rediscovering the joy of reading

After my qualifying exams, I wasn't sure I'd ever read for pleasure again. The mere sight of books made me queasy for a few weeks after that. I declined several very nice offers of loaned books that friends and family assured me were excellent reads. Finally, with the help of some aimless bookstore browsing and some persistent digging through moving boxes for the one elusive box labeled "Unread Books," I eased my way back into reading.

I've always been fond of those challenges to read a certain number of books in a year, and I've often enjoyed watching friends track their books read. So I'll keep track of mine and see how many I can squeeze into a very busy year.

Here's what I've read so far in 2010:

1. The Magicians and Mrs. Quent by Galen Beckett
It's Jane Austen meets J. K. Rowling. Utterly delightful but ultimately forgettable.

2. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle
I'd read this before (and loved it), but I reread it before pursuing the rest of L'Engle's Time Quintet.

3. A Wind in the Door by Madeline L'Engle
A good read that brings back familiar characters from Wrinkle. I much prefer L'Engle's good vs. evil battles and fantastical representation of Christian themes to C. S. Lewis' Narnia series, which is allegory so heavy-handed it sometimes threatens to squeeze all the life out of the story.

4. A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeline L'Engle
Book 3 in the series and possibly my favorite. I read and watch enough science fiction to feel pretty jaded about how time travel is treated in books and film, but L'Engle is distinctively different. I thoroughly enjoyed Charles Wallace's time traveling adventures with a unicorn guide.

5. Many Waters by Madeline L'Engle
Book 4 in the series and my other candidate for a favorite. This book follows two of the Murray children as they accidentally travel back in time to meet Noah and his family right around the time that Noah receives some specifications and starts building a largish boat.

6. An Acceptable Time
A pretty good read that makes me wonder just how many creative plot lines one author can devise. It also makes me want to look into the other books that L'Engle wrote featuring some of the same characters.

7. The Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan
Anyone who has talked to me in the past couple weeks has already heard about this nonfiction book. Pollan argues that plants have evolved to satisfy human desires. Being the sweetest apple, the handsomest tulip, or the most intoxicating cannabis plant confers evolutionary advantages, he argues, if it gets you noticed by humans who will plant your seeds or bulbs or graft you onto another plant. This text is chock full of fascinating information: ask me, for example, why prohibitionists chopped down apple tress or about how a virus made tulips more valuable than houses in sixteenth-century Holland.