Book Review: The Gardens of Adonis: Spices in Greek Mythology by Marcel Detienne

Marcel Detienne’s The Gardens of Adonis: Spices in Greek Mythology was one of the first books I put on my list for the Read-A-Myth Challenge, because it seemed to combine three things I love to read about: food, history, and mythology. And it definitely did that. But despite the title, the emphasis of the book is more on the way the evolution of the myth of Adonis – a myth affirming the renewing cycle of birth and death that symbolizes the calendar year – reveals prevailing societal attitudes and beliefs in classical society.

For those of you who, like me, stowed your copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in a box in your parents’ basement after college with a promise to retrieve it “once you had the room for it,” only to have said box’s decaying contents hauled to a local used book seller when the parents finally retired and moved to Florida many years later, a refresher of the Adonis myth might be in order. In what is arguably the most famous version of the myth, Myrrha is cursed by the Furies to fall in love with her father. Her nurse helps her seduce him during the harvest festival of Ceres. When he realizes of whom he’s had carnal knowledge, he vows to kill his daughter. Myrrha flees Cyprus for Arabia (the place where spices come from) and wanders for nine months. She finally begs the gods to have mercy on her, and they grant her wish by turning her into a myrrh tree, (because after all, what could be more merciful than losing your body and gaining some foliage?). Realizing that Myrrha is pregnant, Lucina, the goddess of childbirth, goes and touches the myrrh tree and it splits open to spew forth Adonis*. Myrrha continues to cry sappy, scented tears for her lost son that are the basis for the perfume trade.

The young Adonis is so beautiful that Venus falls in love with him while he is still a child, but for some reason has Proserpina foster him in the Underworld. Once he becomes the most gorgeous man on the planet, both of the goddesses want him for their own, so Jupiter intervenes, and decides Venus can have him for a third of the year, Proserpina for another third, and that Adonis can choose for the last third. Like Paris, Adonis chooses beauty (Venus) over power (Proserpina), to predictably bad results – Proserpina sends a wild boar to kill him while he’s waiting around in a lettuce patch for Venus, providing a one-way tour of the Underworld for Adonis. Venus cries foul, and Jupiter intervenes by declaring Adonis dead only part-time, giving him to Venus for half the year (spring and summer) and to Proserpina for half the year (fall and winter).

So where do the spices of the title come in? According to Detienne, the true significance of the Adonis myth is its ability to link the botanical, classical world with the exoticism of the East, the place where spices, so significant for the culinary, ritual and sexual lives of the Greeks and later Romans, originate. But more than that, the Adonis myth provides a powerful reminder of the dangers of unbridled emotion in women, who are linked alternatively to both virtue (through Demeter, motherhood and the harvest) and licentiousness (through Venus, carnal love and spices) throughout the mythological cycle.

In fact, the title refers to gardens that were planted by the secret Adonis cults, groups of women who came together to mourn the death of Adonis by planting quick growing seeds, like herbs, that would sprout during the festival and quickly die, leaving behind their scent. This, of course, made Greek men like Plato very uncomfortable, because women were getting together without men – and you know how much trouble those women could get into when there wasn’t a man around to control things! (Who knew planting a terrarium could become a means of subverting hegemonic masculinity?)

In contrast to a festival such as the Thesmophoria which was celebrated in public and in very official manner, the Adonia took place in private, in some private house where women would meet together, each the confidant of the other’s secret love affairs, for a fleeting moment rejecting, in a way, a social order noted for its public and masculine character. pp. 129-130

This is a short book, especially by scholarly standards, but Detienne has a rambling style, shifting between myths and Greek sects with no introduction or explanation. I didn’t find it an easy read, but that may be a matter of style more than substance – I found myself having to put it down and pick it back up multiple times. It may just be a cultural thing – the book is translated from French, and it’s entirely possible that French readers do not crave the organization that an American reader would. But I certainly learned a lot, and I think those interested in ancient cultures, food history and feminist history will all find something to enjoy with this book.

This is my fifth book for the Read-A-Myth Challenge hosted by JoV and Bina (only one more to go!), and the last of the titles I committed to for the Dewey Decimal Challenge (even though I wound up reading a bunch of additional non-fiction for that challenge) hosted by Jen at The Introverted Reader. So thanks to all of you for hosting!

*I included a kind of creepy rendering of that moment from Franchesi. The screaming tree reminds me of the ones from The Wizard of Oz!

