How my September reading got so far out of hand

I have already written about how my National Hispanic Heritage Month listening did not feel extensive enough, though I ended up with plenty of future options:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2018/12/opening-up.html

I will have things to listen to for 2019, but for 2018 I had plenty to read. So much reading.

It was the diverse books spreadsheet. I mean, that wasn't the only issue, but it was the main issue.

As much as I want to go through all of them (at least those intended for children), things do not always align perfectly. The reading months are specific, but many awards for diversity are not. The Pura Belpré awards were the logical starting place for Hispanic heritage, but I had already gone through that list, albeit accidentally:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2018/07/childrens-books-pura-belpre-award.html

The next obvious choice was a School Library Journal article from 2016, focusing on Cuba, as the United States and Cuba were working on normalizing relations.

https://www.slj.com/?detailStory=viva-cuba-focus-on

(Having recently read Drum Dream Girl and Lucky Broken Girl probably made me more interested in Cuba.)

Something that I had not thought about was that the embargo also affected the availability of books between the two countries. The SLJ article tried to provide a variety of age levels and fact and fiction, so it ended up suggesting 19 of the 27 books I read. It would have been more, but I had already read Drum Dream Girl and no one had the National Geographic book, though I was okay with that.

That was a lot of books, and also, while a lot of them were for younger readers they were not picture books. There were a lot of YA novels, and some of them were quite lengthy. I started incorporating Inter-Library Loan more, where previously I had only checked out books through the local library system. Things expanded.

It kind of works well that way. One memoir gives one point of view, but reading four from about the same time and place, but with different people, gives a broader picture. Not everything I read was about Cuba, but a lot of it was.

There will be other posts getting into more detail, but I will list out the other eight books here, and why they ended up being read for this "month". (From starting in September, I finished January 13th.)

Making the Mexican Diabetic by Michael Montoya: This was already on my reading list, but one of the papers in Diagnosing Folklore made me want to read it sooner rather than later.

The First Rule of Punk by Celia C Perez: This was on the Pura Belpré awards list, but at the time I was trying to stay committed to picture books. The "punk" reference still make me add it to the list.

Queens of Havana by Alicia Castro: Reading Drum Dream Girl made me want to know more about the full story of the band Anacaona.

The Boys From Little Mexico by Steve Wilson: This came up as a local book, following one season of the high school soccer team in Woodburn.

I also had two novels - In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez and The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henriquez - as well as two books of poetry not including the many books of Margarita Engle from the SLJ article. I don't remember exactly how any of them ended up on my reading list, except for In the Time of the Butterflies possibly coming from Tough Mothers. This makes me think that perhaps I should start making notes when I add a book in Goodreads.

The poetry books were from Georgina Herrera and Gloria Anzaldúa.
As already mentioned, I also watched Searching for Sugarman and The Buena Vista Social Club.

That's why it took so long... plus having not finished a round of gardening reading and then having a narrow window of time for reading this Native American Heritage Month book, and some similar issues.

Anyway, books are good! I like them.