What I read in December

Because the best time to talk about it is the middle of January

Hi friends! I’m on sick leave this week¹, so instead of telling you my Cuban agua mala story, let’s review the books I read in December.

Please enjoy this fancy infographic from The Storygraph (I told you I liked them) of the 11 books I read in December.

This was the final sprint to finish up 2 of my 2024 reading goals, and it also ended up turning into a Christmas themed reading month. I generally don’t do themed months, or read themed books back to back, but I decided that this is how I was going to end December. Though I still have more Christmas themed books so stay tuned for Christmas this year.

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The Books - Beware ye, Spoilers Ahoy

1. Divine Rivals, Rebecca Ross

   Ok, I get it now. This book was pretty cute. An enemies to lovers type romance involving typewriters, journalism and a World War I trench warfare style conflict, Divine Rivals was a quick read. I think this duology (more on that in a minute) is a prime example of how the emotion of a story can overshadow a narrative’s flaws. I don’t say that negatively - just that the magic system was not fully fleshed out, and even though I noticed that, I didn’t really care because I was still invested in the story of Roman and Iris. This one I read on Everand, though I guess I may have to go buy the physical copies now ugh.

2. Ruthless Vows, Rebecca Ross

   Part dos of this duology. I read the second book on Libby, and thank goodness it was available immediately because I would not have tolerated any downtime between finishing book 1 and starting book 2. This is the benefit to coming to popular books later: all the books are already out and you don’t have to wait to read them. 😈

3. Les Bonnes, Jean Genet

   The Maids, in English, this play is about, well, two maids and their desire to rise above their lot in life. A surprise find in a London Waterstones (mainly because I didn’t know Waterstones carried foreign language books), it was a quick read and helped me get back on track. Playwriting is also very different than prose writing (what I generally do) so I’m always interested in reading different forms of the written word. Read physically, and my cover of the book is much fancier than the graphic’s.

4. Fia and the Last Snow Deer, Eilish Fisher

   This book stopped me in my tracks at Waterstones in London. The cover was gorgeous, and it had absolutely beautiful illustrations inside. In her author’s note, Eilish Fisher mentions that she learned in prehistoric times, there were reindeer in Ireland. So Fia and the Last Snow Deer is her way of exploring the history of reindeer in her home. The story itself is written in a prose poem, and there are illustrations abound. I read a physical copy of this book, and am so glad I acquired this on my UK book journey.

5. Brightly Shining, Ingvild Rishøi

   Oh I got so mad at this book. I was promised a heartwarming Christmas tale and was instead given a Little Match Girl Retelling. Which in my controversial-yet-brave opinion is not heartwarming! Sorry, I don’t think ‘my life is so bad and society has failed me so much that the warm sweet embrace of death is my only option’ is all that heartwarming. Especially when this book is supposed to be a fairytale retelling and many adults in the book do step up to help our two young protagonists. And for the resolution to all of this to be death makes me angry! Heartwarming of a different kind, if you will. I have been hoodwinked and I do NOT approve!!! I also like the British version of this book cover better than the American one, so there’s that. As you might have guessed, I read this as a physical book, and acquired said copy during my UK trip in November.

   

   British version on left, American on right.

6. In the Dead of Winter, Sarah Clegg

   I went into this book with completely wrong expectations. This was on me - I misunderstood the synopsis. I thought it was going to be retellings of the folk stories around Christmas, not the history of the traditions in question. Which was honestly fine by me! I love a good history book. Basically, Christmas was a wild party for most of human history and has only calmed down in the past 100 years or so. I also acquired this book as part of my UK book haul. Also, the cover illustration is printed directly on the book cover which was fun. This was also the last of my recently acquired UK books that I read in December.

   

7. The Wood at Midwinter, Susanna Clarke

   This one caught my eye because the cover was gorgeous. On one of my December book buying days, I figured why not? and snatched it up. I do not think I realized *how* short this book was, because I brought it with me for a pedicure, and finished in 10 minutes. Ok then! The illustrations were beautiful, though, as was the book itself. I read a physical copy of the book.

8. The Third Gilmore Girl, Kelly Bishop

   A 2024 Chaotic Reader Superlative winner, The Third Gilmore Girl is Kelly Bishop’s memoir and traces her career on both the stage and screen. If you weren’t already aware, she originated the role of Sheila Bennet in A Chorus Line, was Marjorie Houseman in Dirty Dancing, and most notably, Emily Gilmore in Gilmore Girls. One absolutely fascinating tidbit I learned from the book was that Bishop did not think Gilmore Girls was marketed well by the WB, which was news to me, because as a teenager growing up in New England, Gilmore Girls was *everywhere*. I was certainly very conscious of it. I have since learned this was not the case from friends who grew up in other parts of the country. I listened to this as an audiobook on Everand.

