Books I received for Christmas:

Dark Water: Art, Disaster and Redemption in Florence by Robert Clark (saw this at my local indy and was mighty curious, especially after reading the novel The Sixteen Pleasures many years ago which was set in the same time and place.)

Finding Everett Ruess by David Roberts (tons of great reviews and I'm very intrigued by Ruess).

Stylelikeu by Elisa Goodkind & Lily Mandelbaum (pretty, funky, cool)

Satchmo: The Wonderful World and Art of Louis Armstrong (Have you seen this? It is gorgeous - I've wanted it for so long and I'm loving it.)

The Lost Photographs of Captain Scott by David Wilson (Do I even have to explain why I wanted this one?)

Lincoln's Dreams by Connie Willis (Somehow I missed reading this and I don't know why. Anyway, really excited to have it now.)

Type I Teens: A Guide to Managing Your Life With Diabetes (Trying to get a jump on when the boy enters his teen years.) (There are very few books written for older kids with Type 1.)

We Bought a Zoo by Benjamin Mee (The book, not the movie!)

The Log From the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck (Haven't read it and want to.)

Salvage King, Ya by Mark Anthony Jarman (Tagline: "...imagine Hunter S. Thompson on hockey skates.")

Claire Dewitt and the City of the Dead by Sara Gran (Has anyone read this and not raved about it? It's a Gwenda rec!)

You Think That's Bad by Jim Shepard (All that I have heard are good things about this collection which doesn't surprise me as Shepard is such a great writer. I'm really interested to see what he has done.)

Greetings From the Salton Sea by Kim Stringfellow (I have been weirdly fascinated by the Salton Sea forever - no idea why as I have no geographical or emotional attachment to it at all. But I saw this mentioned in Orion magazine and the pictures looked so amazing that I had to have it. Just paging through it's really really cool.)

And also a subscription to Garden & Gun! Huzzah!

Now, for the future:

In case you hadn't heard - Princeton Architectural Press has Up on the Roof: New York's Hidden Skyline Spaces by Alex MacLean due out this spring. I'd love to see this type of book for cities all over the world - a real peek at how folks are using urban spaces to bring gardens (and more) into the city. (There are even windmills! How cool is that?)

Quick thoughts on recent reads:

Ghosts by Daylight: A Memoir of War & Love by Janine Di Giovanni is a hard book to walk away from it. Disjointed at some points and certainly a jumpy narrative it is nonetheless about as brutal a story you're going to get from a war correspondent who is trying to adjust to "real life". The author and her husband (he also spent years covering wars) want to leave combat behind. They get married, they move to Paris (so they can not be afraid in their beds) and they have a child (after several miscarriages and a very difficult pregnancy). But they just can't seem to breakaway and while she resists the most, he struggles with an epic bout of PTSD and addiction. They love each other through it all (and adore their son) but can't beat it together - they are part and parcel of their war addiction. Di Giovanni writes about all of this and more but mostly what her book captures is the power of memory and how it never truly lets you go. (I confess I bought the book from amazon.uk because I hated the US cover so much. Clearly I am still totally in the "book as object camp".)

Matt Phelan's graphic novel Around the World is simply wonderful. Published for teens, it is a must read for adults as well. It includes three stories on Thomas Stevens who biked around the world in 1884, Nellie Bly, who traveled the world in less than 80 days and Joshua Slocum's boat journey around the world in 1895. (Obviously Stevens & Slocum took more than one year.) The artwork is first rate, the stories are clear and compelling and emotional and in particular Slocum's tale is heart-rendering. This is what the graphic novels is all about and I can't wait to review it more formally in my Feb column.

I'm still not sure how I feel about Daphne by Justine Picardie. It was certainly well written and it kept my attention but I'm not quite sure that I connected with it as much as I could have. It is a bit like Possession in that there is a literary mystery but it is very slight and that is what bothered me the most. In the past we have Daphne du Maurier trying to cope with the unraveling of her marriage, more than a few family ghosts and the difficulty of her next book which is about Branwell Bronte. In researching Branwell she corresponds with a gentleman who was obsessed with proving he was as great an author as his sisters but as the reader quickly learns this man also stole a quantity of Bronte materials from several collections. This part is very true - both the thefts and du Maurier's book. Picardie imagines much of what was going on in their minds however as well as creating a contemporary character who is obsessed with the Brontes and du Maurier and dealing with her own issues. This character was the weakest to me as she never really proved herself - showed why she cared so much about any of this. And the mystery, which is also true about a lost notebook of Emily Bronte's poems, is really weak for me as well. I just felt like it needed to be one thing or another and the jumping back and forth in time was a fine idea but I don't think that worked here as well as it could either. I don't know. If you are interested in Daphne or the Brontes at all then I heartily recommend the book but if you want a true literary mystery then this will leave you a bit disappointed.

And that is all for this very moment but much more to come. Hope your 2012 is starting well!

[That's the British cover for Ghosts by Daylight - see The Telegraph review here.]