My Advent Calendar of my Favourite Books of 2014




December reading is very important to me. Here in the gap between my full-throttle Nanowrimo experience and the rewrites due on my next kids’ book falls the festivities – but also, I hope, lovely long hours of reading.

In recent weeks I’ve been on a wonderful non-fiction kick, discovering a couple of memoirs in particular that I might never have come across.

But December is often my time for rereading old favourites – and also for consolidating my list of favourite reads from the whole year. In past years I’ve had top tens and top twenties, and fiction and non-fiction lists and all kinds of things. This year I want to do something different, slightly… my advent calendar of this year’s recommendations!  It seems like a good idea to flag some of these things up – after I’ve been so remiss with reviewing on this blog in 2014. I’m sure there are books I’ve loved that I’ve never even mentioned to you?

Also, it might well be that I’m recommending thirty-one books to you in December because I find it hard to pick a smaller selection…

But here goes anyhow! (These are in no particular order, mind… just as they come to me as I think over 2014…)

December the first:  TOLSTOY AND THE PURPLE CHAIR by Nina Sankovitch.

Right at the start of the year I really loved this memoir of reading. It’s about a family wrapped up in books and the year of reading that the author undergoes as she recuperates from the loss of her sister. It’s about reading a book every single day and being alert to the ripples and echoes between them and how they chime through our lives. It was a brilliant opening to the year for me – bolstering my appetite for books and making me feel bold with my own choices. I really do think we are drawn to particular books for reasons we don’t always understand at first – and that books come to us, sometimes, at just the right time.

FIND THIS and READ IT at ONCE! It’ll remind you why you spend so many hours alone, trying to see things through other people’s eyes.



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