To 10 Books of 2010

Here are my top 10 favorite books that I read in 2010, for the Saturday Review of Books at Semicolon. These are in no particular order. I think my very favorite book of the year was A Homemade Life, by Molly Wizenberg. This book contains essays about food and family, and each essay comes with a recipe. The writing was fabulous, and I'm a bit obsessed with food and recipes, so I really enjoyed this book! And doesn't it have a gorgeous cover?

1. Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home, Rhoda Janzen
2. A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes From My Kitchen Table, Molly Wizenberg
3. My Life in France, Julia Child, with Alex Prud'homme
4. Iodine, Haven Kimmel
5. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, May Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
6. The Fortieth Day, Poems by Kazim Ali
7. Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet, Christian Wiman
8. Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, Mark Doty
9.  Leaping Poetry, Robert Bly
10. Possession, A.S. Byatt

2011 Book Challenge

For 2010 I joined a book challenge to read 100 books for the year, and only made it to 36. It was one of my lowest years ever for number of books read, due to major life changes and a return to the workplace. My daughter, however, read more than 100 books for this challenge. This year I'm going to sign up for a challenge that looks more doable. Home Girl's Book Blog is having a Support Your Local Library challenge. I can decide to read 12, 25, 15 or 100 books from my local library during 2011. I think I should pick 12, what do you think? I can always read more than that if I'm able, and then I'll feel really good about myself! I'll be keeping a list of the library books I've read in this post, below.

1. The Last Time I Saw You, Elizabeth Berg. A typical Elizabeth Berg book -- light reading, but relatively well-written and with a story that carries you along. This one follows several characters who are about to attend their last high school reunion.
2. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Aimee Bender. This book is about a girl who can taste people's emotions in the food that they make. A fascinating, unusual book that flirts at the edges of science fiction in the form of the main character's brother, who also has some "special" powers.
3. Addition, Toni Jordan. Another surprising and unusual book, like nothing I've ever read before. I look for that in books! This follows a chapter in the life of a woman who suffers from OCD. Her particular form of OCD leads her to count everything that she does. Her life has become very narrow and lonely because of her disorder, but she encounters some unlikely turns of event.
4. 703: How I Lost More Than a Quarter Ton and Gained a Life, Nancy Makin. This memoir is so poorly written, that I wouldn't have finished it except that the story kept me going along. It's an interesting story, I just wish it had been written better. Also, watch out for long preachy passages musing on what she's learned about her experiences.
5. Room, Emma Donoghue.
6. Girls on the Edge: The Four Factors Driving the New Crisis for Girls, Leonard Sax
7. The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels, Ree Drummond
8. The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Reader in Every Child, Donalyn Miller
9. I Am Hutterite: The fascinating true story of a young woman's journey to reclaim her heritage, Mary-Ann Kirkby
10. Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant, Daniel Tammett
11. The Winter of Our Disconnect: How Three Totally Wired Teenagers (and a Mother Who Slept with Her iPhone) Pulled the Plug on Their Technology and Lived to Tell the Tale, Susan Maushart
12. Lost and Found, Geneen Roth
13. Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, Gabrielle Hamilton
14. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Amy Chua
15. Growing Up Amish, Ira Wagler
16. State of Wonder, Ann Patchett
17. The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides
18. The Family Fang, Kevin Wilson
19. The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach

It's Monday, What Are You Reading?

Books Completed Last Week
Possession, by A.S. Byatt. I've read this at least one other time before, and seen the movie twice. It's one of my favorite books of the last century. A fascinating literary mystery that involves two scholars attempting to solve the mystery of two dead poets who appeared to have an as before unknown love relationship with one another. It took me months to finish this book -- it's not an easy read, but a satisfying one. Try it if you are a literature geek and love a good intellectual/literary thriller. Last week I also read The Color of Water, by James McBride. I had to read this book for a college class I'm teaching (the college class is the reason this blog has been on hiatus for awhile -- I've been too busy learning how to teach college!). It's one of the most fascinating memoirs I've ever read, about a black man and his white mother. The story is an intriguing one, and it's well written. It's one of those books that makes me want to head out to the library and check out all the books I can find by the author!

Books I'm Currently Reading
The Color of Water was the last book I had to read for my class this semester, so now I'm going a bit crazy reading books on my own. I've got a bunch going at once: Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, by Rhonda Janzen, which is about a woman who grew up Mennonite and returns to the community of her youth after a divorce. So far this book is funny and poignant, and I like it a lot. I'm also reading The Ghost of Meter, by Annie Finch, which is a highly technical book about poetic craft; The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Caslas, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece, by Eric Siblin; Sonnets from the Portuguese, by Elizabeth Barret Browning; and What the Best College Teachers Do, by Ken Bain. Whew. It'll take me awhile to finish all these I'm sure, especially with finals coming up and grades due!