9. Alexis et Le Coup de Grâce, Marguerite Yourcenar

   A note here: Alexis and Le Coup de Grâce are two separate works by Belgian author Marguerite Yourcenar, they just happened to be published together in one edition. I didn’t know this, and thought the full title of the book was Alexis et Le Coup de Grâce. Anyways just wanted to make that clear.
   Both of these works were around ~125 pages, and covering wildly different topics: Alexis is a man writing a letter to his wife about his life history and why he has been withdrawing from her, and Le Coup de Grâce is about the Lithuania Wars of Independence, which happened after World War 1, and was fought against the Russian Bolsheviks. Both stories featured closeted homosexual male narrators, and given that the next book on the list will also touch on ‘sexually taboo topics addressed in French literature in the 1920s’ this book was done so much better. The language was easier to read first of all, and secondly, it was much more emotive and vivid. I actually wanted to keep reading and felt like I was learning something rather than…whatever was going on in the Colette book. Marguerite Yourcenar was also a fascinating person in and of herself; she was the first woman to be elected to the Académie Française.² I have her most well known book on hand (Memoirs d’Hadrien) so maybe I’ll read that this year, too.

10. Le blé en herbe, Colette

    Oh boy was this book a SLOG. At only 125 pages, it should not have taken me over a month to finish it. But woof. The French language in this book was a tad archaic (even for the 1920s when it was published), and in comparison with the French book just before this, it was so hard to get through. At the time that Colette was writing this, sexual attraction between teenagers was not something that was talked about, so the book was a big deal at the time. With books like this, where the social conditions of the time are so vastly different than my current reality, I try to give them the benefit of the doubt - and read them with an eye for what the reader in 1920 would have experienced. I just could not do that with this book - there’s a subplot that revolves around grooming, which I found pretty repulsive. There were some really great descriptions of the Brittany countryside, though, so there’s that. The book is translated as Green Wheat in English, and as made obvious by the photos below, I read a physical copy of it.

    

    Various places I tried to read this book.

11. Le livre de ma mère, Albert Cohen

    Written by Albert Cohen while deep in grief for his mother, this book was both beautiful and profoundly frustrating. Cohen truly did love his mother, and was deeply appreciative of the sacrifices she made for him. (His parents were Greek Jews who immigrated to France; Cohen himself fled France for London during World War II and worked with the International Refugee Organization after the war.) However, as a woman, reading a book about a woman being reduced to just her motherhood did feel reductive at times. I am trying to withhold judgment as the note on the book mentions that Cohen wrote the first draft of this shortly after his mother’s death in 1943. (She died in Marseille, he was in London.) So I do understand that there was heavy, heavy emotion at the time that he was writing this. Yet I still did not feel like I learned a whole lot about his mother, more that the same few anecdotes were retrod. I think the compound trauma of the death of a parent and the separation of World War II framed Cohen’s narrative here, and I’m trying to give him the benefit of the doubt here rather than assuming ‘man reduces woman’s life to motherhood.’ As my last book of the year, I finished this at 11am on New Year’s Eve. Woo! (Insert Party Parrot here.)

I guess I’m shocked that I managed to read 4 French books in one month, when I so clearly struggled to make it through one a month for the better part of the year. Also, my impression of December was that I read so many Christmas themed books and I only read…4. Literally only a third of what I read all month. Brains are weird.

And here I am, thinking by using The Storygraph graphic I’d make this post shorter and I end up with nearly the same amount of photos as last month.

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No New Books™️ Challenge

Still holding strong. No New Books have been acquired! Though I did go to the bookstore across the street from my house on a mini field trip, and I took a picture of book I wanted but did not acquire. I am told the Shoestring in question is a cat.

• Current streak: 21 days (January 1st - Present)

Mug Moment of the Week

Another day, another mug. This is another Anthropologie mug, and obviously the M is for me. There’s something very whimsical about having both the cup and saucer fused together as one. I will say though, as Anthropologie does still offer these mugs, that the gold gilding does tend to come off after a while. You’ve been warned.

That’s it for this week’s Chaotic Readings. I will actually tell you my agua mala story next week. Promise.

1. I’m fine, just recovering and need supervision.

2. A language institution for the preservation of French language which sounds just as stuffy as you think it is.