Book Review: Bossypants

Tina Fey’s Bossypants is very funny.

It’s so funny that I tried to read one particular passage out loud to my husband, and I couldn’t even finish it: I was laughing too hard. I may be wrong, but I don’t think he found this situation anywhere near as amusing as I did. And I don’t think he found the passage as funny either, once I finally did managed to sputter through it. It’s not because it wasn’t funny, but it wasn’t funny out of context. Which is, to be honest, the main challenge in reviewing this kind of book. I’m worried that I won’t be able to do it justice.

While she’s probably best known to Americans as “the woman who played Sarah Palin,” Fey really focuses more on her comedy writing than her acting. Writing for Saturday Night Live and producing 30 Rock seem to be her proudest achievements, which leads to one of the main strengths of the book. As a writer, her greatest talent lies in crystallizing the humor in everyday situations and events. In one particularly hilarious passage, she talks about the absurdity of getting a manicure:

The first few times you go, it can be intimidating. For starters, you may forget that you yourself speak English. You enter, smile, and nod at the manager. “Manicure-pedicure?” “Pick color,” she chirps back in her Korean accent. You pick out a couple of the three hundred shades of off-white. “This for manicure. This feet. Magazine okay?”Why are you talking like that? Now that you have racially embarrassed yourself, you are ready to squeeze into a seat at a tiny table and basically hold hands with a stranger for twenty minutes. (page 112)

I only had one real problem with the book (aside from the cover, that is, which I think is absolutely freakish). Fey’s humor is largely self-deprecating, and I get that. The problem is that she goes out of her way, over and over again, to point out what a really, really, really normal person she is. But come on, is her book on The New York Times Bestseller List because she’s just an average Jane? Of course not. Lots of people are funny. Lots of people were theater geeks as kids. But only a handful of people have Lorne Michaels’ cell phone number of speed dial. And he only picks up for a small portion of them. Lorne Michaels picks up for Tina Fey. That makes her a BIG deal. The “I’m-just-a-regular-girl-from-Philly” thing grated on me after a while.

I was glad that Fey dealt head-on with some of the sexism issues that go along with working in the entertainment business, although I thought she stopped short of calling a few people out, especially when she was discussing her tenure at Second City. Still, this is a very funny, very gutsy book. If Tina Fey makes you laugh, you really ought to read it. But those who love modern memoirs and those who enjoy popular culture will also find a lot to enjoy here.

Here’s another title for Introverted Jen’s Dewey Decimal Challenge. So thanks again for hosting the only challenge I have completed so far this year, Jen!

Book Review: Radio Shangri-La

Sometimes a book just speaks to you. For me, Lisa Napoli’s Radio Shangri-La: What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth did just that.

Of course, Napoli is a news producer, and she recognizes a good story when she sees one. And her story of helping out a tiny start-up radio station with a quirky cast of characters in the most remote capital city on the planet is a really good one. But what moves this book from really good to great is Napoli’s willingness to share her own fears and confront her own assumptions about culture and authenticity.

Napoli faces down her struggles and successes with equal clarity and frankness – even optimism:

No longer was I some burnt out career journalist with no idea how to escape the grind. No longer would I see myself as a failure as a woman, either, for not having had a successful long-term romantic partnership that yielded a happy home filled with children. This long-crafted definition of myself, of a nice gal who had made a mess of her life, started to melt away. Replacing it now was new vision of me: one part proud Ambassador of the United States, one part curious anthropologist, 100 percent human. pg. 31

Not that Napoli sugarcoats her times in Bhutan. Like the news professional she is she reports – and then contextualizes. For example, a Bhutanese monk, realizing she was a foreigner with means, suggested Napoli needed a puja, a series of ceremonial prayers by monks, to remove the obstacles in her life. The price he quoted was exorbitant – more than a month’s salary. But rather than focusing on how the monk tried to rip her off, she focused instead on how she and her co-workers, Pink and Ngawang, crossed their cultural divide to diffuse the situation gracefully:

“You can think about it,” said Pink sweetly.

“Well, I don’t really have to think about it. That’s quite expensive.”

Rinpoche chattered a response in Dzongkha [the national language of Tibet]. Ngawang relayed, “He says if you pay a hundred dollars, that will be okay.” Her smile told me she was on to the extortionate monk.

