My Holiday Reading Wish List

With all my crazed rush with work this past year and a half, I must confess that I have indeed lagged behind on my reading. As with the way most resolutions usually go, my intentions to catch up on all my reading have tragically fallen by the wayside so far. It used to be that I almost always read a new book every two weeks, but not so in the recent past. That's such a shame considering the fact that I'm basically a literature aficionado who taught the great masters to both the undergraduate and graduate students back home. So it is with earnestness and a sincere hope of following up on my intentions that I have decided to pursue some serious reading this holiday season. Travel, parties, and the kid's birthday apart, here are the books I most wish to dig into.

As a lover of historical fiction, I've been dying to read Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. I've been reading up all the reviews of the book with avid interest, ever since the novel won the prestigious Booker Prize. If a novel is fat in size and is set in the historical past, then it's delightful fodder for me, and I have no doubt that I will relish this novel about the time of the Tudors and willingly hobnob with the likes of the inimitable Henry VIII, the charismatic Thomas Cromwell, and the sultry Anne Boleyn in sixteenth century England. Palace intrigues are quite irresistible to me, which is why I embrace this genre so willingly. So that's 651 pages of sheer holiday pleasure that I look forward to!

Next on my list is a book of the same genre, Annabel Lyon's The Golden Mean, in which she vividly captures the real-life teacher/student relationship between Aristotle and the 13-year-old son of King Philip of Macedon, who would soon grow up into Alexander the Great and conquer the world. My fascination for this book, which recently won the 2009 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, is that this is the writer's debut novel, her forte being short stories. Annabel Lyon teaches Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, and better still, she lives in my neighborhood in New Westminster...what's not to like about reading her latest book, might I ask! Come Christmas, I am so looking forward to be transported back into the ancient court in Pella, the capital of Macedon!

I have always been gripped by the powerful story telling of Dan Brown, and having thoroughly enjoyed his earlier Angels and Demons, and The Da Vinci Code, I'd love to read his latest, The Lost Symbol. Who could not have fallen in love with the suave, charismatic Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon! So it's perfectly understandable that I'd love to read about his latest exploits and try to get a sense of the ever so mysterious Freemasonry. I have a 16 day holiday break, and as ambitious as my reading wish list is, I'd be really happy if I could finish at least one of them. However, I intend buying all the three books and am determined to give them a go amid all the chaos of my angst-ridden everyday life!

Here's wishing myself some happy holiday reading!!!