Happy Merry Festivities!

I am pleased to report that I am on a break from work until January 2, woohoo! I do enjoy my job, and my coworkers are cool, but sometimes it's good to take a week or so off. Generally, I just take long weekends; this year though I had some extra days and decided to use them now. I know you are all (all five of you) wondering what exciting events I have planned for this vacation, and I will tell you: absolutely nothing. Yep, it's a stay-cation, and I couldn't be happier about that. I will be spending time with friends and family, and also I will relax by myself to take walks and paint and read and write. Last night, Christmas Eve, was spent obsessively curating a list of 100 books to read in 2025 to conform to a new reading challenge pile of requirements. I still have one blank spot ~ a book with a 25-year-old main character. I have not found any book descriptions so far that give a precise age, but I shall be on the lookout. Suggestions welcomed, but it has to be a new-to-me book, and I have read a lot. I also reserve the right to switch out books pre-reading if I run across better ones for my list. Being frugal, I tried to find a spot for every unread book I currently own (physical or Kindle), plus I tried to find some that are free on Amazon Prime. Some possibly will be available at the library as well.

A couple days ago I finished reading The Landower Legacy, another Victoria Holt gem, and I gave it five stars. Such a good read! It was full of romance and betrayals and scandals and mental illness and bees and all kinds of fascinating stuff. One thing that stands out to me in many of the VH books is how death can come for anyone at any time ~ just like now, of course, except that in our comfortable contemporary Western existence, we can tend to forget this. Contemporary romances are usually too upbeat to mention any deaths, except for all the orphaned protagonists whose parents died in car crashes ages ago. VH books are set in the late 1800s, so death via common illness and/or childbirth is a very real thing. (We may be seeing that again here soon, if certain idiots get their way regarding vaccines.) To be honest, Landower wasn't really a five-star book, but since I have given other enjoyable books four stars, and Holt's best are better than that, it's only fair that they should get five. Most books get three, which (again) I will emphasize is not a "bad" rating; it simply means that I liked the book, but it also had several flaws. Two stars means I didn't like it, and I rarely give one star. If a book is that bad I simply DNF it.

Speaking of. Last night, I started a romance novel on my Kindle: Dance with Me New Year's Eve by Alana Highbury, but it was just too awful to finish. I had high hopes for it too because it had a You've Got Mail type of trope, where the main characters hate each other in real life (they work for the same company and have to collaborate on a project), but they connect very nicely anonymously in a chatroom online due to their mutual love of a TV show. The problem was that the female MC was so awkward, shy, and weird that I just wanted to smack her; the male MC was such a total ahole that I wanted to push him off a cliff. In You've Got Mail, we had lots of opportunities to see the MC's away from their bickering with each other and also away from their computers, so we developed a sense of them as complete people. We didn't get that in DWMNYE, as it was simply relentless awkwardness and assholetry throughout. Online, they weren't that different either! She was still lacking self-confidence and overthinking every word she wrote, while he was abrupt and off-putting. What was the point of all this? Clearly, we are supposed to wait for these unlikeable characters to fall in love and become less annoying, but why? I decided that a better course of action was to DNF this book in disgust.

There's a reason why the hater dater trope is one of my nopes: it's generally executed so ham-handedly that the reader also hates the MC (invariably the man) because he actually is hateful! If the writer wants to portray him with many aspects, s/he needs to actually show those other sides to him. Give him a dog, for crying out loud, like Joe had in You've Got Mail. Anything! But if he is 100% ahole, why would we want the heroine to be with him? This guy, Jeff, was an absolute beast at work (and he wasn't even Roxy's boss, so he should have been told off by higher-ups), and honestly idk if anything else he did could make up for that, not even kindness to animals. There was no reason for him to be such a jerk to Roxy, unless she was supposed to be an unreliable narrator, but I didn't care enough to read on and find out. Though this book hit only two nope tropes before it went DNF, the awkwardness plus hater dater themes were so bad in themselves that I just gave up.

Isn't it interesting that I always have more to say about the books I hate as opposed to the books I love? I guess that's true in general, which is why I used to host the Monday peeve and never did anything like the Friday favorite. Oh, speaking of peeves, I found a way to fix my annoyance at grocery clerks and bank tellers who ask personal questions. Instead of being rude (which I don't really like to do as it isn't their fault they are forced to ask me idiotic things like "are you on your lunch break?"), I don't ignore them or say something grumpy now ~ I turn the question right around on them! I did this yesterday at the bank, and the teller was happy to moan about how she was forced to work half a day on Christmas Eve. I didn't have to say a word about my schedule. Remember: most people would rather talk about themselves given a chance.

I, of course, am not most people. My holiday plans and daily activities must be kept a state secret from clerks and tellers, so I can divulge them on my blog. Today, I plan to play board games and eat (more) cookies with some friends, and Sunday I will be with my family. Hope all five of my readers have a joyful Christmas and/or Chanukah!