Pages

January has often been my month for digging deeper into serious reading. One year, I took a deep dive into the history of surgery, a subject that always fascinated me. Another year, I spent the month listening to one of Mary Beard’s excellent books on Roman history. Normally I’d read, but for a change, and without any quibbles, I indulged in an audiobook.

Usually, there is at least one tradecraft-related read. This year, it was a great title on evaluating marine portraits of ships. Since I study 19th-century marine ship portraits for some of my carving projects, it was closely related to my carving interests.

But this January has not yielded the same volume of nonfiction reading that I normally consume. My reading habits are in disorder as I struggle against a bad case of seasonal affect. My schedule is out of whack, perhaps because we have been getting the cold I normally associate with February. The result is that I fuss about February being February and my rapidly shrinking woodpile shrinking faster.

To distract myself, I have wallowed in really trashy science fiction and fantasy E-books. You know the type: Mightily thewed swordsmen, wicked wizards, glamorous heroines. Yuck. Last week, I grew so tired of the trash that I started searching for the worn and torn copy of Gray’s Anatomy. This is the one that Dr. Puffer threw at my head and told me to read cover to cover before he’d allow me to scrub with him again. I found the anatomy in the trash fantasy so unbelievable that I needed to check it against a reliable source.

So that’s it for self-improvement reading for January. February is almost here. Most of the garden seed and supplies are on order, and as soon as the month turns, I’ll start prepping my seed-starting equipment, hunting down my maple syrup supplies, and checking on my tiny sugarbush out back to plan how many spiles I’ll put into the trees.

I won’t regret, in the least, turning the page on another January.