Oh, December, thou art the most wonderful and busiest time of the year!
Even though every member of my family has been sick and my sister is getting married this month and Christmas is almost here, I do still have a handful of recent reads worth sharing.
A few weeks ago I posted the 2023 Christmas Book Guide, but I haven’t stopped reading Christmas books! You’ll find a few bonus recommendations below that I read after the list went live, as well as more nonfiction titles than usual as I race to meet the nonfiction reading goal I set for myself this year. I’m not sure how I got so far behind, but I’m determined to catch up!
To that end, if you have any recommendations for propulsive nonfiction, let me know! I’ve recently realized that I (weirdly) really enjoy reading about diseases, medical mysteries, etc. Books like The Hot Zone (ebola), The Ghost Map (cholera), and Rabid (rabies) fascinate me, so if you know some good books about people dying terrible deaths while doctors and scientists try unsuccessfully to stop the spread of a deadly pathogen, apparently that’s my jam.
Now, on to the show!
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Just Finished:
The Lost City of the Monkey God
I just finished listening to the audio version of this story of a lost city in Honduras and the writer who joined a team of scientists to go deep into the rainforest in search of it. It’s filled with history, legends, mystery, science, ground-breaking technology, and a fascinating medical component toward the end.
Here are a few trope keywords for you: hockey romance, marriage of convenience, only one bed. If you think that sounds like more fun than a barrel of monkeys, you’d be right. I thoroughly enjoyed this story of a hockey player with immigration problems and a nutritionist who works for the team and has a really lousy ex-fiance who she doesn’t want to face alone at Christmas this year. It’s a closed-door romance but there is some swearing, so not totally clean from that perspective. Even still, I gave it five stars!
This small-town friends to more romance was a delight. Cafe owner Taylor is surprised and (mostly) pleased when her best friend Levi shows up in town for the holidays. But things are a little awkward because of an eggnog-induced mistletoe mishap that caused him to spend the last four years keeping the road hot for his job as a journalist. But now he’s back and he’s been doing some deep thinking — but Taylor isn’t sure she’s ready to hear the conclusions he’s come to in regards to their friendship status, especially after so many years of keeping her crush-like feelings for him at bay. This book is sweet and funny with meddling family members (my favorite!) and strong Christmas vibes and also plays on the only-one-bed trope I mentioned above.
You guys, I promise I didn’t plan to have three only-one-bed romances in a row, but that’s where we’re at. This is a fake relationship story about Molly and Brooks, two best friends who pretend to be dating in order to stave off attempts by Molly’s mother to get her to take her ex back. She can’t avoid him since he’s the best man in her sister’s Christmas wedding, so Brooks steps in to make her appear ‘taken’ and lessen the awkwardness. The family members in this story are a hot mess. If you like family drama, look no further. Also, Brooks is a chef’s kiss hero. He’s funny and sweet and all the things you want in a main male character.
When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing
This is a quick, fascinating book about how the timing of everything in your life matters more than you think it does. It’s pretty short, at 268 pages. I listened to it on audio (just under 6 hours long) and I think it might be slightly better in a physical form since there are charts and graphs that I obviously wasn’t able to see in the audio version. It covers a wide range of topics, but the thing that struck me the most from this book is how much timing might matter for our students. I would love for every teacher and school administrator to read this and see how it might change the way they operate their classrooms and school schedules.
In Progress:
This sci-fi dystopian novel follows a young man who is catapulted into a rebellion on Mars. Darrow is a Red, meaning his only job is to serve higher colors as a helium miner deep under ground, until he realizes that everything he thought he knew about society and the world in which he lives is false. He undertakes a painful and dangerous mission to infiltrate the Gold level of society to take them down and bring justice to his people. I have mixed feelings about this one. It’s pretty dark and while I’m interested in what ultimately happens to Darrow, it’s also a bit of a slow read for me, especially for the first 25% or so. But I feel like things have started to pick up now that he’s deeply involved in a competition where young people fight each other, reminiscent of The Hunger Games but different in that they aren’t actually supposed to be killing each other.
A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations
My husband works for a power company and recommended this book to me. I’m not going to lie, I’m zoning out a little on the parts that remind me of my college physics classes, but I’m also learning a lot about the history of electricity and the impact it has had on humanity. It’s fascinating to see the correlations between the availability of electricity and how successful people and countries are, as well how things like solar and wind power might not be the solutions we think they are.
Up Next:
I got this YA romantacy on NetGalley and I’m excited to dive in! This book is by Allison Saft who wrote A Far Wilder Magic which I haven’t read yet, despite the urging of my youngest sister (but it’s on my library holds list!). It’s about a magical dressmaker who finds herself in over her head when she is commissioned to sew for a royal wedding and is attracted to the groom. I think this one is going to be a lot of fun, so stay tuned for a full review next month!
Remember how I said I’m trying to read more nonfiction before the end of the year and I like books about germs? This one checks both of those boxes! This is about the controversial experiments being done in labs with carefully contained smallpox pathogens. It’s a little over 20 years old at this point, so I’m sure the information will not be -up-to-date, but that can be interesting in its own right.
For more book talk, visit Modern Mrs. Darcy’s monthly quick lit post and see what other readers are enjoying!