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This is a terrific collection of Christmas fantasy stories by the fabulous Connie Willis, with a couple of should-be classics and some other fascinating stuff. Willis spends more time on pop culture like movies and songs than on religion, thought she does some of that as well. Most of the stories are quite funny.

The book starts off brilliantly with "Miracle," a very funny and charming story about a woman plagued by a genial but hugely irritating Christmas spirit. This is a must-read.

Other great stories include Now Showing, Newsletter, and All Seated on the Ground.

The weirdest story is the Kafkaesque "In Coppelius's Toyshop." If you've ever wondered what a Kafka Christmas story would be like, this is it.

Most of the rest are also fun but leave less of an impact. There's a murder mystery that has virtually nothing to do with Christmas and is almost entirely the "solution" part, there's a cute sci-fi riff on All About Eve, there's a fun story about an overworked Christmas planner.

Of the two specifically Christian stories, one is a cute thing about Joseph and Mary very far from home and the other is an okay thing about a guy looking for the second coming. They're okay, but the sincerity takes out some of the fun.

The only story I would excise is "Adaptation", which is both depressing and stressful and ultimately has a peculiar moral that made zero sense to me.

A great set of Christmas stories even if like me you read them in the summer.

Catherine House is intriguing at first, putting us in a slightly odd school and offering a sense of mystery. And the author does a wonderful job of putting not so much in the mind of the "pretty bored girl" protagonist as in her body, voluptuously describing how everything looks and sounds and smells.

I was completely drawn in at first, but it felt like the book just sort of stalled out in the middle. And when it finally reengaged towards the end it was just weird and unsatisfying.

It's hard to say what this book is. There are hints of gothic mystery, bits of cult behavior, elements of thriller and sci-fi, and tons of college kids leading the wild life, but none of it really fits together or builds to anything. And even though the story is first person, the protagonist remains inscrutable. Her final decisions are all over the map and I neither understand why she made the decisions she made nor why the decisions were even difficult.

As for the other characters, they are bland and interchangeable, with superficial personality features but no seeming life beyond knowing the protagonist.

Even though I legitimately enjoyed this at first, I ultimately regretted reading it at all. This author writes very well but plots and develops character very poorly.

While most of Gladwell's books have simply taken a concept and explored it through a variety of examples that more-or-less support his hypothesis, in Talking to Strangers he tries to do something far more ambitious: examine a single horrific incident by exploring a slew of concepts that he feels explain how things played out as they did.

This doesn't entirely work. Individual chapters can be fascinating, as you learn of how bad spy agencies are at recognizing spies in their midsts, how suicides can be lessened by making suicide less convenient, and how crime varies not by neighborhood but by block.

Some subjects feel underbaked. He starts with the idea that people naturally believe other people, but that seems simplistic, since clearly people believe their in-tribe more than their out-tribe, and that is ignored. And I was fascinated by the block-by-block crime phenomenon and frustrated that he offered no explanation for why it is so.

In the final chapter he takes all these concepts and relates them to the death of Sandra Bland. But his determination to tell her story through so many disparate ideas makes it feel unfocussed, and I was never persuaded by his framing it as people being bad at talking to strangers. It really seemed more about structural flaws, callousness, and stupidity.

I do appreciate his highlighting those structural flaws, and broadening the conversation from "racist cop" to "system built on numerous flawed choices and bad assumptions," but it just doesn't cohere well.

In fact, his appreciation of the complexity of events is the best part of the book, and also the part that has engendered the most negative reviews on this site, where it is described as victim-blaming. Admittedly his approach is sometimes problematic, especially when he seems to go out of his way to excuse behavior that deserves at least some blame, but people so often choose a simple villain story and I appreciate that Gladwell isn't afraid to say, "it's complicated and there are reasons beyond some people just being evil."

I feel Gladwell might have done better with Jon Ronson's approach of starting with a central subject and then following all the loose threads of it. He could have started detailing Sandra Bland's encounter and then, as he hit each disastrous error, move into a chapter detailing where that mistake came from. He clearly wanted something like the movie Signs, where you have a bunch of stuff that comes together in a seemingly inevitable way right at the end, but it just doesn't work.

Gladwell is a hugely talented writer, but Talking to Strangers highlights his limits more than any of his other books. It's still worthwhile, but it's easily the weakest book he's written.

A lot of people I follow on Twitter highly recommended this book, and I read a number of intriguing excerpts highlight what a twisted monster Trump is and has always been that made me look forward to reading it. But unfortunately, while this may be an important book in terms of giving a fuller picture of the monster in the White House, it's also remarkably tedious.

The great appeal of this book is that Trump has a slight but lifelong relationship with Trump and knows his family. This allows her to tell a lot of family lore. But while that lore can be interesting, it is only about 20% of a book that is primarily tedious psychoanalysis.

I certainly think Trump is a narcissistic psychopath, but that doesn't mean I want to read a book that is simply someone who knows him blathering on for page after page about what a disaster he is. Mary Trump ignores the famous writer's edict, "show, don't tell," and instead tells us over and over again how vile Trump is, spinning out her theories from small but telling incidents.

I only made it through the first chapter and a half; it's really a pretty agonizing slog. This might have made a solid article in the New Yorker, but as a book there's just not enough to it.

This remarkable memoir portrays Angelou's as a zig zag through chunks of the country. Her characters are strong, she herself is riveting, and she captures a child/teen's mind beautifully.

Angelou's approach to pervasive racism is interesting, in that she portrays it kind of like living near savages that sometimes attack and sometimes are barely visible. Racism comes across as horrific and unjust, but also as inevitable as fire and storm. It's not that she's writing a book about racism; it's a book about her life and the racism of America is simply one of many threads that run through it.

Angelou is really good at capturing all facets of life. There are moments of horror, moments of softness, and some moments that are just hilarious, like a woman being filled with a hysterical amount of Jesus.

While I occasionally felt Angelou was straining too hard for poetic metaphors, for the most part her writing is elegant and immediate. This is the first of 7 memoirs and I absolutely need to read the rest.

I really wanted to like Another Country. I had read a brilliant essay by Baldwin and thought I'd like to read more, and while the most sensible thing might have been to read one of his non-fiction books, I'm more a fiction reader so I started with this.

It's interesting and literary but it's also slow and seems to lose energy as it goes along. It does a number of interesting things, such as changing focus to show you into the mind of a character you've only seen from the outside, but I didn't care deeply about any of those characters.

Another Country has a fairly strong, very desperate beginning, but when its most tortured character exits it leaves a hole Baldwin doesn't seem inclined to fill, and the more muted unhappiness of its cast left me enervated.

At the point I stopped, the only real reason to keep reading would be to see if one eventually sees the world from the one major character who, two-thirds in, has only been seen from the third person. She's the most intriguing character for most of the book. But I can't work up enthusiasm to keep going.

Guess I'll try something non-fiction after all.