My December Books and my Annual Reading Recap Post

 Hi everyone. 

Today's post is my December 2023 book list, as well my yearly reading wrap up with it.  I really enjoyed my December books, and there was quite a nice variety of genres.

Also I kind of cheated at the end of the month. When I started a book the week  before Christmas, I noticed  that it was my  98th  book. I don't read  to reach a certain number of books , but for the last several years I have had this "goal" that maybe I could read 100 books in a calendar year. This year I was so close. Instead of starting  a big book, I chose a couple of short volumes that I could quickly get through so finally I could say I read 100 books in 2023. 🥳 🥂 ❤

I'll also warn you, it's a rather long post today as I've also done my yearly reading wrap up, which may or may not be of any interest to you.

December BOOKS:

I listened to this book, Mr. Dicken and his Carol, several years ago and enjoyed it very much.  Since I was feeling in a holiday mood I decided to relisten to it .

Charles Dickens' family is getting ready for  Christmas. However,  his publishers are  not  happy with his latest book  (published in serialized parts).  They want a Christmas story from him  ready to publish and be read on Christmas Eve   He’s not sure if he can do that, especially since it is already November.  The problem is Dickens can't really say no to his publisher as he needs the cash in order to give his family the Christmas they are all expecting.

I enjoyed how this book follows Dickens' path to writing a Christmas Carol. Please note, this is a work of fiction, and it does not have any historical merit when it comes to writing that famous story. However, it has the fantastic atmosphere of Victorian London,especially at Christmas time, and includes many characters that are true in Dickens life. But it is also a fantasy novel, since his publishers want ghosts and other scary characters. There are some fun little twists like the woman in the purple cloak.

 If you're looking for an enjoyable and light read with lots of Victorian Christmas charm, then I recommend this book.

My next book, A Wonderful Woof, is a Chet and Bernie mystery. These Chet and Bernie books are always fun to read. Chet is that cute black dog (with one white ear) you see on the cover; he's a police canine training school reject.  Bernie is his owner. Bernie runs the Little Detective Agency with Chet by his side. Chet's job is to tell the story, through the dog's eyes, so you can just imagine how that story progresses. 😀

I read the first couple of these books in this series last year, and this time I skipped to book 12 because I wanted a Christmas themed story. It's actually a story that happens during the holidays, but the story itself isn't about Christmas. It is a very enjoyable and light read, and just like the other books it made fairly fast reading and had lots of laugh out loud moments. Although a couple things had happened during the last 9 books that were mentioned, I was still able to read and follow this book without any problems. 

This time someone knocks on Bernie's door and asks him to take a case. Bernie turns it down and sends the man over to his friend Victor Klovsky. Victor is trying to get his detective agency up and running, but when he takes on this man as a client, Victor goes missing. Then Victor's Mom calls Bernie, which is how Bernie  and Chet get on the case. Add in a missing Caravaggio painting and a rich but unscrupulous European collector, and you have a good storyline. 

I love how Chet tells the story. Spencer Quinn (the author) has that dog think down. I know none of us know how a dog  actually thinks, but I think most of us who have had dogs can agree that Chet sounds like a  dog. One of the best things about owning a dog is how they can make you laugh, just like Chet in this book does.

I listened to my next book, These Precious Days, written and read by Ann Patchett. This book is a collection of personal essays that are autobiographical in style.

What a lovely collection this is. Patchett is a gifted writer, and in this book you learn about her love for knitting, her days in graduate school, how she connected to Tom Hanks (who read her book The Dutch House), all about the cover of The Dutch House, about flying in planes, about dogs,  about being childless, and many other topics. This book is a richly written read.

I actually don't know what else to say about it. I will mention  I was bawling my eyes out at the end of the book, mainly because Patchett is such a great writer so you, as the reader, get very involved with her life based on these essays. Just read this book. I highly recommend it, and I'm not usually an essay reader.

(Thanks Jeanie for the suggestion too.)

I had read a couple of other books by Arial Lawhon and liked them, so when I read she had a new book out and that it was set in Maine, I decided it would be a good choice for my next book . This setting is not only Maine, but it is winter in 1789.

Martha Ballard lived in Hallowell, Maine. She is a mid-wife and healer. She is called out one day to look at a body that was  found frozen in some newly forming river ice. The body is of one of the men who were accused of raping the local minister's wife a few months earlier. Martha keeps a journal of her days, and since she cared for the woman after the rape, she is called to the trial.  However, the local doctor looks at the body and disagrees with  Martha, which then sets up an interesting situation in this small frontier community.  

