Posted by Sari
We sort of thought that the New Year's Eves during which Jukka is working were behind us, but no such luck: someone fell ill, and the boss has to fill in. So here we are, after a nice evening with my sister and her husband, the dogs are sleeping and I am whiling away the time so we can go and get him. If the weather does not worsen suddenly. Can I just by the way say how wonderful it is that I this time the chance has given me dogs who are not afraid of noises. I don't have to sit in the bathroom with radio on writing this. But to business:
I continued to try to read one book a week, so 52 was my goal. This year I beat that easily with 75 books read for pleasure. Somewhere around 46 of them fitted into Lonkeropiirakka's SF reading challenge which I wrote about in the form of Advent calendar. Few non-fiction works I blogged separately (in Finnish).
Those I have not written before I want to mention Jo Walton's Necessity. I have been reading Hannah Arendt (for work so not included here), and getting to grips with the concepts of freedom and necessity, which makes me want to re-read Walton's trilogy which is a really cool actual take of fantasy as a simulation game for philosophy: what if platonists picked up from all over history really tried to create Plato's republic.
Laura Thompson's The Six was another Mitford biography, this one more sympathetic towards Diana than some I have read but either I have read too much about Mitfords or this really was a bit light weight. Which you can't say Fredrik Logevall's excellent book on the war in Indochina before Americans got involved: The Embers of War. Reading that before two other Vietnam books (Mark Atwood Lawrence: The Vietnam War: A Concise International History and Gary R Hess: Vietnam: explaining America's Lost War) did put the later war into proper perspective.
This years reading included some re-reads: Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising, Lois Bujold's Civil Campaign and Megan Whalen Turner's The Thief. All among my ultimate comfort reads. I also read Turner's Thick as Thieves, the latest addition to Queen's Thief series. It was an entertaining adventure and it was nice to see Costas from someone else's point of view, but really I am just waiting for the next and last installment out in March.
So that was my year 2018 in books. Lets see what the new year brings!
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