There are only three books remaining from my February reading list and my reading was much less emotionally charged. Hopefully then this will be a much shorter post.
Two books were re-reads.
I was a big Anne McCaffrey fan when I was a tween, teen and young adult. I think her first novel, Restoree, came out when I was ten or so, and I read the paperback when I was 11 or 12. I read all of the Pern novels multiple times. I was particularly attracted to her strong female characters at a time when science fiction rarely had complex strong intelligent female characters, and women were often portrayed as delicate ninnies screaming in the corner while men rescued them. That was never how I saw myself, even as a child, where even when very young I dreamt more about rescuing hapless princes, than being rescued.
But I gave all those books away a long time ago, mostly because they don’t always hold up well, and I want to hold on to the memories of what they meant to me as a young girl/woman, more than I want to reread them. I was surprised then when I found this book, Get Off the Unicorn, hiding in my pocket book shelves, and I decided to reread it.
The book is a series of short stories based on her novels and stories and I enjoyed revisiting places and characters. I almost reconsidered rereading Pern, but have not yet committed to that. I probably won’t. And although this book was fun, there are sections that have not aged well. I’m glad to have reread it, because that allowed me to let it go. I do think McCaffrey made an important difference in the lives of a group of young women, as well as in science fiction and fantasy literature. As to rereading, I am, after all, rereading Harry Potter, and I never had as much respect for it as I did for Pern. (and HP is not filled with strong female characters. Professor McGonnegal is complex, and Hermione is smart, but is also often dismissed as annoyingly freakish, and is laughed at more than she is admired).
I’ve owned Far Afield by Shane Mitchell since it was first published. I read it cover to cover then, and have dipped into the various essays over the years. I’ve cooked many of the recipes, although it is not so much a cookbook as it is a book about food and culture and the people who make the food. I was thrilled therefore when the Kitchen Arts and Letters cookbook club chose it for its February 2026 cookbook.
I was thrilled to read the book again, and I planned to cook several of the dishes, many of which I had not visited for a few years. But February got out of hand and I didn’t actually have time to explore those recipes. I did spend a lot of time with the book, and I was happy to attend a zoom with Shane, who is as smart and thoughtful as I remember her from Vassar. (Where she intimidated me, because I was a shy girl who hadn’t yet learned to break away from the expectation that I would never be good enough. The fact that I remember her so strongly shows the impression she made on me, although she was ahead of me and we did not run in the same circles.) I am no longer intimidated, although I didn’t speak in that zoom, because I wasn’t actively cooking from the book, and others were. You know I will cook from and read the book again and again. And somehow at the moment it has inspired an interest in Somali cooking. We will see where that goes.
The Land in Winter was the only new read in the month of February. It is a beautifully executed, and beautifully written work of historical fiction that takes place in the early 1960s in the West Country of England. Surprising to me that I have reached an age where my childhood is eligible to be classified as “historical” or even “antique”.
I enjoyed the novel and the characters for the most part. I enjoyed the setting, the strong sense of place, and most of the characters, who were complex, different, and ultimately rather engaging in their humanity. The exception was Dr. Eric Perry who I thought was a terribly disgusting piece of work as a human. But alas pleasant and unpleasant people exist in the world and Eric is not the one who dies in the end. Overall I enjoyed the novel; I enjoyed the second part where there were some separate stories involving each of the characters, showing us more of who they were and what made them tick. But it is not a novel that is going to claim a permanent spot in my memory. More complex than genre fiction, both engaging and thought provoking, it remains nonetheless ephemeral.