This story is based on a real mid-wife/healer really named Martha Ballard who (as Amazon's book write up says) "defied the legal system and wrote herself into history".  Ballard really kept a journal. Most of the characters in this story were actual people,  as are many of the events. Although Ballard's journal was very factual so much of the actual story is created by the author because the journal would not be enough to tell a rich story.

What is also interesting is that I have book that's been sitting for a long time on my bookshelf by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich which is about this actual woman and the 30 year journal she wrote and was then passed down through her family before it was given to the State Library of Maine. More so, Martha was born and grew up in a town in Massachusetts not far from where I grew up, and according to Wikipedia, was a not too distance relation to Clara Barton (founder of the American Red Cross) as Martha's sister was the grandmother of Barton.  Growing up, I had family who literally lived just a few driveways down from the Clara Barton homestead.  This  peripheral information made this book even more interesting. There's a good possibility you might see Ulrich's book on next year's reading list.

I loved this book, and the ending was one of those where you couldn't stop reading. I also like how Lawhon writes a postlude at the end of her books about what is historical and what is fiction. This is another book I highly recommend.

Living in a large area of oak trees (mostly red, some white), when I saw this book I knew I had to read it. In fact, I listened to it, but it is a book I would like to actually have in old fashioned paper form.  What an informative book, and even with my oak pollen allergies and all the leaves my yard gets blanketed in each autumn, my appreciation of these trees has grown even more than it was before. 

Written with scientific citations, this book looks not only at the biology of an oak tree, but also at the ecology of places with oak trees. And it spends a lot of time discussing insects that inhabit oaks, as well the birds who live in the oak trees and feed off those insects. This is one reason why I am keeping my eyes open for an actual paper copy of the book. There were a lot of insects mentioned, and although some of the names were familiar (stick bug, katydid), specific species and some of  the other insects  were not familiar to me.

I did enjoy reading about how ecologically important oaks are, and I am thankful that I live in a big stand of oaks, not just on my property, but in the surrounding properties. It probably explains why I feel like I live in a little oasis of many types of insects, birds and plant life.  Now, if only others would plant oak trees to help the insect and bird population. I say that because most variety of insect life are on oaks than on other species of trees in the United States and Canada.

My next book  was this fictional story about a segment of Agatha Christie's life.

This book starts off with Agatha Christie in 1963. A man from the Middle East comes to her home with a couple of old photos from the 1920's. Agatha is in one of the photos, and she hints there is a story there behind this. The book then goes back to 1928, when we meet a newly divorced Agatha, about to take her first solo trip to the Middle East. She is going by a pseudonym, Mary Miller. There are 2 other main characters also. One is Katharine, a widow who works in the Middle Eastern part of the British Museum and is on her way to Baghdad to get married to an archaeologist. The other character is Nancy, who is leaving her husband. Both women are also headed for the Middle East on the Orient Express with Christie. 

The 3 women become acquainted, and the story is woven around them as they become connected during their time together not only on the Orient Express but also in the Middle East. Christie also meets Max Mallowan, who will later become her second husband. There are secrets not being told between the 3 women, and there is enough intrigue to make you want to read further in this book. One part of this story I really loved is how the author introduces in so many places that Christie most likely visited during her trip(s) to that area. There is a lot of culture and archaeology.

I enjoyed this book. The ending was only partly unexpected, but it didn’t detract from the overall story. This is a fictional tale, and the author includes a short what is true/ what is not true in a postscript, including the fact that time was condensed and that Christie did not actually meet her second husband during this journey. This was also a light and interesting read.

If I could meet people from the past, 3 names that pop quickly into my head  are Agatha Christie, Julia Child and Eleanor Roosevelt.  This short (a 5+ hour listen) little book was written by Eleanor late in her life (at age 76) and is based on some of the questions she received in letters.

Roosevelt doesn't answer the letters directly, but instead lumps general questions under big topics.  Examples of these topics include maturity, dealing with fear and learning to learn. She doesn't reference any specific letters, but does answer  general questions and also talks about her life  in regards to the topic. Overall, she discusses how everyone is in charge of their own life and who they will become, something she learned as  time in her own life went on.

This is an insightful little volume. I'm not sure there is anything earth-shattering new in it, but I enjoyed how she organized it. I especially enjoyed Eleanor's little stories she included (since they were about her own life) and also how she uses those stories to illustrate each topic. 

