Books in January. A lot of history, fodder for drawings, food for thought.

• Casey Wilson’s memoir was a surprising gem: essays with a surprise, gut wrenching arc about the loss of her mother, but truly laugh out loud throughout.

• The War of Art was a two-day dalliance, recommended by POOG. Brilliant if somewhat cringeworthy life and creative advice from your boomer coworker who maybe sometimes says the wrong thing, but who knows what they’re talking about. Containts the most crisp, sharply observed analysis of inherent animosity between fundamentalism and art.

• Edge of the World & Blood of the Isles were a refreshing look at northern European history and folk customs, antidotal to nationalism and supremacist views. Edge of the World changed the way I thought about the relationship between coastal communities and deeper mainland towns and cities, where the former had far more in common and to do with one another than with the latter, even within their own “borders.” The Light Ages was similar, changing my understanding of the roots of our modern sciences and the people who brought them to the fore.
  
  Blood of the Isles took me back to my Ancestry DNA days, but also contained a tantalizing personal connection: an anecdote about a “journeyman geneticist” in the 1800s who catalogued physical characteristics of people in the British Isles. He noted a group of people in the West Riding of Yorkshire with almond shaped eyes and darker features — features he puts down to an exotic, foreign bloodline somewhere in the Colonial rule. That’s where my family is from and describes me precisely, but Blood of the Isles (and my own DNA analysis) shows no such admixture… just a weird, native trait, present in theIslands long before the Saxons made their way across the strait.

• Queer City and the Edge of the World have really kindled a rage in me towards Rome, Christianity and piety of any stripe. How much we lost. How much was erased.