For a split second, I worried this Rinpoche might pray to the wrong deities if I refused. Make my obstacles more intense. Then I remembered that I didn’t believe in spells. pg. 85

There are funny and sad and frustrating moments in this book, as well as a wealth of information.* I teach a class in International Strategic Communication, and one of the things I talk to my students about is the importance of stepping outside of your own cultural framework. Napoli’s book illustrates all the difficulties of doing just that – and also all of the possibilities once you’ve done it. I’ll be assigning this book the next time I teach this class. And I can’t wait to read it again!

Here's another one for the Dewey Decimal Challenge, so thanks to Jen at The Introverted Reader for hosting that. It's definitely been my most successful challenge of the year. It also counts for the South Asian Reading Challenge. That one is finally coming along as well! Thanks to Swapna at S. Krishna Books for hosting.


*Who knew that UTEP's campus is inspired by Bhutanese architecture? Certainly not me!

Book Review: Pig Perfect

I love micro-histories, and I love food. So when my buddy Jess over at Desperado Penguin suggested Peter Kaminsky’s Pig Perfect: Encounters with Remarkable Swine and Some Great Ways to Cook Them as the subject our next simul-blog, I quickly signed on. Pork is a critical ingredient in at least two cuisines I adore* – Spain’s and the American South’s – and I’ve always wondered why the ham in those places just seems to taste better than the stuff I get at home.

Kaminsky explains that little mystery, and many more, in his comprehensive ode to the Ossabaw**, a compendium of all things porcine.

Let’s start with a fair warning: there is no doubt that some animals are necessarily harmed in the making of luscious pork loin and succulent hams. If you are uncomfortable with eating meat at all, and I know many people that are, you should probably avoid this book, not because it is ugly or graphic in any way, but because you have already made decisions that will make the logic of this book less tenable for you. I admire that.

But I should also add a statement of responsibility: the reason that people like Mario Batali and Michael Pollan have enthusiastically recommended this book is because it supports a kind of meat eating that is both sustainable and rare – the kind of meat-eating most likely practiced by humans for millennia. Pig Perfect, at its heart, is a tribute to flexitarianism. It agrees with animal rights activists that the current methods of mass producing animals are heinous, cruel, and environmentally destructive – that humans are simply getting far less out of livestock, energy-wise, than we are putting in. In fact, the environmental disasters that accompany large-scale pig-farming are well documented by Kaminsky.

Instead, Kaminsky looks at the paleo-biological, historical and social roots of humans’ love of pork. He also devotes a fascinating chapter to the pork taboos found in Jewish and Islamic cultures. Ultimately, Kaminsky comes down on the side of moderation, arguing that pigs and humans actually evolved to live together, and makes a compelling argument that Europe’s “primordial” forests were actually products of the human/pig/acorn relationship.

Roaming forest and field is what pigs were born to do. Long-legged pigs are the natural form of this animal, able to move nimbly through woodlands eating acorns and grasses. That they should be raised this way is as self-evident to me as the fact that cattle should be raised on grasslands and not in feedlots on corn and soy. Grazing (as well as rooting, in the case of pigs) is the natural way for these domesticated animals to sustain themselves and us. p. 112

I really liked most of Kaminsky’s message. I can’t say the same for the recipes, which just didn’t look so appetizing to me. And having persuasively advocated for people to be thoughtful consumers of pork products, I really would have appreciated a section on Internet resources for jamón ibérico or Southern hams. Seriously, why create a demand for something, and not help satisfy it? The people who helped him from the book, and might benefit from interest in their products, were poorly served by that omission.

Also, as a strategic communications professor, I was totally put off by his chapter called “The PR Guys,” in which he seemed to be amazed that one of the best studies of the pork industry in the US was produced by a PR firm –to which he attributes negative intentions, without any evidence on his part, even though he finds no fault with the history. It was disappointing to read something so totally biased from someone who prides himself of being a “journalist.” He seemed to miss the fact that half of the people that spoke to him for this book from various companies and farms were probably PR professionals, or performed PR functions in the companies in which they worked – um, that’s why they spoke to him, to get their story out there. Kaminsky seems to subscribe to the notion that it’s “information” when he likes you, and “PR” when he doesn’t. Sorry, he lost credibility with me at that point.

But, in general, I’ll say I agree with his main thesis – and I’ll mention that Kaminsky is not saying anything that Pollan and Mark Bittman haven’t been saying for some time: namely, that we have to be more responsible about what we eat. If we only eat a little meat, we can assure that it is of high quality, and insist that it is treated humanely. I can certainly appreciate that.

