December Reads

2024

Stiches in Time by Barbara Michaels

Someone in the House by Barbara Michaels

Vanish with the Rose by Barbara Michaels

Patriot’s Dream by Barbara Michaels

I started rereading Michaels in October. I have a shelf of her books. She’s a familiar, soothing bedtime read. I have to read some of her paperbacks in sections because the bindings are falling apart! I love them all. Of these few, Someone in the House is my favorite.

11/22/63 by Stephen King

It by Stephen King

I may want my own copies of both of these, which were library books. 11/22/63 is extraordinary. It’s a time travel/magic portal novel, one of my favorite subjects ever since I picked up C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series as a child. I didn’t think I would like this King because the Kennedy assassination took place the year before I was born and thus boils down in my mind to dry facts. I never experienced Kennedy’s charisma and the cultural controversies of the time. I should have known better. I couldn’t put this brick of a book down. A long one.

It is another one I didn’t think I would like. I’ve always thought of it as belonging in my category of true horror, like The Shining, but I’m captured (as usual) by the characters. Pennywise the clown is a cultural icon now, and I’d certainly heard about him (it?), but I didn’t really have the connection with King and this book. It’s another long one, and I haven’t finished it yet, but I’m loving it.

Image by Joao Silas on Unsplash

The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden

The Girl in the Tower by Katherine Arden

I first read this author about a year ago. She wrote a trilogy about Vasilisa, a character out of Slavic folktales and one of my own characters in my Webbd series. I used to tell oral tales about Vasilisa when I worked as a storyteller. I saw the books on a recommendation list somewhere and ordered the first one to see what I thought. I was enchanted by it, so ordered the rest of the series. However, these are really winter time books. I didn’t want to read them during the spring, summer, or fall months. They’ve been sitting patiently in my to-read pile waiting for the season. I didn’t want to start in the middle of the trilogy, so I reread the first one and then read the second. Wonderful. Magical. Delightful. I’m envious. I wish I could write like Arden! I have the third book, but haven’t read it yet. I will before winter is over, but I got distracted by King, so the pleasure is yet to come.

Dragonfly in Amber by Diana Gabaldon (read by Davina Porter)

I started listening to Gabaldon’s Outlander series on audio last month. I finished the first and now am on the second. It takes me a long time to listen to them, as I don’t have that much free time and they’re quite long, but I love them and enjoy playing them while I’m cleaning, stretching, working in the kitchen, etc. I’ve listened to them several times, as well as read the series, so they’re quite familiar.

Substack

Garen Maire at

Only Child Originals

is a new discovery this month. She writes “dark fiction” and some of her work is inspired by folk and fairytale, as is mine. Her newsletter provides lots to explor:e serial fiction, short fiction, posts on gardening and Tarot. You might say we have a thing or two in common. I’m enjoying her work and will spend some time going through her archives to see what I’ve missed.

The first post I read from Miranda at

Root Stories

was this:

Consistency sucks (the life out of me)

I cried. I, too, came to a place where I had to put the story of my dysfunctional mother into words others could read and witness. The guilt, shame, and fear were overwhelming, and not entirely unjustified. Exposing family secrets is not applauded by the family in question. My vehicle was my blog, Harvesting Stones, which was my tiny corner of the Internet before I found Substack. Since I’ve come to Substack, my mother has died a protracted, miserable death, fighting it every step of the way, which was perfectly in character in spite of her terrifying me as a child with threats to “leave” and never come back. When she took her favorite dog I knew she’d be back. When she didn’t … But when Death finally came for her she fought it tooth and nail. I wish I could go back and comfort the anguished child I was, take away the chronic fear of abandonment.

Anyway, Miranda and I have much in common and I’m sorry we can’t be friends in real time. It’s hard to understand some things, like a longstanding pattern of family abuse, if you haven’t experienced it yourself. She’s doing a brave and painful excavation that will ultimately be healing but also change her relationship with her family and herself forever. My blog started out with almost no readers; I gained readership over the years I wrote it. I hope others will find Miranda and honor her courage and her pain. I think many of us write as a way to stay sane and understand our experience, past and present.

Kimberly Warner

at Unfixed and David Perry at

In The Garden Of His Imagination

come to mind.