special occasions and everyday books

I know I just mentioned my husband a couple posts ago (where I introduced his new book on Katherine Parr), but last week saw another cause for celebration in his career: he was appointed Assistant Professor of Historical and Theological Studies by the Board of Trustees at the seminary where he is currently serving a year-long term as Instructor.  Pretty cool, eh?  So to celebrate, we went up to Ann Arbor on Saturday and dodged the raindrops by hanging out at some of our favorite bookstores, including The Dawn Treader and Shaman Drum.  He bought a copy of John Polkinghorne’s Theology in the Context of Science.  I found a used but pristine hardcover of Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans, which I’ve wanted to read ever since I finished his haunting Never Let Me Go (review here).  We also planned to have lunch at Vinology, but apparently they no longer serve lunch on Saturdays and forgot to update their website—woops!  So we wandered a bit and found a cafe with a bit of vintage glamour and had a lovely meal after all.

It sounds like all I’ve been doing lately is celebrating (!), but mostly I’m dividing my time between working on short fiction and my other life of writing proposals and analyses for marketing clients and potential clients.  But I’m getting a little reading done, too.  Last week I started catching up on a couple series I like, reading An Incomplete Revenge (5th in Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs series) and Blue Shoes and Happiness (7th in Alexander McCall Smith’s #1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series).  I’m also still working through Tom Standage’s A History of the World in Six Glasses, about which I have a mixed reaction.  And I have a feeling I’ll be saying the same thing about Brad Gooch’s Flannery: A Life, which I’m about a third of the way through.  I love her work and find her life fascinating, but I’m not sure yet if I appreciate the biographer’s writing style.  I’ll let you know what I conclude.

What are all of you reading this week, and are they winners or duds?

13. May 2009 by Mindy
Categories: Currently reading, Your turn | 4 comments

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