Books read in December

Can't review my Advent book yet, as it actually goes all the way up to Epiphany, so I'm still going! It's the incredible journey by Steve Brady.

Also read in December:

The Morville hours by Katherine Swift
What a lovely book. Bizarrely I tried reading this when it was first published back in 2008 and didn't get very far with it, maybe because I wasn't really gardening then? Anyway, something made me buy a copy on holiday at the little book shop we found in Thame and I tried reading it again. This time it was compelling - it's an mixture of gardening (how the author created the garden at the Dower House at Morville), but around a framework of a medieval Book of Hours, so there are parts about faith and belief, plus the history of the house and area, and the history of her family, and related to her earlier life as a rare book librarian. The garden was designed from scratch, with different areas to represent different parts of gardening history, and I definitely want to visit it now! I've reserved her other book about Morville , the Morville Year, from the library.

Sew your own by John-Paul Flintoff.
The sub-title of this is "man finds happiness and the meaning of life making clothes". This was one I'd had on my Amazon wish-list for a while, then happened to see at the library so I borrowed it. It can sometimes be a bit hard to follow, as the chapters can lurch between taking apart a shirt to work out how to make one, to attending a meeting of various religious groups. Ultimately the book follows his quest to make life more meaningful, both through doing practical stuff for his own family (instead of paying someone else to do it) and spiritually. It is very funny, and inspirational, although I can't help thinking it must be a lot easier with a freelance/flexible job to fit in doing all of that, than around most people's working lives!

Death comes to Pemberley by P.D. James
Mum's Christmas present, which I promptly stole borrowed from her to read before she went home. This is much better than many of the other P & P sequel type books I've read. It's a few years after the events of P & P and there is soon to be a ball at Pemberley, when a carriage lurches out of nowhere and Lydia tumbles out in a dreadful state. Yes. There's a body in the woods. OK, so the plot is a tiny bit predictable, but it is good fun and mostly believable, although definitely not something Austen would have written... I wasn't convinced by the inclusion of characters from other Austen novels though, made it all feel a bit too much like Facebook, where everyone follows what everyone else is up to! But if you enjoyed P & P it's worth reading.