What I’ve read lately

I haven’t done any of my Quick Book Reviews in a while, and that’s because I have hardly read any non-school books for the last few years.

But now that RN school is behind me, I have actually finished some non-textbooks!

Fair warning: I rarely read books that have anything to do with money or frugality. I spend so much time writing about money and thinking about money, when I read a book, I usually want something else. 

The Next Conversation

This book is full of good advice for how to have better, more productive conversations, especially when it comes to hard convos. 

The one thing that stuck with me from this book, though, is about criticism (and I think I mentioned this in passing before!).

Jefferson says, “People who can’t be confident in their contributions will be confident in their criticisms.”

I think this is helpful in reading other people; it helps to realize that when another person has a consistent pattern of criticism, it’s usually because of insecurities on their part. Which means: IT’S NOT PERSONAL. It is not about the object of the criticism; it is about the criticizer’s lack of confidence. 

I also think it’s helpful as a check on myself. If I observe an urge to criticize, I can question myself: Am I feeling a lack of confidence in my contribution? 

And then I can ask myself, “What could I do to increase the value of my contribution or my confidence in it?”

Which would be way better than falling into a pattern of criticism. 

Shadows of the Workhouse

This is another in the series of Call the Midwife books and ooof, this one is sobering. In it, the author tells the stories of several people she knew who survived the workhouses and lived into adulthood.

Two things stood out to me.

First, the descriptions of how mothers were separated from their children made me want to burst into tears. I thought about how I would have felt, thinking of my poor babies in a completely separate area, away from me, having no idea why I wasn’t there.

It made my heart ache to even imagine it. 

Second, I thought about how much our understanding of trauma has evolved since then; the workhouses caused such obvious psychological trauma for the people who survived them, and I can see it as I read these books.

Things like attachment injuries, PTSD, and more are present, though no one had names for these things back then, and no one really knew how to treat psychological trauma. 

Lean Learning

I got this book handed out for free at Fincon, and I honestly skimmed through it pretty fast.

To me, the book felt like a lot of overthinking and that’s probably because I am solidly not the target audience. I am not a person who gets stuck in the research phase of things; I tend to do the bare minimum of research and then just GO.

And I learn along the way.

That’s honestly how my blogging journey has been. I had almost no idea what I was doing when I started out, but I hopped right in and just figured it out as I went. 

I don’t really need a whole framework to help me stop overanalyzing. 😉 

So.

If you are someone who is stuck in analysis paralysis or can’t get out of the research phase, this book might be worth a read. But if you are more like me, skip this book and read something else that will be more helpful/enjoyable. 

better

(purposely not capitalized because that’s how the book title is!)

This one is by Atul Gawande, who also wrote Being Mortal. I appreciate his thoughtful writing, and how he considers whether or not some medical interventions are actually moral and kind (Being Mortal touched on this more, but he brings it up in this book as well.)

I know many people dislike thinking about end-of-life issues, but simply prolonging life is not always the kindest thing to do to someone. And I think the general populace would be better off if they read some of Gawande’s writing. 

We’d then be better able to make sensible decisions about the kinds of interventions we want. For example, I personally am not going to be a 95-year-old patient with “full code” listed in my chart. 😉 

Prairie Fires

This is a behind-the-scenes, real-life story of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family. Since I read the Little House books over and over and over, I found this book fascinating, especially the parts that tell about Laura’s immediate family. 

I bought an “acceptable” copy on eBay…thus, the cover wear!

The last half of the book talks a whole lot more about Rose Wilder Lane, and that was less interesting to me. I will say, she was so much more of a rebel than I knew before, and I did cheer her on for divorcing her terrible husband Gilette (“I have got rid of him.” she wrote. Hehe.)

Something that stuck out to me from this book is that poor Pa and Ma Ingalls never really found a happy ending. Their lives were honestly just hard from start to finish, and it is sort of depressing that none of Pa’s ventures ever panned out like he hoped they would.

Garth Williams’ illustrations are the only allowable ones, and I will die on that hill.

Something else that stuck out to me is that this idealized family where the dad goes off to work and the mom stays at home doing unpaid work is quite a modern invention. 

Over the course of her life, Laura was consistently engaging in money-earning activities (sewing, teaching, taking in boarders, raising chickens, selling eggs, writing), and this seems to have been unremarkable to the people around her. 

At one point, she was actually doing sort of an old version of homesteader blogging by writing articles about topics such as how to raise chickens for profit. 

It was also interesting to see how much grittier real life vs. the book life was; there were dysfunctional families, abusive marriages, and mental illnesses (the isolated prairie life made people literally lose their minds).

This is not the picture you get from the Little House books, which is understandable, as they were written for children!)

My overall opinion: if you are a Little House books fan, I think you’d love this book.

What have you been reading lately?