I mentioned earlier in this post how I was going for some short books, and my next listen was this around 3 hour book all about the history of Christmas. I am a Bill Bryson fan. I enjoy how he is prone to sarcasm and exaggeration. There are times in his books he makes me laugh. Plus he researches his topics so well and writes a good tale about whatever the topic happens to be. 

This time Bryson talks (as he was also the reader of this short volume) about Christmas over time and how it differs between the United States and England. I learned about Twelfth Night, which I had heard of but didn't really know much about. I learned about Christmas in medieval  times,  and how the Puritans tried to get rid of this holiday (as well as some other things too.) I learned about the history of Christmas cards, Christmas trees, and Santa/Father Christmas too. You get the gist, but this book was an interesting and fun little history, perfect for the days leading up to 2023's holiday.

And finally, my last book for 2023, number 100. It wasn't quite finished by January 1, but I was more than 60% through it on December 31, and I finished it on January 1, so I am counting it.

The Blood Spilt is book 2 in the Rebecka Martinsson mystery series. This series is set in Sweden and written by Swedish author Asa Larsson. Rebecka Martinsson is a lawyer in Stockholm, and in this book she returns to her childhood home area of Northern Sweden. This time she comes in a somewhat business capacity because with the new legal separation of church and state in Sweden, her law firm has been hired to help one of the churches get their monies under control.

In book 1, Rebecka went home to Northern Sweden where she ended up not only getting involved in a brutal murder case but almost being murdered herself. Book 2 deal with her post-crisis emotional battle, and the church her law firm is  helping also had a brutal murder of a minister a few months before her arrival. Rebecka gets involved with this murder investigation also.  Larsson  brings back the same police officers I got to know to book one, which is good because I liked those characters also. It all works. I enjoyed reading this book, although at the beginning there were a few too many flashbacks. After finishing this mystery, I can see why the author included them. And once again, as I mentioned in last month's review when I read book 1 in this series, this is definitely NOT a cozy mystery.

Reading Wrap Up:

And bear with me for  this part of the post while I do a bit of data collection and analyze my 2023's reading trends. The scientist in me is coming out. 😏 I know this probably isn't all that interesting  to you readers, but I have fun analyzing where my reading took me. It's also interesting to see how it compares to the past couple of years when I first started doing this analysis.

Total books for 2023: 100

-number of mystery books: 43

-number of fiction books: 24

-number of nonfiction books:33

  non-fiction breakdown for 2023:   biographies :12,    natural history/science books: 11 ,  travel/ biography books: 2 ,   other: 8

(Note, I am counting mysteries as their own category. I know that what I read are really fictional stories not true crime, but because I tend to read so many more of them, I'll separate them from other types of fiction.)

*****

And my favorite/ most memorable books from the year, in no particular chronological order and not limited to a specific number:  Horse (January), Remarkably Bright Creatures (February),  Lady in Waiting (March),  The Princess Spy (March), Wild Swans (March), The Last Remains (April), The Reading List (April), The Real Valkyrie (July), The Forbidden Iceland Mysteries (4-books-but especially number 4- July and August), Mrs. Roosevelt's Confidante (August) and the other Maggie hopes books (all year), The Last Devil to Die (September), Tom Lake (September), Our Hideous Progeny (October),The Long Call - (October), Once a Monster and  Sun Storm (November), These Precious Days (December),  The Frozen River (December)

*****

longest book I read: Appetite for Life (Julia Child biography)- 569 pages

shortest book I read: The Hawk's Way-96 pages

month(s) I read the most books: March and July- both with 11 books

month(s) I read the least books: June- with 4 books

book I still need and plan to finish: Independent People by Halldor Laxness 

my least favorite book in no particular order: I didn't finish this one: Ester the Wonder Pig: It was too much about the author's emotions

*****

Looking over all my reading for last year, here are some areas that I had been drawn  towards reading  in 2023.

