It’s December 28th and here’s a list of what Santa dropped off at our house this year.

• Heirloom: Notes from an Accidental Tomato Farmer by Tim Stark – So far I’m really enjoying this book.  Basically, Stark began farming heirloom tomatoes in Pennsylvania and selling them to chefs at NYC’s Union Square Greenmarket.  Interesting reading particularly for vegetable gardeners.  Fortuitously, my Seed Savers Exchange catalog arrived a few weeks ago and March is right around the corner!  A great way to escape the ice and snow.

• The Ventriloquist’s Tale by Pauline Melville – I am so excited about this book!  It was Melville’s first novel and winner of the 1997 Whitbread First Novel Award.  I took a peek at the Prologue, which establishes the narrator in a way that is surprisingly similar to Eating Air.

• Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn – A recent issue of The New York Review of Books had an article on this book which caught my interest.  The authors are a husband & wife journalist (and Pulitzer winning) team who in their travels discovered that  one of the things struggling countries have in common is the oppression of women.   In Half the Sky they explain how this kind of attitude toward women is not only morally wrong, but economically ruinous.

• Plagues & Peoples by William H. McNeill – Originally published in 1976, Plagues & Peoples examines the effect of diseases (particularly large scale outbreaks) on history & society.   It’s covered with excerpts of rave reviews from the likes of The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books & the Washington Post.   This is a great additional to my library’s Disease shelf.

• Interaction of Color: New Complete Edition by Josef Albers – A surprise Christmas gift, I’ve already begun flipping through the pages – but I anticipate the need for an extended sit down before I’m comfortable reviewing this gem.  The color illustrations are gorgeous and I won’t even get into how beautiful the books are, by themselves, in the slipcase.  This is one of those books that moves into the realm of an object, and if you have the opportunity to look one over in person (regardless of whether you are interested in art books) I definitely recommend doing so.

Books given as gifts are my favorite things, if only because they show as much about how the giver’s mind works as they do about the receiver’s tastes.  I’ve never been that big of a fan of the end of the year/end of the decade lists, because, let’s face it – the same books are pretty much repeated again and again.  But a list of the books exchanged over the Holidays… that’s always going to turn up something new.

Leave a comment below with what turned up under your tree (or other appropriate holiday accessory) this year…  And if you’re interested in what everyone else is reading the Monday after Christmas, stop by J. Kaye’s Book Blog for the weekly meme.