Good vote this month. So many members seemed pleased by the books included as shown by the comments sent in. However, our favorite was this: “I realized it's been a year since I joined the group. I'm really so happy to find and join this group! And I'd like to say I really appreciate your research about the countries/nationalities, cookbooks, poems, books and more. All add richness to the blog, books and expand my horizon. Thanks a lot!” This comment made our month so thank you so much.
Before we get to the voting results, I wanted to share a book by an Indigenous author, an Ojibway from the Wabaseemoong Independent Nations in Canada.
It’s a sublime book of an Ojibway’s meditations. Calming & inspiring, the book nourished my soul:
“Alone in that country where poems are born in the stillness of things. Light is frail now. Purple is the colour of the world and the day becomes a stretch of open water freckled by rain, depthless and pure. Alive. Ready for the challenge of being.”
&
“I am not created or re-created by the noise and clatter of my life, by the rush and scurry, the relentless chase or the presumption that more gets more. No, I am created and re-created by moments of stillness and quiet. I am struck richer by a pure solitude that allows me to feel the world around me and lean into my place in it. I am not the rush of words in my life's narrative. I am its punctuation. Its pauses and stops. I am my ongoing recharge; in this silence I am reborn.”
His writing is evocative. From his introduction: “At dawn each day, I creep from my bedroom down the hall to the kitchen, where I set my tea to brew and then move to the living room to wait. In the immaculate silence, I watch the world unfurl from shadow. I listen to the sounds of birds, the wind along the eaves, the creak of floorboards and joists and rafters in this small house I call my home. When the tea is ready, I cradle the cup in my palms and inhale the scent of lavender. I place the cup on the living room table. Then I rise to retrieve the bundle that holds the sacred articles of my ceremonial life. I open it and remove my smudging bowl, my eagle wing fan, my rattle and the four sacred medicines of my people — sage, sweet grass, tobacco and cedar. I put small pinches of each together in the smudging bowl, which I set upon the table. I close my eyes and breathe for a few moments. Then I light the medicines, using a wooden match, and waft the smoke around and over my head and heart and body with the eagle wing fan. When I am finished, I set the fan on the table, too.
…
The small meditations in this book come from my early mornings at that table.”
If you’re looking for something begin this new year in the best possible way, I highly recommend you read Embers (view on Amazon).
But what book is the club reading next?
It’s a novel by another of the same Anishinaabe/Ojibway people though a different tribe—the Turtle Mountain Band:
Louise Erdrich, the NY Times bestselling, National Book Award-winning author paints a startling portrait
The world as we know it is ending. Evolution has reversed itself affecting every living creature on earth while woman after woman gives birth to infants that appear to be primitive species of humans. 32-year-old Cedar Hawk Songmaker, adopted daughter of a pair of big-hearted, open-minded Minneapolis liberals, is as disturbed and uncertain as the rest of America around her. But for Cedar, this change is profound and deeply personal. She is four months pregnant.
Though she wants to tell her parents, Cedar first feels compelled to find her birth mother, an Ojibwe living on the reservation, to understand her and her baby’s origins. As Cedar goes back to her own biological beginnings, society around her begins to disintegrate, fueled by a swelling panic about the end of humanity.
There are rumors of martial law, of Congress confining pregnant women. Of a registry, and rewards for those who turn these wanted women in. Flickering through the chaos are signs of increasing repression: a shaken Cedar witnesses a family wrenched apart when police violently drag a mother from her husband and child in a parking lot. The streets of her neighborhood have been renamed with Bible verses. A stranger answers the phone when she calls her adoptive parents, who have vanished without a trace. It will take all Cedar has to avoid the prying eyes of informants and keep her baby safe.
Future Home of the Living God is a startlingly original work from one of our most acclaimed writers: a moving meditation on female agency, self-determination, biology, and natural rights that speaks to the troubling changes of our time.
“Masterful…a breakout work of speculative fiction…enters the realm of The Handmaid’s Tale…A suspenseful, profoundly provoking novel of life’s vulnerability and insistence…with a bold theme, searing social critique, and high-adrenaline action.” —Booklist
“Smart and thrilling…Erdrich’s storytelling is seductive.” —Vanity Fair
(A special thank you to book club member, Julie Jacobs for the suggestion.)
Happy reading!