What I’m Reading: Nonfiction

selective focus photo of pile of assorted title books

Wintering by Katherine Mays is a memoir written when Mays’ health forced her to take a sabbatical from her job. Her own personal winter (depression) happened during an actual winter. Mays brilliantly interweaves navigating her depression while navigating winter. As she explores winter as a time when we do pull away from the world to survive the cold weather, she compares it to navigating her own internal winter of depression, and the withdrawal and introspection that is called for in both circumstances. She also illustrates the paradox of winter’s withdrawal with the need to keep close to family and friends as well to survive both the cold months and depression as they rage on. I appreciate the fact that Mays has no easy answers, and it is a wonderful memoir of how navigating depression (any time of the year) is both a solitary and communal endeavor.

Rating: 5 out of 5.

What I’m Reading: Fiction

opened book on tree root

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich is a surreal, eerie novel that combines the concreteness of the pandemic and the social unrest of 2020 with a ghost story set in a bookstore in Minneapolis. Erdrich captures 2020 perfectly in her main character Tookie, who has to navigate both the pandemic and the protests and riots that followed George Floyd’s murder as a Native American woman while dealing with the ghost of a woman who constantly appropriated Native American culture while she lived.

Rating: 4 out of 5.