more 2010 reading

Before my several-month hiatus from blogging, I was keeping tabs on everything I read this year. For the first time since 2003, I'm not enrolled in graduate classes where I'm being compelled to read lengthy lists of books chosen by someone else. It feels like I'm re-learning how to choose my own reading material. and it's an interesting process so far.

I finally had time to read some of the random book purchases that have been clogging up my bookshelves for years.

The Third Witch retells Macbeth from the perspective of one of the witches who predict Macbeth will become king. I picked this book up secondhand when I was working on a project for a course on Shakespeare and Marlowe. The project involved writing an undergraduate curriculum for a course about literature inspired by Shakespeare's works. Overall this novel was a decent read.

Peter and the Starcatchers was a charming read. Characters such as Wendy, Peter, and a pirate captain should be familiar. The Peter Pan story is reworked here with a lot of humor and a fun new angle. I'll definitely look into the other books in this series.

Things Cooks Love is a handbook for a well-stocked kitchen. It was a Half-Price books find, and I really enjoyed looking through the big glossy pictures of pots, pans, and kitchen tools. I finally know what a paella pan actually looks like! But I'll keep making paella in my ovenproof skillet or my shallowest Corningware dish. The book also includes recipes but nothing startlingly new or must-try.

I don't remember when I first heard about Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but I got my copy a couple of years ago when I belonged to an online book club (I don't even remember the name!) that let you choose one book each month for $10 per book. (Most of the books were hardcover, so it was a pretty good deal.) I enjoyed both the aforementioned novel and the story collection, The Ladies of Grace Adieu. These are alternate histories that imagine a magical England where learned men study the history of magic but where all of the magicians have forgotten how to practice magic. Both are good reads, but at 700+ pages the novel is a marathon undertaking.

I encountered  Letters from a Skeptic months ago when our Sunday class was reading it. We were so preoccupied with wedding planning back then that I didn't finish the book until late summer. It is both a thought-provoking volume of apologetics and a riveting story about an important conversation between a father and son. The father happens to be an agnostic, and the son happens to be a theology professor and a Christian. I enjoyed this one immensely. One of my favorite exchanges in the book is when the son answers his father's question about why God would allow people to do evil things to each other. His answer (in part) is that our capacity for evil and our capacity for love are linked. (And this is tied to the concept of free will, which they also delve into in several of their exchanges.) In other words, if we didn't have the capacity to do harmful things to other people, we also wouldn't have the capacity to love others. If God limited one capability, He would have to limit the other.

Remember the movie Children of Men from a few years back? That movie, about which I was ambivalent, was the first I had heard of British mystery novelist P. D. James. She wrote the novel upon which the movie was loosely based. I was intrigued about her for some reason I can't remember now, so I picked up this 1972 novel that introduces a female private detective named Cordelia Gray. The story moved a bit slowly and the denouement was a bit underwhelming, but I enjoyed James' writing style. I may read one of the books in her Adam Dalgliesh series. Dalgliesh makes a cameo appearance in Unsuitable, but he's the main character in a substantial series of James mysteries published between 1962 and 2008.


my 2010 reading recap:
17. An Unsuitable Job for a Woman by P. D.James
16.  Letters from a Skeptic by Gregory and Edward Boyd
15. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clark
14. The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories by Susanna Clark
13. Things Cooks Love by Marie Simmons for Sur La Table
12. Peter and the Starcatchers by Ridley Pearson and Dave Barry
11. The Third Witch by Rebecca Reisert
10. The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
9. The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
8. Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller
7. The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan
6. An Acceptable Time by Madeline L'Engle
5. Many Waters by Madeline L'Engle
4. A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeline L'Engle
3. A Wind in the Door by Madeline L'Engle
2. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle
1. The Magicians and Mrs. Quent by Galen Beckett