Another foodie simul-blog with the Desperado Penguin. Next time we need a title that doesn’t make me so hungry, Jess!

As a non-fiction title, this counts for the Dewey Decimal Challenge. Thanks to Jen at The Introverted Reader for hosting!

*I do share a lot of vegetarian and vegan recipes, but I hope I’ve always made it clear that I do eat a small amount of meat and fish. In fact, since I don’t eat a lot of meat, I go out of my way to enjoy what I do eat, by making sure it’s of high quality (usually organic) and sustainable, which is why this book was so interesting to me.

**An American pig breed that is apparently related to the original pigs left by the Spanish conquistadors and early missionaries. And also apparently, as Alton Brown might say, good eats.

Character Connection: Cleopatra

There are a lot of great reviews of Stacey Schiff’s Cleopatra: A Life already. I’ll join the chorus of those who think Schiff did a first-rate job of fitting together pieces of Cleopatra’s life that I didn’t know existed, and explaining along with them the geopolitical realities of the Romans’ Mediterranean world. I didn’t know what else I could actually add to the chorus. That’s why after struggling with this review for about a month, I finally decided to write it as a Character Connection.

Cleopatra, like Eleanor of Aquitaine more than a thousand years later, suffers in historical record for being a powerful woman whose legacy was recorded by men – men who had reason to hate her, to say the least. A bit depressing, isn’t it? Schiff’s biography does what so many other feminist-inspired works are forced to do: it imagines the day-to-day life and the motivations of a woman who was not privileged to tell her own story in her own way. Love the method or hate it, we already know Cleopatra’s story from the dominant, hegemonic vantage point: Vamp. Temptress. Usurper. Schiff reconceptualizes Cleopatra as something far more interesting: a woman. I’d call it a valiant effort.

Schiff doesn’t ignore primary accounts, but seeks to contextualize them, giving Cleopatra a complexity impossible to achieve by looking at those texts alone. At one point, she takes issue with Cleopatra’s legendary ability to “bewitch” men:

The consort of two men of voracious sexual appetite and innumerable sexual conquests, Cleopatra would go down in history as the snare, the delusion, the seductress. Citing her sexual prowess was evidently less discomfiting than acknowledging her intellectual gifts. In the same way it is easier to ascribe her power to magic than to love. We have evidence of neither, but the first can at least be explained; with magic one forfeits rather than loses the game. Kindle Location 2604

I read Stacey Schiff’s Cleopatra: A Life during the Prince William-Kate Middleton engagement flurry. What struck me most was how William and Kate seemed to be trying so hard to just be like any young couple. The emphasis of the entire public relations campaign – and this royal-commoner engagement represents a massive PR campaign – was on their “love story.” Why? Because a love story is the one thing that royals might have in common with people like us. Sure, making them seem normal might take away some of the monarchy’s mystique – but their PR pros know it also makes them less vulnerable to attack.

In the absence of a personal narrative – even one contrived for public consumption – Cleopatra was easy to vilify. If only Cleopatra had left us her story, others would not have been able to fill the void with venom so easily. I appreciated Schiff’s attempt to give Cleopatra some kind of voice. Like a lawyer making a case, Schiff examines the motives behind the claims made against her. She can’t call her client to the witness stand, so instead she pokes holes in the opposing case. It’s not conclusive in the end, but if posterity is Cleopatra’s jury, Schiff gives it something to ponder. I’d highly recommend this to lovers of history, and for those interested in feminist scholarship. Though well-documented, it is a pretty light read – you certainly don’t have to be a student of history to enjoy reading this book.

Thanks to Jen at the Introverted Reader for hosting Character Connection. And what do you know? She’s also hosting the Dewey Decimal Challenge, which I am currently tearing up, with yet another non-fiction read! So thanks again, Jen.

Book Review: The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

Remember how you felt the first time you read Homer? Stretched and slightly confused, but in a good way? Reading Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony gave me that feeling again – for the first time in a long time.

Calasso’s landmark work is not just a retelling of the Greek myths – although the myths are central to the book. Rather, Calasso puts the myths, and their evolution, into perspective. Starting with Zeus’ rape of Europa, Calasso explores the Greek world’s uneasy relationship with their gods, and thereby tries to explain their relationship to the world.

