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It has felt quite a long break this year for Christmas and New Year celebrations. The offices I work with in publicity and publishing have all closed for at least two weeks and, as much as I intended to get ahead in their absence, I've inevitably slipped into my own holiday break. 

And I'm not ready to get back into the swing of things! 

Just as all the magazines, papers, tv and radio programmes revert to their predictable features on resolutions and self-improvement, I'm feeling less motivated and energised!

Friends have told me of the courses they've signed up for, holidays they've got planned, projects they're determined to complete in the coming months, books they want to read. And I've drawn up a list of my good (and some possibly unrealistic) intentions for the year, as I usually do. We should have hopes and dreams, after all. 

But I rarely look back on the year for all that I've achieved and enjoyed, and actually that's been pretty good... I've remained healthy, have spent time with friends and family, interviewed some fascinating creative people, and have read more books in a year than ever before (148 if you're interested).

So perhaps I'll pause before getting back to my emails tomorrow and think about Oliver Burkeman's advice in his book 'Meditations for Mortals'. Instead of compiling endless, and possibly unattainable, 'to do' lists I will think about what I can claim as 'done'. Perhaps that will be my New Year's Resolution! 

Thank you for reading.

I hope you had a happy Christmas and have enjoyed good company, good food, (good books?), and perhaps some nice long walks too. (Though the weather hasn't been great for that, has it? I was out on the river this weekend and though the water was beautifully flat, I couldn't see very far!)

So now we're looking to the New Year and all that 2025 has in store.

I rather like the lists in the newspapers around this time, pinpointing the books which will be released in the coming months. (I'm not so keen on the lists of books I should have read in the past year!)

There are some fabulous books coming out and I'll be doing my best to mention them here as well as discovering some forgotten gems, too...?

Thank you for reading with me over these past few months. I really appreciate all the messages I receive from you, the books you buy from my page on bookshop.org, your attendance at book groups and author events, and generally your being with me week by week.

It means a great deal to have your support. And, if you are able to spread the word to anyone who might also like these newsletters with their reviews and recommendations, please do encourage them to sign up. 

For now, though, I hope you have a happy New Year and I look forward to being in touch again in 2025!

Thank you for reading.

Not long now - just a couple more days...

I hope whatever you have planned, it is happy and peaceful and that amongst all the festivities and time with friends and family you might have the opportunity for some restful reading or to flick through the pages of a new book in anticipation of losing yourself in another world.

I'm looking forward to seeing if anyone has been brave enough to select a book for me in their kind gifts this year. I realise I'm a difficult person to buy for in that regard, and I really do have plenty of reading matter, but it's always very special if someone has taken time and trouble to select a book for you, isn't it?

Of course I'll be seeking to work my way through my existing vast collection of unread books over this Christmas period and hope to have all my jobs done early on Tuesday so that I can spend the evening in front of the fire with a good book.

I'm pleased that the Icelandic tradition of Jolabokaflod is now quite a 'thing'. I run a book group in a local primary school and one of the children there said that all of her family are given a book on Christmas Eve and they'll sit together and read while enjoying chocolate and hot drinks. 

So however, you are spending Christmas this year, I hope it is a good one, full of light and warmth, hope and promise. 

Thank you for reading.

No matter how prepared I think I am, there always seems to be too much to do and too little time in the lead up to Christmas. So it certainly doesn't feel appropriate to be whiling away the hours reading. But I never feel quite right if I haven't got a good book on the go.

So I was pleased to discover that Tessa Hadley's latest book is a novella (see below). I could enjoy the story in one sitting, as a perfect escape on a grey afternoon and found I returned to the Christmas preparations renewed! 

It was interesting, then, to read a newspaper article extolling the virtues of short stories, and novellas. The journalist was hoping this might become 'a thing'.

It's commonly accepted that fewer people enjoy short stories than full length novels (in 2020 a YouGov poll found that just 14 per cent of people in the UK declared short stories their favourite form of fiction), but there's a lot to be said for this more concise form, not least the fact that a short story can be enjoyed in a lunch break or a commute, an evening in front of the fire, or in a snatched hour or two between commitments over the festive period itself.

This year there have been a number of novelists publishing short story collections - Elly Griffiths, Lee Child, Stephen King, George Saunders, Eliza Clark, and the interconnected stories of Elizabeth Strout. 

We bemoan the short attention span of society generally but there's also something to be celebrated in brevity, and the skill of creating a world in few words. And isn't the winter the perfect time for a short story? What about the extraordinary 'Small Things Like These' by Claire Keegan, the ghost stories of MR James with the wind swirling outside, or Dickens' 'A Christmas Carol', of course. I think I'll be picking up a few more short stories in the next few weeks.

Thank you for reading.

I can't quite believe that it's only a week since the event with Angela Harding at The Riverside on 1 December. And I've already had to play catch up in opening the doors on my advent calendar (Angela Harding Midwinter Robin).

But I have decorated the Christmas tree and quite a few cards have gone in the post, so I'm in that dangerous position of thinking I'm making good progress in the preparations - until I find that I'm not. The days seem to vanish at this time of year, don't they?

And the weather this weekend has been disruptive. I've been thankful not to experience the terrific gales and flooding that we've seen on the west of the UK, but I've still been hunkered down at home rather than meeting friends and family as planned.  

Hopefully this week we'll have calmer conditions and we'll all be able to get on with business as usual. Though in my reading this week (see 'Exhausted' below), there was a salutory reminder that frantic activity isn't always a good thing.

So if we feel pressured to keep buying, cooking, eating, drinking, working, perhaps we should pause for a moment, get off the treadmill and take stock. 

Winter weather sometimes causes us to stop and reprioritise, but we can do that for ourselves too. 

Thank you for reading.

PS Sorry for the delay but you can take a look at this year's reading recommendations from members of the Woodbridge Book Group here.