The Books of February 2011

This was not a month spent reading a lot for pleasure. This was more a month for research, specifically as it related to the Ohio History Class that I teach each Monday in our homeschool co-op. But even that netted me some reading pleasure.

This was also a month that saw me spending a great deal of time on the road for the sake of basketball. I'm one of those folks who can read just fine while riding in a car, but I've never tried to do it while actually doing the driving.

Without further ado (and whining), I will review the books I read last month. But first, I'd like to draw your attention to something. It's March! Yippee! The month that spring officially begins. :)

Okay, now that I got that out of my system, here are the books I read in February.

• Suddenly Frugal by Leah Ingram.

You might recognize the author by her blog of the same name. I know that I did and that is one of the reasons I checked out this book from my library.

This was the book I alluded to when I said I wondered why I hadn't written it. (Well, I know the answer to that, really.)  To say that I do - and have done - probably 90% of the stuff in the book is not an exaggeration. In our case, it is not that we are suddenly frugal. It is that we are looking for more cost-cutting tips. I did find a few that were new to me and some that I knew already but needed to be reminded to do.

One of the new tips I learned was that vinegar can be used to clean laminate floors. We replaced most of the carpet in our house with a quality wood-look laminate a couple of years ago and I had found that the cheap store-brand alternatives to Swiffer mopping cloths were not worth the money I paid for them so I always used the real thing (which should make several members of my extended family who work for P and G very happy). However, I am pleased to have the vinegar and water frugal alternative. My floors look G-R-E-A-T.

If you "suddenly" find yourself needing some frugal suggestions I recommend this book. It will get you moving in the right direction. And then, for more industrial strength frugality, go borrow the bound volumes of The Tightwad Gazette (written by Amy Dacyczyn) or better yet, find them in a thrift store.

• A Slow Burn by Mary E. Demuth

This is the second book in the Defiance Texas Trilogy. I began reading this set a year ago while in Texas (which was purely a coincidence). The first book, Daisy Chain, didn't get a fair review when I listed all of my 2010 reads in one lump sum. I said that I didn't remember much about the book, and that was true. Now that I've read the second of the trilogy I remember the first, too.

The series is about the disappearance of a girl named Daisy and is set in 1973. Book 1 is written from the perspective of her friend, Jed Pepper, a preacher's kid. Do you see any similarities to my own family yet? Well, yes, The Bear was a 14-year-old preacher's kid this time last year. Like Jed, he is also pretty trustworthy and somewhat of an introverted deep thinker. Perhaps now you see why the book disturbed me a bit too much to want to remember something written from the perspective of the tortured 14-year-old boy who feels responsible for his best friend's disappearance.

These good qualities are about all that The Bear has in common with Jed, though. The Bear's preacher-dad is NOTHING like Jed's dad, thankfully. In fact, despite the fact that I kept seeing The Bear's face as I read, the rest of the family and the people in his father's church resemble nobody that I know.

A Slow Burn picks up the story where Daisy Chain left off but the thread is picked up by Daisy's grieving mother, Emory. She is haunted by her own feelings of remorse. She wasn't a good mother to Daisy. In fact, she wasn't a good neighbor, friend, employee, or anything to anyone with whom she came in contact. This book is about her journey to find her daughter's killer (yes, Daisy is dead) and the spiritual journey she begins in spite of her desire to avoid it.

I recommend these books, but only if you have the time to read the whole trilogy because the first book left me totally deflated and this second book left me waiting for Emory to find the answers to the questions that troubled her, including the identity of the killer.

(P.S. I began the third and final book in the trilogy this month but did not finish it. I just completed it last night and will review it next month.)

• The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis

This was the audiobook presentation of the much-beloved Narnia tale. I know it is the bonafide first book in the series but I read (heard?) it following The Magician's Nephew. I've seen the movie so the story line was not a mystery to me. Still, I think it is good to actually experience a story in an author's own words.

• "Ohio Valley History" Volume 9, Number 3, Fall 2009

This book is not a book at all. It is a magazine. But it happens to be an exceptional magazine. The magazine itself states on the inside that it is "A Journal of the History and Culture of the Ohio Valley and the Upper South, . . ." Subcriptions may be obtained here. I borrowed this copy from the library.

Why did I read this magazine? It provided research toward a lesson I was teaching in my Ohio History class. My students are 4th-6th grade homeschoolers and I think it is important that the information I present be both interesting and accurate. This particular edition had an article concerning European migration and the Kaskaskia Indians. We happened to be studying how the Native Americans in the Ohio region were influenced by French fur traders.

As an added bonus, after I returned home with this magazine I found that another article in it was written by a professor that Pastor Dad and I met last year at the conference we attended in Mississippi. And as an added added bonus the article was about the pastor of one of the churches that started the church that Pastor Dad now pastors. Okay, that's not quite as confusing as it sounds. (A certain pastor pastored a church in KY in the 1700s. That church later helped start our church.) The article was interesting to me, too, because it discussed regional and cultural biases among Baptists in the late 1700s. Ohio was a frontier microcosm of the blending between the New England  and southern cultures. Most historians are familiar with how that blending in the 13 original colonies wreaked havoc with the nerves of our Founding Fathers as they worked to coalesce the colonies into a nation. Those regional prejudices extended beyond governmental procedures and into how churches conducted their worship and missions. This, of course, was aggravated by how differing affiliations interpreted Scripture concerning church polity and its offspring, missions.

But for those of you who are not interested in Native Americans or church history, this volume also contained an article about a heinous robbery/murder and the resulting execution of the perpetrators, plus one about a steamboat of long ago. There was also a section for book reviews, which I found helpful for suggestions for further reading, particularly to adequately prepare for certain future Ohio History lessons, which was the impetus for obtaining this magazine in the first place!


So the results for this month are not that spectacular, but they are what they are:

1 non-fiction book
1 non-fiction magazine (which had more information in it than many of the non-fiction books I've read)
2 fiction books (1 via audiobook)