Wrapping up 2023

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I took a look at my reading for this year, and there was a definite trend.  I tended to do two things: I either read difficult and depressing books about politics, or I hid in comfort reads.  If there was a Nancy Drew on the donation table, I took it home.  I read a simply incredible number of fluffy mysteries, which meant that there wasn't as much to blog about, even if I'd been keeping up my former writing rate, which I certainly was not.  Of course I read other things too, but ambition, international reads, or classics were pretty thin on the ground.  I don't feel bad about it or anything; I just noticed it when I looked at my Goodreads list.  (My goal for the year was 170 books, and I passed 200, but a hefty percentage of that list involved titles like Three Investigators and so on.)

This month I've been in the mood for a lot of Christmas reading.  Not much new, just a bunch of old and easy favorites. I'm a bit late to get very detailed, so here's a quick list:

  • The Dark is Rising, by Susan Cooper
  • The Children of Green Knowe, by L. M. Boston
  • The Fox at the Manger, by P. L. Travers
  • I Saw Three Ships, by Elizabeth Goudge
  • Christmas stories by Connie Willis
  • The Nutcracker, by ETA Hoffman (with the Sendak illustrations)
  • Chill Tidings: Dark Tales of the Christmas Season, ed. by Tanya Kirk (this was my new title, and is part of the British Library "Tales of the Weird" series, very good indeed!) 

 I also re-read the entire Murderbot series so I'd be well prepared to read System Collapse, the new title.  That was a lot of fun.  System Collapse is a direct follow-up to the novel Network Effect, while all the others are novellas that take place before that, even the one published after Network Effect.  It worked really well to zap through the whole series like that.


In System Collapse, the whole gang is still stuck in orbit around the planet holding a colony that was infected by alien remains.  It emerges that over 20 years ago, a splinter group left the colony and hid out in the north, near the terraforming machinery so that it couldn't be spotted.  Are they still there?  Are they also infected?  Murderbot and friends are going to have to go find out, even as half of them stay behind to try to negotiate with the colony and the corporation that has every intention of taking possession and enslaving all the colonists.

And tomorrow, I'll finish my year-long readalong of Les Miserables! 

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