Book 6: My Year with Eleanor

I am done with the yearlong project books. That's it. I'm not reading any more of them.

However, since I'm writing this blog post several months after finishing this book, I know that I have just told you a big fat lie.

It's not that this is a bad book; it actually was pretty interesting. But I'm weary of the trope.

Book 5: However Long the Night

This is the biography of Molly Melching, a woman who started a non-profit organization called Tostan in Senegal.

I appreciated this description of an organization that seeks solutions from the bottom up, rather than the top down. Tostan provides education to women in small groups, and over time, the women began asking for a module about women's health and the very sensitive issue of female genital cutting. Tostan has been very successful in reducing the rate of female genital cutting where other groups have not because it uses women's social groups and women's ideas to address the real reasons that cutting is practiced.

Book 4: Long Walk to Freedom

If you're interested in Nelson Mandela's life and work, this book is great.

Although there is a lot of information about South African politics that was new to me, it wasn't dry or really even that much over my head! The detail about how apartheid came to exist, and the methods of resistance they used against it, was really interesting.

There are a couple of other books I'd like to read about Mandela's life, including Conversations with Myself, a compilation of primary documents from Mandela's papers. Apparently Mr. Mandela was sometimes uncomfortable with how he was portrayed as nearly perfect. In an unfinished autobiography that was to follow Long Walk to Freedom, he wrote,

One issue that deeply worried me in prison was the false image that I unwittingly projected to the outside world; of being regarded as a saint. I never was one, even on the basis of an earthly definition of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.

A film adaptation of the book was released last year and I haven't seen it, but I have my doubts that it could present Mandela's life in enough detail to be satisfying.

Book 3: Bossypants

I needed a bit of comic relief, so I listened to Tina Fey read her book.

Some parts of this I thought were very funny, and some parts were just kind of meh. I think I would probably have enjoyed it more if I were more familiar with Tina Fey's work. Really about the only thing I had seen her in was on SNL as Sarah Palin, which I loved.

Book 2: Far from the Tree

Before my wee babes were born, I did some reading, but surprisingly, I've been getting some reading in since they've arrived, too! I've got lots of bum-on-the-couch or lying-in-the-bed time as I nurse these two, and an ebook is perfect for those times. And luckily so far, my other children haven't torn the house down while I'm buried under babies with my nose in a book, if you don't count that incident with the glitter.

So come with me, back in time, to January 2014. 

I have wanted to read this book for a while--since I heard an interview with the author on NPR. It covered virtually every way a child could be significantly different from his/her parents, including mental illness, extraordinary musicality, sexual orientation, and deafness.