Calasso finds patterns and subtle differences in familiar stories that I never noticed before. He writes poetically and persuasively. Speaking of the disaster wrought by the necklace given to Harmony by her mother Aphrodite for her wedding, Calasso explains the irony:

What conclusions can we draw? To invite the gods ruins our relationship with them but sets history in motion. A life in which the gods are not invited isn’t worth living. It will be quieter, but there won’t be any stories. And you could suppose that these dangerous invitations were in fact contrived by the gods themselves, because the gods get bored with men who have no stories. (p. 387)

This is a very enjoyable but by no means light read. First, the text assumes a fundamental understanding of ancient Greece’s philosophical terms. For a mythologist, this is just jargon. For me, it required a lot of trips to the dictionary – along with Wikipedia, I must admit. Likewise, even though I have a pretty good background in Classics, there were many myths and characters – especially from the older Greek Pantheon – with which I was unfamiliar. Again, these required a good deal of cross reference to understand Calasso’s arguments. Lastly, there’s the problem of chronology – while the book has numbered chapters, the structure is hard to understand. Some paragraphs seemed to bear no relationship to the paragraphs before or after them. I think this was intentional on the author’s part, hoping to emulate a kind of discussion with the reader. But there were times when I simply found it disorienting.

I would urge anyone with an interest in Classics or Greek mythology to read this book. I read it looking for a non-fiction title about mythology for the Read-A-Myth Challenge, and I would highly recommend it to the other participants in that challenge. I would simply urge readers to be patient – it’s not a book to be devoured in a day or two. I found myself reading a section, reflecting, sometimes re-reading and referencing, and then finally moving on. There’s just so much information here that I think to plow through it would be a disservice to Calasso’s accomplishment. Reading this book really will give you a completely different perspective on myths you thought you knew.

Thanks so much to JoV and Bina for hosting the Read-A-Myth Challenge! If you have room in your challenge schedule, I think you'll learn a lot from this one!

Since Calasso's treatise is about Greek mythology, and not a retelling of myth, I think it also counts for the Dewey Decimal Challenge! Thanks to Jen for hosting.

Book Review: Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Biography

Many people who know my politics assume my daughter Eleanor is named after a famous American first lady. Far from it. She’s actually named for an infamous duchess: Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Of course, infamous is in the eye of the beholder, and virtually every contemporary account describing Eleanor’s escapades was inked by a man. Which is why I so appreciated reading Marion Meade’s Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Biography, a book that seeks to illuminate this amazing woman, both through painstaking research* and the intuitive piecing together of events that history left unrecorded. Meade’s attempt to see events from Eleanor’s perspective isn’t perfect, but it probably brings the reader closer to the truth than contemporary, male-oriented accounts ever could.

Brilliant, wealthy and impetuous, Eleanor – along with the land’s she herself controlled in Languedoc (now southern France) – represented the dynastic marital jackpot of twelfth century Christendom. Her father’s untimely death on the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela prompted her hasty marriage to Louis of France. Meade speculates on the rationale for their marital problems quite extensively – and I think pretty persuasively – based on the very different relationship she maintained with her second husband, Henry of England. Before she managed a divorce from Louis on the well-established grounds of consanguinity (a burden the Pope had already removed), she gave him two daughters, one of whom was Marie of Champagne, patron to Chretien de Troyes.

With her second husband she had many more children, including two kings of England, Richard the Lionhearted and the ignominious John, who eventually was forced by his unhappy nobles to sign the Magna Carta. But it certainly wasn’t a “love” match, and their family feuding eventually took on civil war proportions, with some of the children siding with Eleanor and the king of France against Henry.**

While Eleanor has mostly been framed by the size of her patrimony, the depth of her perfidy and the acts of her progeny, what struck me most in reading Meade’s biography was her prodigious energy! She never seemed to stop moving, covering thousands of miles throughout her realm, even in years when she was pregnant. She represented a gentle touch to her subjects, probably a much needed one, considering Henry’s heavy hand. And she didn’t slow down much over her long life. The woman was crossing the Pyrenees on horseback at close to 80 years old, securing a granddaughter’s marriage and sealing a peace treaty!

Meade paints what I consider a deserving portrait of Eleanor of Aquitaine. To do this, she imagines motives and considers alternatives to “common knowledge.” Since male historians, many of them clerics with axes to grind, are the sources of the “common knowledge” about Eleanor, I can’t see any way around it, although as someone trained in historical method, I can see the potential problems with this strategy. I think anyone interested in medieval history will thoroughly enjoy this book, as well as those interested in history from a feminist perspective.

