Portney Chase

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Subtitle: Harmony Begins in the Soul, Long Before the First Note Is Played

Recommended to me by: the Little Free Library down the street

A meditative little book on how to learn and teach piano in a kind, body-centered way. Mildred Portney Chase was a musical prodigy, playing piano by ear at age 3 or 4, and went on to be a concert pianist. She writes in detail about how she finds relaxed, sensitive movement in her fingers, hands, and arms to play her best. She fiercely defends the right of young students to improvise and learn at their own pace.

I have only studied a little piano. Some of the book is applicable to singing, and some of it is specific to the piano, which as she says is an instrument that cannot be brought close in to the musician’s body. I passed the book along to a piano player and teacher, and I’ll be curious to hear what she thinks of it.

Recommended if you’re interested in music and musicians, or if you play piano and want to create beautiful tones.

Available at bookshop.org.

“The Day You Begin” by Jacqueline Woodson and Rafael López

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Spanish title: El Día En Que Descubres Quién Eres! (The Day You Discover Who You Are!)

Recommended to me by: the Little Free Library down the street

What a gorgeous, loving picture book. “There will be times when you walk into a room, and no one there is quite like you.” Full of colorful flowers and multi-cultural children, the illustrations contrast their inner liveliness with their feelings of disconnection at school.

On the cover, a brown-skinned girl with tightly curled hair emerges through a partly opened door that is marked like a ruler. Later, a Korean girl protects her “too strange” lunch from the other children’s stares at a cafeteria table that is also a ruler. A boy excluded from playground games leans against a tree drawn with ruler markings. When two of the children make friends, they swing from a tree drawn with bark.

Highly recommended for children who might not quite fit in, and for adults who remember that experience. It made me cry, both times I read through it, and I’m taking it right back to the Little Free Library for someone else to find.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Your Mindful Journal and Memoir” by Jenny Davidow

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Subtitle: Open the Floodgates to Your Creativity

Recommended to me by: the author

Your Mindful Journal and Memoir by Jenny Davidow has great advice for making journal entries more lively and personal and present. My paper journal is completely private and I’m not trying to improve it in any way, but the tips feel useful for online posts, and could apply to creative writing, too.

I met Jenny at Balkan camp years ago and we corresponded a bit about her book. I was happy to review it on Amazon:

“Your Mindful Journal and Memoir” is good medicine for our frenetic, fragmented modern lives. Jenny Davidow distills decades of experience with mindfulness, journaling, creativity, and teaching into a step-by-step guide full of wisdom and kindness.

For someone new to journaling, the book offers ideas on what to write and how to center it on the present moment even when it is about the past. For someone whose Inner Critic says, “You can’t say that!” or “You’re doing it wrong,” the book offers a shift toward safe experiments and listening inwardly with a kind ear. For someone whose attention is focused on external approval, the book offers fiercely guarded privacy and tuning in to one’s own voice and preferences.

For everyone, the book offers innovative ways to combine journaling with mindfulness and self-exploration, creating a lively personal record. For those who want to share individual entries or publish a memoir, the book offers strategies to do so with creativity and care.

As a longtime journal-writer, I appreciated the gentle invitations to turn events into metaphors, and I enjoyed reading the author’s example entries shared from her own journals.

Highly recommended for anyone who wants to keep a journal but struggles with what to say, or who wants to heal their connection with their creativity, or who wants to create a memoir but doesn’t know where to start.

Available at Amazon.

“Effective Testing with RSpec 3” by Myron Marston and Erin Dees

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Subtitle: Build Ruby Apps with Confidence

Recommended to me by: a coworker who started a book group about it

RSpec is an automated testing framework for Ruby and Rails programs. It covers both unit tests (fast, narrowly scoped) and feature tests (slower, broadly scoped).

A small group of coworkers met every two weeks via video chat and discussed one chapter at a time. We reviewed the chapter topics and discussed how they apply to the large application we work on. I did most of the exercises and outside reading because I learn better that way.

The book starts with an extended, detailed example that covers most of the topics in the book, and then those topics are covered again chapter by chapter. It reads as if the example was originally at the end, and then they decided to move it to the beginning and then duplicate a lot of material to make it understandable.

That caveat aside, the book is clear, understandable, and very useful when working with RSpec. It covers details of configuration, command line arguments like –only-failures (only run the tests that failed on the previous run), and suggestions for how to structure tests to be reliable, readable, and maintainable.

Recommended for anyone who writes or maintains RSpec tests or who would like to start using RSpec for Rails or Ruby code.

Available at bookshop.org.