January is over and I’m relieved. Most of my family ended up with a nasty bug so in between naps, television, and doses of cold medicine, I read what I could.

I had a strong start to the year with Antarctica by Claire Keegan. It is an excellent short story collection and it’s Keegan’s first, published in 1999. I always like reading an author out of order so when I read and fell in love with her 2021 novella Small Things Like These, I was excited to be able to go back in time on the bookshelf. There’s more violence than I expected, but the opening story helps prepare you for that. She also covers plenty of ground; Keegan’s stories are set in Ireland and England but she also crosses to ocean to the American South and manages the language and setting change without missing a beat. She was made for short stories, knowing exactly when to plop a reader in the story and exactly what to give us to create a rich narrative with only a limited number of pages. I won’t say to pick this up if you’re looking for something before bed, they are often too sad and all too engrossing for that purpose. Instead, pick this up if you just want some really good stories.

I next tried to start three different non-fiction books, all of which I liked enough to get about halfway through before losing focus, so I picked up a love story. Well, actually The Marriage Bureau for Rich People by Farahad Zama is a number of different love stories, many of which are only just starting as retired government clerk, Mr. Ali sets up an marriage bureau using a diverse and complicated filing system to match up different perspective brides and grooms. Most are arranged marriages where the families are ready to join together and the expectation is the love between the bride and groom will grow, but Zama also offers his readers a love match and a reunion for a young, divorced couple. It’s a sweet novel with a full cast of characters and sprinkled with detailed descriptions of food and clothing and different locations so by the end you feel it would also make an excellent film.

Probably because of my illness grump, I stayed in the mood for love stories, so I finally read How to Stop Time by Matt Haig, which has been sitting on my shelf for years waiting for the right time. Tom is born in the sixteenth century in France with a biological quirk: he is aging much more slowly than humans. We meet him in 2016, when he looks forty but is starting to feel his actual age both emotionally and physically with headaches and flashbacks plaguing him. The text switches between eras in short bursts so we can follow Tom’s own perspective on time and also feel just how much history he has, and just how much loss he carries with him. Like many of Haig’s characters he starts out isolated and lonely, having lost much hope and love of life, but he finds his way back to living and loving in the end.

Finally, I picked up Caveat Emptor: The Secret Life of an American Art Forger by Ken Perenyi. A friend bought it for me because she loved the madness between the pages and I could see why in the first chapter. His descriptions of the research and experimentation he did to create his forgeries show his unique combination of talent, interest in the history and chemistry of painting, and complete lack of ethical concern about selling something fraudulent. His network was supposedly full of art dealers, a touch of the New York/New Jersey mafia, art collectors (some he loved, some he hated), restorers, landlords, lawyers, and artists who sometimes look after each other when they were sick or broke and sometimes hit the road with no warning and disappeared for months if the police were too close. I have no idea how much of Perenyi’s entertaining story is true (especially considering how many young, beautiful models supposedly meet him and immediately fall into bed with him) but it almost doesn’t matter because the one thing he’s very honest about is his ability to forge the truth for money.

I hope everyone else had a healthier start to the year but I took solace in the fact that books aren’t afraid of sitting next to you for hours when you have a cough…