What to Read this Month: December

The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year by Ally Carter. Narrated by Saskia Maarleveld and Zachary Webber. Meet Maggie Chase and Ethan Wyatt:

She’s the new Queen of the Cozy Mystery.

He’s Mr. Big-time Thriller Guy.

She hates his guts. He thinks her name is Marcie (no matter how many times she’s told him otherwise.). But when they both accept a cryptic invitation to attend a Christmas house party at the English estate of a reclusive fan, neither is expecting their host to be the most powerful author in the world: Eleanor Ashley, the Duchess of Death herself. That night, the weather turns, and the next morning Eleanor is gone. She vanished from a locked room, and Maggie has to wonder: Is Eleanor in danger? Or is it all some kind of test? Is Ethan the competition? Or is he the only person in that snowbound mansion she can trust? As the snow gets deeper and the stakes get higher, every clue will bring Maggie and Ethan closer to the truth—and each other. Because, this Christmas, these two rivals are going to have to become allies (and maybe more) if they have any hope of saving Eleanor. Assuming they don’t kill each other first. Check out this review from Book Club Chat to learn more.

Digital Declutter Blueprint: Organize Your Files, Photos and Online Life by T.S Avini. Are you feeling overwhelmed by the digital chaos in your life? With the Digital Declutter Blueprint, conquer the clutter and regain control over your files, photos, and online presence. This comprehensive guide empowers you to effectively manage your digital environment, boost productivity, and ensure long-term digital wellness.

– Discover proven strategies to organize and streamline your digital files, making retrieval easier and more intuitive.
– Master the art of managing your digital photos, ensuring your cherished memories are always within reach.

With actionable tips on reducing email overload, securing your online accounts with robust password management, and optimizing your cloud storage space, this book covers all bases. Start your journey towards a simplified digital lifestyle today and transform your tangled digital world into a model of efficiency and productivity!

The Antidote by Karen Russell. The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing–not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a “Prairie Witch,” whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples’ memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate. Russell’s novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting–enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been–and what still could be. To learn more, read this NYT review or this Chicago Review of Books review.

Booster Shots: The Urgent Lessons of Measles and the Uncertain Future of Children’s Health by Adam Ratner, MD, MPH. Every single child diagnosed with measles represents a system failure – an inexcusable unforced error. The technology to prevent essentially 100 percent of measles cases has been in our hands since before the moon landing. But this serious airborne disease, once seemingly defeated, is resurgent around the globe. Why, at a time when biomedical science is so advanced, do parents turn away from vaccination, endangering their own children and the health of the wider population? Using a combination of patient narrative, historical analysis, and scientific research, Dr. Adam Ratner, paediatrician and infectious disease specialist, argues that the reawakening of measles and the subsequent coronavirus pandemic are bellwethers of forgotten knowledge – indicators of decaying trust in science and an underfunded public health infrastructure. Our collective amnesia is starkly revealed in the growth of the antivaccine movement and the missteps in our responses to the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, leading to preventable tragedies in both cases. Trust in medicine and public health is at a nadir. Declining vaccine confidence threatens a global reemergence of other vaccine-preventable diseases in the coming years. Ratner details how solving these problems requires the use of literal and figurative ‘booster shots’ to gather new knowledge and retain the crucial lessons of the past. Learning – and remembering – these lessons is our best hope for preparing for the next pandemic. With attention and care and the tools we already have, we can make the world much safer for children tomorrow than it is today. You can read more at the LA Times or in this NPR interview.

Hothouse Bloom by Austyn Wohlers. In the vein of Rachel Cusk, Han Kang, and Clarice Lispector, Hothouse Bloom follows a young woman who renounces her painting career and all her human relationships to become one with her late grandfather’s apple orchard. Anna arrives at the orchard with the intention to abjure social life, deverbalize her experience, and adjust her consciousness to the rhythms of the trees. She succeeds, for a time, until the arrival of her old friend Jan, nomadic and lively and at work on a book about the painter Charles Burchfield. Alarmed by her isolation and declining health, he tries to get her painting again, while Anna is determined to show him the orchard as she sees it. As the harvest approaches, the outside world descends in the form of pickers, contractors, neighbors, and pomologists. Anna realizes that the only way back to her idyllic life is to turn a profit. It becomes an obsession, much like her former in the way it consumes her, the way an apple oxidizes, might rot. Hothouse Bloom is a millennial pastoral, both painterly and critical in its ideas about art, permaculture, subjectivity, and the natural world. Find out more with this Southern Review of Books review and this NYT review.