All the Books I Read in December 2023

It’s been an incredible year for me. I have read around 90 books this year according to GoodReads and if you include those little books that I have that don’t include a ISBN number, Inwould say it’s just about 100 books. Being lost in another world distracts me from the stress from the real world. Escapism is nice. I’m also doing my best to finish the books I have before buying anymore, but that rarely happens. I always end up buying at least three books a month.

I’ll be honest, I bought this book because I thought it looked beautiful. It was a cute little hardback and it was shiny. The collection of poems and short stories kept me company on a long bus trip. I really liked the modern voices mixed in with some classic tales and I felt strong voices from feminism and culture. I would reccomend this for sure, if you're into international poetry.

I was in Oxford the weekend before Christmas and I was stuck between two books to buy. They were both so beautiful and they promised an outlook on culture and worlds that I knew very little about. In the end, I went for both. This book was also a great read, but focuses more on the classics.

Poems written by our very own Mike Singleton. I love his work and they way he connects music into his work. He has thousands of great stuff up on this site. It’s always encouraging to see my notifications and see that Mike has written another piece.

This is the second time I have read this book and I think it’s wonderful. I recommended this book to my work’s book club and they’ve picked the book for February. I think I've mentioned this book a few times in my previous blogs. I love it and it makes me feel like I am in Japan.

Apparently I have read this book three times. I don’t remember, but I do remember claiming this as a freebie on Smashwords. I loved the cover and it gave me that Christmas feel. It's a sweet sapphic romance story between Jill and Stacey and has a few elements of Dicken's Christmas Carol. But it's nice to have sapphic fiction with happy endings, but I have found in a lot of mainstream media (looking at you Killing Eve) it's always either a sad ending or half of the couple gets killed off. The author has a lot of other books and has published under a few different names like Natalie Brunwick and Callie Hall.

I don’t remember downloading this book, but it must have been around the time when 50 Shades was dominating the world. I think there are better parodies out there, and I am glad this was short because if it went on for too long, I don’t think I could have finished it. Some of the erotic phrases are really cringey, but I think that's what the author was going for. Because of the cover, I was expecting a killer clown to pop out of nowhere and cause chaos, and I was a bit disapointed that that never happened.

I don’t know anything about this author and book before. I had the urge to read something quick and Christmassy and I think this book did the trick. This is a collection of short stories that capture the warmth of the season. The poems inside the stories are a great touch. I thought they were easy to read, but since these were written back in 1912, over 100 years ago, people may disagree with me there. It's nice to see these old stories still being preserved.