This book counts for the Dewey Decimal Challenge. My non-fiction kick is tearing that one up, but I'm moving on to a bit of fiction at this point! Thanks to Jen at the Introverted Reader for hosting.

*You know a book is painstakingly researched when your Kindle says you’ve read 86% of the book, and you’ve already arrived at the footnotes!

** Kind of makes the squabbles at your last family gathering seem like a walk in the park, doesn’t it?

Lessons from the Bog People

If I had to conjure a coherent theme for my Winter Break reading, it would have to be “quirky non-fiction.” Cleopatra, Charlie Chan, and then this: Bog People.

It seems that nineteenth- and twentieth-century peat diggers throughout Northern Europe unearthed bodies so perfectly preserved that the local police were regularly called out to investigate possible murder. As it happens, the victims were ritually murdered – around 2,000 years ago. P.V. Glob’s The Bog People: Iron Age Man Preserved, written in 1965 and brought back into print by the New York Review Books imprint, was the first comprehensive archaeo-anthropological look at Denmark and Germany’s bog people, and the clues to Iron Age Germani society they provide.

P.V. Glob was Denmark’s Director General of Museums and Antiquities, as well as Director of the National Museum of Copenhagen, which afforded him particular access and insight into that country’s bog people. Some of the black and white photos throughout the book struck me as totally gruesome, but also fascinating in their detail, right down to a perfectly preserved Swabian hair curl, which had been described by Roman chroniclers, but not actually seen. (**Digression: I can’t get my hair to keep a curl for one swanky evening – apparently, some enterprising hairdresser needs to come up with a peat bog treatment for the wavily-challenged.**)

Think of this book as the literary equivalent of a very comprehensive National Geographic special, and you have the idea. Glob starts by describing the individual finds in detail, but by far the most interesting part of the book is the last third, when Glob uses the mummies to piece together the day-to-day life of Denmark’s Iron Age society, as well as speculating very convincingly about the meanings of these particular deaths.

For me, it was the photo of an intricately knit bonnet that really brought the dichotomies of Iron Age society home – it’s impossible to call a society that produced something so beautiful, without a written pattern or a machine, “barbaric.” And yet ritual sacrifice was clearly part of the fabric of their lives. How much have we changed?

The Bog People: Iron Age Man Preserved is a good, nerdy read. Highly recommended for readers who love anthropology and archaeology, readers who enjoy nonfiction, and who enjoy reading about ancient history. The pictures are pretty graphic, though, so it’s not the kind of thing I’d leave on a table for very sensitive little children to find.

This book counts for the Dewey Decimal Challenge -- if you like reading nonfiction, you should check it out over at The Introverted Reader. Thanks to Jen for hosting!

Looking Forward and Back on the Blogging Thing

For me, 2010 will definitely be remembered as the year I discovered blogging. Back in April, when I started Col Reads, my idea was pretty simple: I wanted a place for my reviews for the What's in a Name 3 Challenge. But clicking on a just a few links to read reviews turned into a far more interesting proposition, as I found other book bloggers with similar interests and tastes. Now reading book blogs and participating in memes is part of my weekly routine, and for the most part it's been very rewarding -- especially meeting so many wonderful, bookish people.

With 2011 looming, I took a little break last week to enjoy time with my family and friends. I've also been thinking about what I wanted to do with this little piece of internet real estate in the coming year. Here are some plans:

More and shorter reviews: Some books deserve a long review -- others, not so much. I'm going to try for pithy this year, rather than comprehensive.

More creativity: I think I'm going to work on the look of the blog. Sounds like a summer project, but it's on my mind.

More adventure: I've joined a number of challenges that will push me to read from different literary traditions. Some of the best books I read in 2010 were not ones I would have picked up on my own. But Bellezza's Japanese Literature Challenge introduced me to Kitchen. Amy's Scandinavian Challenge introduced me to The Summer Book. I'm looking forward to more of those "a-ha" moments this year.

Less pressure: This is for fun. I have a day job. If blogging becomes a chore, why do it?

With all that in mind, here's the current Challenge Line-up (complete book plans are in the Reading Challenges tab). I'll probably add a few more as the year goes on. Looks like a lot, but I'm only doing a few books in each!