My Reading Month – September

I had one of the biggest reading months of the year this past month – albeit through a combination of short books, audiobooks and some graphic novels. I feel like the change in light helped too. It is so much easier to read in the mornings when I wake up in the dark and can read in front of a cozy fire curled up under a blanket with my morning tea.

This month, I could share a lot with you, but I sort of want to just share this one really incredible and totally out of left field book that might be one of my favorites of the year. I especially want to do this as I really want to get this out (it is already halfway through October)! Blogging has been challenging lately and I haven’t had the time or headspace to much more than read, cook and get to work on time.

We Took To The Woods by Louise Dickinson Rich

I don’t know what captivated me most about this book in the end, but I do know what hooked me. Rich starts this book by telling us that as a girl she wanted to live alone in the woods when she grew up and then spends an entire chapter explaining, with grim amusement, all the ways in which her current life in the middle of the woods is NOT the dream life she had imagined.

The book continues along these lines as she talks about the cycles of their year, from winters spent driving cars over ice and dealing with inconsistent supply runs to summers spent guiding fishing trips and berry picking, she does a wonderful job of describing both the simplicity and the business of a rural lifestyle.

While my favorite part of this book was without a doubt her hilarious stories about her life, from lost hunters to logging camps, what I found most amazing was that this book was written in 1942 and that despite this, Louise Dickinson Rich has an incredibly contemporary outlook on life (with a few glaring exceptions). Her attitude towards relationships, parenting and life in general feels like it fits in today, not 60 years ago, bearing in mind that at the time, a woman had much less economic and social freedom once married.

I am so excited because I also discovered she wrote so much more and it will just be so much fun to see what else she has to say!

I am already well into October, so it feels weird to talk about the next month, but I do feel motivated to keep my reading streak going. My book club is back on again after our summer break, and books are on the mind.