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your question first, no, I don't really read holiday-themed books at all, let alone during the season. I was actually surprised when I went to an event at one of the local libraries--a combination Christmas decorations swap, regifting swap and pop up book sale--and saw just how many books have been written about Christmas. Heck, I've never even read Dickens' A Christmas Carol, though I've seen several film/TV versions of it.

My short list, and it's all because of the first book...

The Overlooked Americans by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett - ***WARNING! I can't discuss this without getting a tiny bit political, but I'll try to keep it as apolitical as possible*** EC-H is a professor at USC who grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania (Danforth, to be precise). She got the idea for this book, which is non-fiction, when various political analysts and members of the media decided, ah, a certain someone won the 2016 election because rural Americans were angry and felt overlooked. That idea was expanded somewhat to "rural America is in crisis". So the author decided to interview a bunch of people who live in rural America to see if that's true or not. Her conclusion? Neither belief was entirely true. I had a LOT of mixed feelings about this book...on the one hand, I appreciated her effort to get the opinions of actual rural Americans instead of assuming what they believed, and I even more appreciated her ability to like a person while vehemently disagreeing with their stance on politics or religion or culture in general. Too often, I hear people scoff and say "Oh, I could NEVER be friends with a <fill in the blank>", which saddens me because I truly (maybe naively) believe there's something to like about everyone and can (usually) find the good in everyone, including my most fervent "opposites". OTOH, EC-H could occasionally be a bit smug and dismissive about those who weren't like her, deciding they were just ignorant or "liked the wrong things". One not too political example: education. EC-H talked to both rural and urban parents and asked them what they wanted for their children when it came to education. Rural parents just wanted their kids to be happy. But most urban parents not only wanted their kids to attend college, they wanted them to get into a "GOOD" college. As if only a degree from the "right" kind of school (Ivy League) and a big salary could make their kids happy or somehow guarantee their kids' success. I found that incredibly sad. I'm not a parent but I'd like to think I'd rather have a child that was poor but happy than a child who was rich and miserable. E-CH agrees with the urban parents and feels the rural parents just "don't understand" how important a fancy degree from an Ivy League school is. Anyways, I'm going to give the book a solid B. It was though-provoking, to be sure, but it was a bit too long, relied a bit too much on charts and graphs and never really let us get to "know" more than 3 or 4 of the rural people she interviewed. I would've given the book an A had she cut out half the graphs and replaced them with actual short chapters about more of the people she interviewed.

Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto - This is a collection of fictitious short stories by a young woman of Hawaiian-Japanese descent. And apparently a bitter one at that...from the book jacket, I was expecting stories of Hawaiian mythology and indeed, the first "story" was more a three page list of some of the warnings Hawaiian mothers give their keikis. I actually knew a couple of them from the reboot of Hawaii 5-0 (never take pork over the Pali Highway--it has to do with the legend of Pele and her half man, half pig lover Kamapua'a) and would've loved to read more, and indeed, one story had to do with a family taking in a menehune but mostly the stories were less about educating the reader on Hawaiian tales or exploring the myths and more about angry half Hawaiian, half Japanese women--an obvious self insert. I gave up after the first five stories, so give this one an incomplete.

The Librarianist by Patrick DeWitt - A mostly sweet, gentle tale about a retired librarian who decides to volunteer at a local nursing home by reading to residents. He gets the idea after meeting one of their patients, a woman deep in the throes of Alzheimer's. The book starts off in the present, then retreats to the librarian's past. I found both time periods to be enjoyable, though the author spends a bit too much time on one specific event, later in the book. I also would've liked the author to do a better job with the characters' voices; almost everybody spoke in the same stuffy, stilted, formal way, a way that not even our older generation speaks. Because of that, and the one part that went on too long, I'm going to have to give The Librarianist a B+.

My December reading list will be even shorter, as I just started a book that I'm enjoying...but it's over 700 pages.