Reading 2009

Begun in 2009 but not finished
Death in Holy Orders, P.D. James; finished in 2010
The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton
Poetic Knowledge, James Taylor
Family-Friendly Farming, Joel Salatin
The Trial and Death of Socrates: Four Dialogues, Plato
A Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman
The Greek Way, Edith Hamilton
On Poetics, Aristotle
What Are People For?, Wendell Berry

* = reread

December
* Goodbye, Mr. Chips, James Hilton; love this story

Maskerade, Terry Pratchett; quircky British humour

Half Magic, Edward Eager

* Long, Dark, Tea-Time of the Soul, Douglas Adams

All Flesh Is Grass, Gene Logsdon

November
Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Josef Pieper

October
The Little White Horse, Elizabeth Gouge; love all her stories

The Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy; a delight reading craftsmanship of this excellence, but the story was brutal and heart-breaking, a little like reading Truman Capote; would like to read more by him

The White Horse King, Ben Merkle; good intro to Alfred the Great with an excellent bibliography

* The Scarlet Pimpernel, Baroness Orczy; How do I love thee? Let me count the ways...

September
The Art of Civilized Conversation, Margaret Shepherd; good book but I'll have to reread it and put it into practice

* Persuasion, Jane Austen

August
* "The Gold-Bug," Edgar Allen Poe
* "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," Edgar Allen Poe

* A World Lost, Wendell Berry; my favorite Berry novel... I think

Life, Inc., Douglas Rushkoff; how our lives have been corporatized; important book

July
Eifelheim, Michael Flynn; science fiction involving a medieval German town that disappeared and an historian and a scientist who try to discover why; definitely want to read this again -- very well done literary SF, if you can believe such a thing exists

Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl, N.D. Wilson

The Echo of Greece, Edith Hamilton

Crossfire Trail, Louis L'Amour

Summer of my German Soldier, Bettie Greene


June
* Leave it to Psmith, P.G. Wodehouse; still my favorite Wodehouse

* Against Christianity, Peter Leithart

My Antonia, Willa Cather

Breathmarks: Haiku to Read in the Dark, Gary Hotham; read this little volume through two or three times, one or two poems a day

"Trifles," Susan Glaspell, one-act play; murder mystery


May
Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education, David Hicks; really good -- I think I should read it yearly

* Howl's Moving Castle, Diana Wynne Jones; delightful, haven't gotten tired of it yet

PACE: Rediscover your Native Fitness, Al Sears; helpful info on alternating low-intensity activity with high-intensity (walk/sprint/walk), it really helped me increase my stamina

* "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," Ernest Hemingway

* "Barn Burning," William Faulkner

* "Revelation," Flannery O'Connor