The start of December was full of happy hours and end-of-year catchups but that lovely week between Christmas and New Year’s Day was also full of excellent reading time! I didn’t choose anything with much holiday cheer (I save that for my annual re-watch of A Christmas Carol) but I did use the pause to dive into some really excellent texts.

I did start out with an audiobook while making my way around town and doing plenty of cooking during the holidays. Anyone who has ever binged a podcast (especially a true crime podcast) will probably enjoy None of This is True by Lisa Jewell. It’s the story of two women – Alix who makes podcasts and Josie who thinks one should be made about her. The audiobook has a full cast and switches perspectives which was what drew me in. It also includes clips from the fictional podcast itself, so it does have a radio drama vibe that is very engaging. It was a good, short thriller with the correct number of twists and turns and has a little bit of a question mark at the end which I know plenty of crime fiction readers hate, but in this case, I think made the ending more interesting.

Once I had my quiet reading time over the break, I turned to The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed, a novel set in 1952 Cardiff, about one of the last men to be executed in Great Britain who was the exonerated decades later. Mohamed dives deeply into Mahmood Mattan’s life, crossing the years and the globe as a sailor. In 1952, he’s in Wales because he married and started a family in Britain and the first half of the novel is a fantastic spread of perspectives on Cardiff at the time showing just how many workers from all over the world were in the port city and how plenty of them also stayed and started a family. Lily Volpert, the murder victim, and her sister also come from one of those families; they are the daughters of a Russian-Jewish immigrant who came to Britain to flee violence. However, when Mattan is sent to prison, Mohamed leaves Lily and her family behind and the second half of the novel focuses solely on his time and thoughts in prison as his options and future shrink. Mohamed keeps us with Mattan and away from the police and court and legal counsel as the novel continues to show just how little he would have been informed of right up until his execution. Both sections of the text have their strengths and the novel is definitely worth your time, but by the end, I felt like they were two different novels in one binding.

I switched gears and picked up what I thought would be light reading with The Door-To-Door Bookstore by Carsten Henn and I was almost right. Henn’s sweet, short novel is not only about bookselling and friendship, but also love and loss and change. The main character, Carl Kollhoff has been a bookseller for years and offers a delivery service for some clients, facing a variety of challenges, who really need a book, and a friend, to come to their door. Now that his former bookseller boss has retired and put his daughter in charge, Carl struggles to fit in with her quest for modernization. In the end it’s the help of a nine-year-old girl who sees him on his delivery path who not only changes Carl’s life (and his book delivery mission) but saves it. This novel does have some heartbreak, but it also leaves you with a sigh of happiness in the end.

I also finally had the attention to properly sit down and finish Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov. It’s such a remarkable book, I wish I could make everyone read it to really consider how we think about the past, our collective and personal histories, and why we try to recreate them. It’s about friendship. It’s about modern politics. It’s funny and sad. It’s beautiful. If you have even an inkling of curiosity, pick it up and be ready to give it your full attention. This is a settle in a comfortable spot, put on your thinking cap, get your pen or sticky notes at the ready to mark passages you’ll want to read again book.

After Time Shelter I went back into the orbit of crime fiction for Three-Fifths by John Vercher. Unlike The Fortune Men this isn’t based on a real case, but Vercher sets us in the middle of a fully believable cast of characters. It’s set in 1995 so different comments and opinions on the O.J. Simpson trial are weaved in the background to set the scene but change the news story and it could be current-day America. Vercher doesn’t shy away from any hardship: his characters include a single mom struggling with alcoholism, a young mixed-race man passing as white but always worried when he looks in the mirror, a successful Black doctor dealing with a broken marriage and grief, a young white man released from prison and dealing with both hate and trauma. Vercher brings them all together in a page turning, empathetic narrative with a heartbreaking ending you see coming but really, really wish would turn out differently.

I hope everyone else had plenty of reading time over the holidays. Here’s to an excellent 2024 with plenty of good books!