Reading is my oldest and favorite hobby.  I literally can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t love to curl up with a good book.  Here are my reads for December, 2014…

A Merry Christmas, and Other Stories, by Louisa May Alcott – I’ve said it before, Penguin Classics is killing it lately.  No sooner did I complete my Drop Caps collection (still looking for the perfect place to display them) did they introduce Penguin Christmas Classics, and obviously I needed all five.  (I only bought three, though – have to save something for next year.)  One of the gorgeous editions I brought home was Louisa May Alcott’s collection of Christmas stories.  The title piece, “A Merry Christmas,” was actually an excerpt from Little Women, so I’d read it before.  But the rest were new to me and were delightful reads in the Alcott mold – pretty stories of the Christmas spirit with an undertone of feminism and awareness of social inequalities.  I loved them and will be making this a holiday tradition.

No Holly for Miss Quinn, by Miss Read – Another holiday read of mine, for at least the past three years, I had to look in on Miss Quinn again.  I didn’t make time for Village Christmas this year, but I couldn’t let the month pass without a visit to Fairacre.  Quiet, introverted Miss Quinn is hoping for a solitary Christmas to finish painting her living room – but when her sister-in-law fall unexpectedly ill, she is pressed into aunt service.  It’s not the Christmas Miss Quinn was looking for, but what she finds is a holiday filled with the warmth and family joy she’s been missing (and a good dose of respect for what mothers deal with on a daily basis!).  This is one of my favorite Fairacre tales.

Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson – This slim but lovely volume has been on my to-read list for ages, and now that Robinson has just published a third book about the characters first introduced here, I felt I had to read it.  The Rev. John Ames is an aging, dying minister in the town of Gilead, Iowa.  Knowing that he will not be around to raise his young son, he writes instead a long letter filled with the wisdom he has acquired over his years.  It’s a story about love lost and found, and about the relationships between fathers and sons – between Ames’ father and grandfather, between Ames and his father, between his best friend Rev. Boughton and Boughton’s wayward son Jack, and even between Ames himself and Jack – and it is going to have to substitute for a relationship between Ames and his little boy.  It’s a lovely, compelling book and I’m glad I finally made the time for it.

Letters from Father Christmas, by J.R.R. Tolkien – The Amazon recommendations engine strikes again!  This is the second time Amazon has recommended a book to me that I’ve loved.  (I forget the first, but I know it’s happened before.)  I should probably be worried about a computer knowing so much about my reading preferences.  Anyway.  Christmas was a magical time in the Tolkien household, not just for the usual reasons, but because in addition to their gifts the Tolkien children always received a letter from Father Christmas, usually with silly asides from his assistant the North Polar Bear (who, from what I could tell, spent more time causing disasters than he did actually helping out or getting things done), and illustrated with fun, whimsical pictures of the calamities that seemed to hit the North Pole every year.  As the Tolkien children grew older, the letters became more and more elaborate (and on occasion, included goblin attacks!).  Getting to read all of the letters, collected from the 1920s to the 1940s in this little volume, was such a treat.  I can’t wait to share them with Peanut when she’s older.

Well, so ends another year of reading!  It started out well, but it was harder to keep up a good reading pace after returning to work, and especially this fall, when so many things seemed to go wrong all at once that it threw me into my first reading slump in years.  As you can see from the list of four relatively short books here, I’m not out of the slump yet, but I’m still trying.  I won’t make any predictions about what January’s reading will look like – just say that I enjoyed everything I read this month, and I’m so glad I finally got around to reading Gilead, which I’ve been meaning to pick up for a long while.  I hope you had a more productive reading month than I did (but that you had a nice, relaxing holiday) and send you best wishes for 2015 reading!