1) I read a lot of  new mystery series and/or new mystery authors:

  1)K.D.Mason/Harbor Ice- 1 book, 2) Serna Kent/Death in Provence- 1 book  3) John Rowland/Murder in the Museum, 4)Jacqueline Winspear/Maisie Dobbs: 1 book, 5)Steve Higgs/ Albert Smith's Culinary Capers series-2 books, 6) Susan Elia MacNeal/Maggie Hope mysteries-6 books, 7) Anne Glenconner/ 2 mysteries, 8) Vanessa Walter's/The Nigerwife, 9) Sean MacLachan/ The Case of the Purloined Pyramid, 10) Eva Bjorg Aeggisdottir/ Forbidden Iceland Series- 4 books, 11) Kerry Tombs/ Inspector Ravenscroft mystery-1 book, 12) Michel Bussi/ Black Water Lilies, 13) J M Dalgleish/ Tom Janssen mysteries-3 books, 14) Ann Cleeves. new series not new author, Matthew Venn- 1 book , 14) Sophia Hannah/new Hercule Poirot mysteries-1 book, 15) Asa Larsson/ Rebecka Martinsson mysteries-2 books, 16) Dana Stabenow/ Kate Shugak mysteries-1 book      

2) I read a lot of World War 2 connected books: 

1) 6  Maggie Hope mystery series, 2) The Manhattan Project/ 109 East Palace, 3) 2 female spy books/ Clever Girl and Princess Spy  4) the mystery fiction book/ The Haunting at Holkham, 5) parts of the Julia Child biography, 6) First Ladies, the historical fiction about Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary McLeod Bethune, 7) parts of the biography about Wallis Simpson, 8) part of the biography Lady in Waiting, 9) parts of the biography Wild Swans

3) I read several books that were  biographies or  had  biographical leanings: 

1) A Book of Bees    2) Lost Among the Birds, 3) Wild Swans   4) Lady in Waiting    5) My Beloved Brontosaurus   6) The Hawk's Way    7) The Princess Spy   8) Frida in America   9) Wallis in Love   10) A Good Horse Has No Color   11)Appetite for Life    12)Between Two Kingdoms    13) Bicycling with Butterflies   14) Archaeology From Space    15) The Earl and the Pharaoh   16) Edison's Ghosts    17) 109 East Palace    18) Clever Girl   19) The Romanov Sisters    20) The Real Valkyrie   21) These Precious Days   22) Bicycling with Butterflies

4) I read a few fantasy books also-

1) Our Hideous Progeny   2)The Golem and Jinni   3) Starling House  4) Once a Monster  5) Mr. Dickens and his Carol

5) I read more Agatha Christie ( or related) books-

1) A Caribbean Mystery   2)Appointment with Death   3) Mrs. McGinty's Dead    4) Murder on the Orient Express   5) Hercule Poirot's Silent Night    6) The Woman on the Orient Express

6) Series I read multiple books from-

1) Forbidden Iceland series- 4 books  2) Practical Magic series- 2 books    3) Maggie Hope books - 6 books    4) Ruth Galloway mysteries- 2 books   4) Kyoichiro Kaga mysteries-2 books  5) Rebecka Larsson mystery series- 2 books  6) Hidden Norfolk mysteries (3 books)  7) Hercule Poirot mysteries (4 books)

7) Books  I reread-

1) A Few Green Leaves by Barbara Pym,  2) Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman, 3) Cosmos by Carl Sagan, 4) The Locked Room by Eli Griffiths, 5) Mr. Dickens and His Carol by Samantha Silva, 6) 3 of the Agatha Christie's 

8) What I didn't read a lot of in 2023-

1) I didn't read much in the way of classics (only the Agatha Christie's and one Simeon mystery), 2) I read zero science fiction books, 3) I didn't read  many personal travel/journey stories (surprisingly as they are one of my favorite genres)

*****

And here's my comparison to the  last couple of year's reading.

                                                                             2023                  2022         2021

total books                                                           100                      86               96

mysteries                                                               43                       33              44

fiction                                                                    24                       24               27

nonfiction/biographies                                        12                       11                 1

nonfiction/travel stories                                        2                        6              didn't record

nonfiction/ natural history or science                11                        5                15

nonfiction: other/art/cooking                               8                        5              didn't record

One final thought in this already long post. Now that I reached my 100 books read in a year goal, it doesn't seem important to have to repeat it.  I like to have goals, but other than listening to a couple of short books in late December, I didn't read just to meet this goal. Will I go  for 100 books next year? Perhaps if I once again get close. Maybe I'll read a lot of short or quick reads and will get to more than 100 books. Maybe I'll read more 1,000 page books and not even come close. I'm happy I can check that off accomplishment off my list, but not obsessed that I did it. 

If you made it this far, thanks for your perseverance. I'm looking forward to reading some more great books in 2024. Wishing you a great new year of reading also.