Reading: The Code of the Woosters

Given that I find the Christmas and New Year period a particularly trying one in the best of years, and that 2016 hasn't been the best of years by anyone's reckoning, I wanted something frothy and comforting, and you can't get more frothy and comforting than Wodehouse. I'm not actually sure whether I'd read this one before or simply seen the Fry and Laurie TV adaptation multiple times (it must be about 30 years since I discovered Wodehouse and read my way through everything the local library had to offer), but either way this was delightfully familiar territory; Bertie Wooster getting into a series of scrapes while trying nobly to extricate everyone around him from theirs, in this case largely centering around a silver cow-creamer, and narrating in characteristically breezy style, and incidentally delivering a stinging response to the thuggish would-be dictator Roderick Spode which gladdens the heart of 2016 as much as it must have gladdened those of 1938.

2016 reading

I started reviewing books here fairly early in 2016, and started cross-posting the reviews to Goodreads later on in the year (around Easter, I think, though I can't remember exactly). You can see the reviews by clicking on the "2016 books” tag. I make it 83 books, which is a surprising increase even on last year's 50, especially when six of them were by Dorothy Dunnett.

( List )

I don't seem to have logged Did Not Finishes this year, but I know there were a couple; Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body, possibly Courtney Milan's The Duchess War, though that may have been last year (both of these were DNF basically for Too Much Sex, though in rather different ways) and Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint (much more whimsical than I was expecting it to be and not really what I was in the mood for at the time, but I might give it another try some other time).

And now it's New Year's Eve, possibly my least favourite daye of the year, and I'm trying to decide whether I should be polite and stay up and go with my parents to see the New Year in with lots of complete strangers in the second freezing Norfolk church in two days or just go to bed and read The Hanging Tree which I treated myself to on Kindle as no-one had bought me the hardback for Christmas and be sound asleep well before midnight. After all, 2016 was the first New Year I'd stayed up for in about 15 years and look how that turned out...