As usual, it was a sprint to the end of December, but I survived and even managed to do a fair amount of reading.

In the month of December, I read five books:

The Wife Between Us by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen–This one was pure escapism. I love a good book about domestic drama, especially if the twists are ridiculously over-the-top in a Lifetime Movie kind of way. I think this one is best read without knowing anything about the story. I’ll just say it’s about marriage gone wrong.

A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne–I really loved Boyne’s previous book, The Heart’s Invisible Furies. I liked this one just as much, but the main characters in the two books could not possibly be more different. Cyril Avery in The Heart’s Invisible Furies is a delightfully plucky narrator who wins your heart as soon as you meet him. Maurice Swift in A Ladder to the Sky is a deliciously unrepentant sociopath and plagiarist. The comparisons to Patricia Highsmith’s Mr. Ripley are apt.

Hyperfocus: How to Be More Productive in a World of Distraction by Chris Bailey–This is a helpful book if you need a reminder about all the things you let hijack your focus every day. The second half of the book, about creativity, was particularly helpful to me. I sometimes forget that you can’t be creative if you never let your brain “un-focus.”

A Simple Favor by Darcey Bell–This is another domestic thriller filled with middle-class people behaving badly. Lot of secrets and unrealistic plot twists make the book enjoyable–as long as you don’t expect anything too deep. I read a lot of psychological thrillers, and I thought this one presented one of the more original plots. I haven’t seen the movie. Let me know if you have.

Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill by Candice Millard–I love all of Candice Millard’s nonfiction because she knows exactly how to perfectly merge together facts and narrative. Everything she writes is just so propulsive–even when you know the outcome to the story. This one is an interesting portrait of Churchill in South Africa as a young man. He sounds like an unsufferable ass, but that explains a lot about his later life. My brother doesn’t know it yet, but he’ll be getting my copy in the mail. Nobody tell him that Churchill does escape.

Happy reading in January!