Curious, Healing
Books about healing, business, and fun
Recommended to me by: Leah K. Walsh
A heart-warming children’s book with few words and spacious illustrations that perfectly convey emotion through body language. Young Taylor (gender unspecified) has a creative disaster, and all the animals have ideas about how to offer comfort. Finally, the rabbit sits nearby and listens, and Taylor begins to feel better.
Subtitle: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style
Recommended to me by: Jesse-the-K’s rave review
This book is both a useful guide to writing well in English, and an entertaining quick read that includes the occasional jab at the current occupant of the White House. Benjamin Dreyer is persnickety and opinionated, as befits the Copy Chief at Random House. He holds forth on grammar rules that can be safely ignored and ones that can’t, easily misspelled words, easily misspelled names, and words that tend to be confused with each other.
One can see his process of becoming more educated on social justice issues. There is one inexplicable balk at using work-hours instead of man-hours (seriously?!) but otherwise his language in the book is inclusive of women. He admits that he also balked at using singular they until he had a colleague who uses they pronouns.
Recommended for writers and others interested in the vagaries of the English language.
Recommended to me by: Redbird
A slant-wise retelling of the Snow Queen story originally by Hans Christian Anderson. It’s been a long time since I read the original, but I remember a sense of heavy oppressiveness. The beginning of this book has the same feeling to it, but fortunately veers away from that after the first few (short) chapters.
Young Gerta thinks of Kay as her best friend, and Kay barely notices her. That’s a big part of the oppressiveness. It’s a great depiction of the shame that arises from associating with a narcissist. The book does not use the word narcissist (“frost in his eyes and frost in his heart”), but Gerta does name the shame she feels, and she breathes through it until it passes.
As in the fairy tale, Kay gets taken by the Snow Queen and Gerta goes after him. First thing, she gets caught by a milder kind of narcissist who is kind, but delays Gerta for her own purposes. “Gerta’s desire to be useful was an open road down which nearly any magic could walk.”
After she gets away, she still has difficulties and there is some violence, but she has more agency and less shame and the book is more comfortable to read. Her relationships with the allies she finds are delightful and kind.
Overall the book is engaging and beautifully written and surprising and inclusive. Highly recommended.
Subtitle: A Retelling of the Poem “Pangur Bán”
Recommended to me by: The White Cat and the Monk: A Lovely 9th-Century Ode to the Joy of Uncompetitive Purposefulness, Newly Illustrated
A lovely picture book, well-described by the recommending article, about a monk and his white cat. I could see it leading to a lot of questions if read to a small child, about monks, and cats catching mice. The drawings are enchanting.
Recommended to me by: James Davis Nicoll
A murder mystery is being unraveled by supernatural beings with human allies. Not at all my sort of thing, but it’s a followup to Redemption In Indigo so I gave it a try. Unlike that book, which started off slowly for me, this one pulled me in immediately and I read it all in one sitting.
It tackles some serious topics along with the fast-moving plot. A class system that values land owners over everyone else. Paying attention to who matters and who doesn’t. Adjusting to disability, with a lot of support.
I enjoyed the ride! Stepping back, I didn’t quite follow some of the twists and turns of causality in the plot, and I’m not sure I agree with some of the deeper implications.
Recommended to me by: Sarah Pinsker
This book has no words, only illustrations. Whimsical and menacing by turns, the images tell the story of an immigrant’s parting with his family and arrival in a new land where everything is unexpected and askew. It was unclear until the end whether the macabre or the whimsy would win.
This book is far more serious than “picture book” would imply. The sepia-toned art is magnificently expressive.