I didn’t read as many books as usual in December (making it the only month this year that I didn’t read more than ten), though my page count (about 1650) was higher than three other months when I read more books. I had one prompt left for the PopSugar 2023 Reading Challenge, which I knew would take me the longest: “the longest book (by pages) on your TBR list,” because I knew I would have the week off between Christmas and New Year’s. Technically, The Brothers of Gwynedd Quartet is a set of four novels, republished in one volume in 1989. When I bought it (probably around 1990), I thought of it as a single story in four parts (which it is), and intended to read it that way. But 821 pages is a long book, and somehow I was always too busy for a book that size, and it stayed on the shelf (or at least always wound up back on a shelf after we moved – I moved four times since then).
Finally, with this prompt in the 2023 reading challenge, I decided it was time to read the saga. It took me a full month to read it, finishing with less than three hours to go before the year ended. It was slow going through the first two parts, necessary setting up of characters and events but not a whole lot to really pull me into the story. Besides, I discovered it is not easy to hold an 821-page paperback! Finally in the third part, with the introduction of Llewelyn’s wife Eleanor (though at this point she is only married by proxy, a ritual that certainly seems strange to us in our society), it took on new emotional depth and renewed interest. And even though I knew, in a general sense, how the book had to end for the Welsh heroes, it made fairly good reading right through the end (which was well-written). I feel like I know this bit of Welsh and English history now, though I realize this was a fictional account. I’m not sure I’ll pick up any history books to read more about the period, but I might.
Looking over the list of books I’ve read this year for the PopSugar reading challenge, I can see that historical fiction is the prompt I read the most books for (ten). I didn’t particularly set out to do that – it’s just the kind of books I like reading. Another that I didn’t set out to read multiple books for was “a book that features two languages,” but in early December I added three more to this category. My husband and I have started learning Japanese using Duolingo, and I went to the library looking for children’s books written in both English and Japanese, to see if I could at least recognize the hiragana symbols (and use the English to figure out what the words meant).
Words to Make a Friend: A Story in Japanese and English by Donna Jo Napoli is a very nice children’s picture book, with beautiful pictures and a simple story about how understanding each other doesn’t always require understanding the words. It doesn’t have the Japanese written in hiragana symbols, however, instead using the Roman alphabet (what English – and all the other languages I’ve studied previously – use). So I also got out another children’s book, The Discovery of Anime and Manga: The Asian Hall of Fame by Philip Amara, which does have the Japanese words written using Japanese symbols (a mix of hiragana and kanji, and no doubt some katakana as well). The font colors used for the Japanese words were unfortunately often not a good contrast to the background, which made them hard to make out. I did pick out the word for “anime” at least, and occasionally managed to spot a word or two I recognized from Duolingo lessons. Plus it was very interesting history, something I knew nothing about because I don’t share my husband and son’s interest in anime.
Having read those, I thought it would be interesting to find a bilingual book written in German and English, and found an ebook, Learn German II: Parallel Text by Polyglot Planet Publishing. It’s not a children’s book by any means, and while I mostly got the sense of what I was reading just from the German text, there were often words that I didn’t recognize and had to get from the English translation. I hope that the German portions were written in better German than some of the English translations, which clearly needed correcting by a native English speaker. The stories were mostly people telling about their own experiences of travel, and were moderately interesting, but hardly compelling. The latter portion of the book had the same stories again but without the English translation, and I was pleased to find that I could read these and mostly understand them (of course it helped having recently read them with the help of the English translation).
Paladin’s Hope by T. Kingfisher is the third in Kingfisher’s The Saint of Steel series (I’m waiting for the fourth to be available through the library). Like the other two, it features a paladin (of the now-dead “god” called the Saint of Steel) – a different one in each book – who is trying to find a murderer and also finds himself falling in love and afraid to allow the relationship to develop (paladins being both called to a life of danger and with a strong tendency to self-recrimination). It’s different enough that I enjoyed the story, however, even if not as much as the first in the series, which I still think was the best.
Ellie Engle Saves Herself by Leah Johnson is a children’s book (I’ve found these are generally good for listening to while riding my exercise bike) about dealing with being different, and about love and friendship. It begins with Ellie suddenly finding herself with superpowers (able to hear the faintest of sounds and able to bring dead plants and animals back to life). While many stories of people with superpowers focus on saving the world, and the powers are generally portrayed as a positive thing, here Ellie finds that her powers isolate her. Many people accuse her of trickery, and even most of those who know the powers are real are uncomfortable around her. Meanwhile she is dealing with all the usual challenges that go with middle school. It’s a well-told story, fun and also containing wisdom for living.
I recognized the name Ari Shapiro from listening to All Things Considered on NPR, but I knew nothing else about him until I listened to The Best Strangers in the World: Stories from a Life Spent Listening. I had expected it to be mostly a series of anecdotes about people he has met and talked with in the course of his work for NPR, and it does contain a good many of those, but it is essentially a memoir, starting with his childhood. While it’s not quite the book I was expecting it to be, Shapiro is (unsurprisingly) a good storyteller, and I enjoyed learning about his life as well as about the people and issues he has covered.
I was looking for more non-fiction, and thought The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession by Michael Finkel sounded interesting, especially having read about fictional art thieves in October. Stéphane Breitwieser succeeded in stealing an astonishingly high number of valuable items before he was finally caught. In large part this was because he selected smaller, out-of-the-way museums with relatively little security. His methods would never have worked on the well-secured items, held by the most prestigious museums, at the center of Portrait of a Thief. He also made no attempt to make money off his pilfered treasures, so there was very little trail for detectives to follow. There is some discussion of the art itself and the related history, but more about Breitwieser and his methods and speculation about his psychological state. It was interesting, but I admit I’d have preferred more about the art and the history – I got tired of Breitwieser as a person pretty quickly.
My last book of the year, besides the saga by Pargeter, was Bookshops and Bonedust by Travis Baldree. It’s a prequel to Legends and Lattes, which my husband and I enjoyed listening to on our trip to Tennessee last spring. Prequels can be disappointing, but I thought it was probably as good as the first (or is it second now?) book. The action is centered in a bookshop this time, rather than a coffee shop, still hardly a typical locale for an orc to feel at home. There are a number of other non-human creatures, both good and evil, swordfights, black magic, a love affair. I have no idea whether Baldree will add any more books to the series, but if he does, I’ll plan on reading them.
Perennial Student 