SO busy lately—working, traveling (first to a conference and then to visit family), and remodeling the house, which, since spring has sprung, now also involves the perennial borders, courtyard, and vegetable garden!  But I am managing to keep at least one book going at a time.  On a road trip last week I enjoyed Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest: Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall; I picked this up from the library as part of my “deep reading” project (I’m still deep reading–reading everything by–Ishiguro, Shirley Hazzard, and Iris Murdoch).  I hope to review it here soon.  Also, in honor of Shakespeare’s birthday over the weekend, I’m working my way through James Shapiro’s A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (which has made me almost decide to add Shakespeare to the deep reading project–if I can find a really good annotated critical edition).  I’m still researching this possible book idea.  I just put two more fiction works on hold at the library, and I’m combing through various books on square foot gardening and building outdoor rooms.

So…what are you reading?  Do you tend to read more or less in the warmer months?

After weeks of remodeling and painting, my muscles needed a break.  So even though I have lots of work to do on the house, I gratefully have spent evenings over the last week or so catching up on all the reading I set aside when we moved in.  Right before the move, I had re-read A Wrinkle in Time and resolved to read, for the first time, the remaining four titles in that series.  Having done so now, I think I’m still partial to the first one, but all are that fun and characteristically L’Engle combination of easy reading yet thought provoking.  I’m looking forward to introducing my oldest niece to these soon.

Also at the time of the move, I was about halfway through C. S. Lewis’ The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (I read a great review of it at a blog inspired by the book) and am back to that now. It was his last book and the one that perhaps captures him in his most natural habitat as a classics prof, and it’s one of those books I read with a full packet of post-it tabs for marking excellent points or quotes I want to remember.

Thanks to my sister, who’s a fellow Maisie Dobbs fan, I also got to catch up on that series with the latest, Among the Mad.  This is a consistently interesting series, I have to say.  I was excited to learn that a new one, The Mapping of Love and Death, is due out in April.

And now I finally have my TBR stack unpacked and organized again, so as soon as I finish Lewis, I’ll be reaching for one of these — which one, I haven’t yet decided.

What are you currently reading?

Today marks the third Sunday of Advent, and I have to admit that waiting for the Christ Child is a bit overshadowed by waiting to take possession of our house.  We closed two weeks ago on our first house—after 15 years of renting near grad schools and temporary teaching assignments—and hope to begin moving next week (yes, best Christmas present ever)!  In the meantime (and in addition to packing), Brandon and I have been marking the season by reading aloud each evening from Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas.  This is our third year of observing Advent in the company of this book.  Each day features a selection from a great poet, theologian, or church father or mother, including Madeleine L’Engle, Thomas Merton, C.S. Lewis, Henri Nouwen, Kathleen Norris, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Annie Dillard, Sylvia Plath, Bernard of Clairvaux, and John Donne.  As in all collections, some of the selections are more striking or original than others, and we enjoy noting the thematic and stylistic elements that characterize each selection’s author.  On the whole, we have found this useful for quieting and focusing our thoughts and sparking a bit of conversation as we unwind from the day.  

Do you have any Advent traditions?  Any favorite books you return to in this season?

I’ve just completed my first 30 days on the new job.  I’ve also just realized that I’ve barely posted since I started it!  It’s typical of the way I work that I need to focus almost exclusively on the new thing until I find my sea legs, so to speak, and I think now that I’m heading into my second month I’m ready to re-incorporate my previous activities—like this blog.  My husband and I are also house hunting, and if you’ve done that you know how time-consuming it can be.  So I’ve had a lot going on recently but hope that I’m back to blogging more regularly.  Thanks to all for your patience! 

Obviously I haven’t had a lot of time for pleasure reading, though I did “devour” Julia Child’s My Life in France (I read it over my lunch breaks, and what I would have given to have Julia spice up my tuna sandwiches!) and I’m now partway through Iris Murdoch’s The Good Apprentice (my second foray into her fiction, after loving The Bell).  I’ve also been doing some reading for work (my job has to do with developing programs for a religious institution), including historian Diana Butler Bass’ Christianity for the Rest of Us and sociologist Christian Smith’s new release, Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults.

And for whatever reason, my BookMooch wishlist has been on more of a roll in the last few weeks, too, so to my TBR stack I’ve added: Rachael King’s The Sound of Butterflies, Natalie Goldberg’s Old Friend From Far Away, Iris Murdoch’s The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, and Karen Armstrong’s The Spiral Staircase.  Now, if only I could extend my lunch breaks!

What are you reading/buying/borrowing these days?

I’ve just looked over my list of this year’s reading so far, and I have to say, this has not been the year of fabulous debut novels that last year was.  I don’t mean that no fabulous debut novels have come out this year, just that I haven’t read many yet.  (The first one I read this year, Janna Levin’s A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines—which came out in 2007—still far out-paces all the new stuff I’ve read since.  But to be fair, the TBR stack is still toppling.)  Anyway, thinking about last year’s great reading bounty reminded me it’s time to pressure you again: Have you read Mischa Berlinski’s Fieldwork YET?  If not, take this as a friendly shove to get thee to the library (us Ohioans are particularly considering our library patronage these days in light of threatened budget cuts) and check this out today.  To (re-)whet your appetite, I refer you to my original comments:

“The narrator of American journalist Mischa Berlinski’s first novel Fieldwork is an American journalist named Mischa Berlinksi. When Berlinksi (the fictional one) is tipped off to a suicide in a Thai prison, he finds himself compelled to investigate a conflict between an anthropologist and a family of Christian missionaries that, decades ago, led to murder….” Read the rest of my review.