February reading

Started Not a Tame Lion: The Spiritual Legacy of C.S. Lewis by Terry Glaspey. Part of the Leaders in Action series, I've had this book awhile but I don't think I've ever read it before.

Update:

Never finished the Glaspey book. I had trouble getting into it -- not because of the subject but because of the style. It's really an overview and the chapters are so short (about a page and a half each) and topical that just as it gets interesting he ends the chapter and moves on to another. The one good thing about it is the extensive bibliography. Hopefully someday I can read a couple of the things he lists there.

I bought the first three books of Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series to take to Houston with me, but I had to leave the second and third books behind. Actually, I had to leave behind at least half a dozen books I'd meant to take with me, but two of them were these. After finishing the first I was able to pick up the second (Tears of the Giraffe) from MD Anderson's patient/family library. Really liked these books -- strong sense of place and people that comes across really well.

I've been wanting to read Barbara Kingsolver ever since Wendell Berry mentioned her at the conference we attended in Bristol, TN, a couple of years ago, so I was pleased to see one of her novels at the M.D. Anderson library, The Bean Tree. I enjoyed reading it -- it kept me guessing -- but I wish she weren't so... vulgar. Well, her main characters were lower-class rural people so maybe that's normal.

Another find from the hospital library was a collection of short stories by Truman Capote, whom I've never read before. His prose is beautiful -- not a single word out of place. "Breakfast at Tiffany's" is a little different from the movie -- rougher, more squalid. I didn't like either of the next two stories, "House of Flowers" and "Diamond Guitar," but was refreshing to read such excellent writing. The last one, though, "A Christmas Memory," was perfect in every way.

I began P.D. James's Death in Holy Orders but only got as far as the third chapter before it was time for me to fly home. It was the first of hers I've ever read, and I liked it. Slow at the start, but gradually drawing you in... the kind of book I like.