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It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

Books Completed Last Week

Last week I finished The Duggars: 20 and Counting, by Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar. Like many people in America who have small families, I find the Duggars and their 18 children quite fascinating. I picked up the book because I found the TV show rather boring and shallow, and I hoped to discover more in-depth information in the book. Unfortunately I didn't really find that. Sure, the book gives more details about the Duggars lives, but I guess I was looking for something more internal. Or maybe that's not quite right. Maybe something more, um ... real? Some evidence that the Duggars aren't completely perfect and happy all the time. That they have conflicts and problems, just like everyone else. Unfortunately the book only hints vaguely at such things, and focuses on the happy, happy, happy! Oh, and one fact in particular bothered me in the book. The Duggars state that they are not particularly well-off financially, yet they go on to say that they spend $3000 a month just on groceries. Wow! Unless they don't spend much money on anything else, I think they have to be pretty well-off to be able to afford that.

Last week I also read The Backyard Homestead, edited by Carleen Madigan. Well, I didn't actually "read" the whole book, but read some parts and skimmed through others. This is more of a resource book than a read-through book, and wow is there a lot of great information in here, everything from starting seeds to butchering chickens. As a fledgling homesteader myself, I've added it to my Amazon wishlist. I need to own this book.

Books I'm Currently Reading
This week I'm reading The Children's Book, by A.S. Byatt. It's an interesting book, and very complicated and disturbing, which is typical of A.S. Byatt. It's also nearly 700 pages long and very dense, so I'm not sure how long it'll take for me to read it.

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Review: Simple Country Wisdom: 501 Old-Fashioned Ideas to Simplify Your Life, Susan Waggoner. Hearst Books, 2009

I can't believe how beautiful this book is! It's full of warm, welcoming pictures, has thick glossy paper, and a lovely font. Even the size and feel of the book is aesthetically pleasing. I can't describe why, exactly, but the book just feels good in my hands. It even smells good! Every time I sat down with this book, I felt filled with a warm, pleasant feeling. Even just looking at the cover makes me smile.

Oh, I also found plenty of helpful tips inside. The book is set up by topic, and each topic contains short household hints, usually about one paragraph. I found the section on natural pest control particularly interesting, since I'm about to expand my garden in an attempt to grow lots of vegetables. There are plenty of other great topics too: laundry, cleaning, clutter control, cooking, etc. My only trouble with the book is the phrase "old-fashioned, " which occurs the title. I expected to find the type of tips my grandma, or my great-grandma would have given me about running a household. However, the book sticks primarily to modern tips. Not that there's anything wrong with that -- it just wasn't what I expected.

Two Short Reviews

I finished two books this week, but I had to return them before I had time to write reviews, so I'm afraid these won't be very thorough. The books were Homeschool Open House, by Nancy Lande and Wounded By School, by Kirsten Olson. In Homeschool Open House, Nancy Lande interviewed 55 homeschooling families about how they "do school." Overall I found the book pretty interesting, and I discovered a few ideas that I'd like to try at my house. But the book was very long, and I found myself skimming parts of it. Some families were just so different from my own, I couldn't relate to their lives. But still, a good read. I found books like this especially helpful when I was first starting out as a homeschooler, since I didn't know what sort of shape it would take in my own house and I needed lots of guidance and advice.

Wounded by School is a school reform book. While homeschooling is mentioned, briefly, the bulk of the book focuses on ways in which public school wounds children, and then suggests possible solutions. I found myself relating to a lot of things in this book, since I feel I'm still recovering from wounds I received from my public education. Everything from the more obvious wounds like teasing, bullying, and feeling invisible, to more subtle wounds such as boredom and the stifling of the joy inherent in learning. Before reading this book, I assumed that I was in a small minority of people who felt "wounded by school," but this book suggests otherwise. The author found many people from all walks of life who have been damaged by school. I admire the author's wish to change that by reforming public education, but I remain skeptical as to whether that is really possible. There are a few schools doing so in radical ways (see in particular, http://www.newcountryschool.com/), but to me, the size of the institution, the federally mandated rules and testing, and the red tape make it impossible to reform it on a grand scale.

Teaser Tuesday

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

1. Grab your current read
2. Open to a random page
3. Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
4. BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
5. Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

My Teaser: This book is written for any student who senses he or she may have been wounded by school, or is becoming reluctant to learn at school, and wants to understand more about this. (Are there people like me?)

Wounded by School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and Standing Up to Old School Culture, by Kirsten Olson