Recommended Reading

This time of year, I'm always leaping into a number of new reading adventures, usually fizzling out a couple of weeks into the new year and lamenting that I didn't finish what I had started. This year will be different, she says with hope in her heart. The current books are getting read vigorously, and here they are:

Lesley M. M. Blume's Let's Bring Back: An Encyclopedia of Forgotten-Yet-Delightful, Chic, Useful, Curious, and Otherwise Commendable Things from Times Gone By

A lengthy title, yes, but utterly descriptive of this little volume's contents. So far, I've learned that chariots pulled by lions or elephants are best, that I'm not the only one who thinks bathing caps have a certain charm about them, how to make luscious pin curls, and that once upon a time, parents revealed how they felt about a daughter's suitor by use of something called a "courtship candle." I'm currently on "fountain pens."

Dorothy J. Gaiter & John Brecher's Love by the Glass: Tasting Notes from a Marriage

This book was recommended to me by a friend of a friend at a birthday party in the wee hours of the morning as we discussed to two very different red wines we were drinking. Gaiter and Brecher document the years of their relationship through the wines they drank and, later, their "Tastings" column for The Wall Street Journal. So far, it's been engaging and very personable, and I look forward to making my way through Louis Roederer Cristal 1974 and Franzia Chablis all the way to Collery Brut Champagne.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove's The Wisdom of Stability: Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture

For months, this title sat in my Amazon cart unpurchased. In a last-minute Christmas shopping spree, it made it to my abode and now sits on my makeshift bedside table. This topic falls particularly close to home as I contemplate joining church (officially) with a certain measure of wanderlust still pervading my heart and mind. I've not made it far so I don't have much to write except that my previous experience Wilson-Hartgrove's work has benn thought-provoking and challenging so I can only hope that this book will prove equally so.

Ruth Reichl's Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise

Recommended by the same friend of a friend at the same late-night birthday party, this book is recently arrived and not-yet-opened. It may have to wait until I'm through at least one of the other three, but I relish the idea of Reichl's adventures in the world of New York restaurants, as both herself and her many alternate identities.

- - -

2012 will be an adventurous year in books. My goal is to finish what books I have before buying more. In the past, that has meant a temporary (and short-lived and highly unsuccessful) moratorium on book-buying. Perhaps I'll just attempt to keep myself occupied with those hundreds of long-neglected titles on my shelves before moving on. Perhaps I'll have to avoid bookstores like the plague, as they say. We shall see.

In any case, there will be reading!