Wow, there's been a real spurt of reading action at the end of this year - maybe a consequence of so many people being put into tier 4/unable to see family? I know I've been reading more than usual just to avoid the squabbling from the DCs...
Thank you very much for your thoughtful reviews, Keith - I really enjoyed reading them!
Thank you also to southeastdweller for keeping these threads going all year (and for heeding our pleas for a final 2020 one - I've got lots of reviews to catch up on and would feel weird putting them on a 2021 thread!)
I'm now on books 95 and 96 (and am wondering whether I can push through to 100 with a bit of judicious children's book reading, or whether this is a futile goal and I'm only cheating myself 
) so I'm going to update in batches as I can't face doing all of the reviews at once.
The Carer by Deborah Moggach
Enjoyably tart book about two late middle-aged siblings whose lives are turned upside-down when their father gets a new live-in carer. At first, Robert and Phoebe see Mandy as a complete “treasure” – yes, she’s a bit “common”, but she seems devoted and enthusiastic about her work and they are relieved that they can pay her to do the caring that they don’t want to/can’t do themselves. But their father (an octogenarian professor emeritus of particle physics) seems to be changing oddly under Mandy’s influence, and the siblings start to wonder if all is as it seems… Things come to a head halfway through the book (not in the way that I’d expected!) and all sorts of things come out of the woodwork; the second half of the book examines the fall-out and the events leading up to it from various perspectives. I’d assumed this was going to be a Sophie Hannah-style thriller with a devious “twist” but it wasn’t like that at all. Instead, Moggach casts a rather beady eye on family relationships (between parents and children, between siblings, and between spouses), on ageing, and on the interplay between money, intelligence, success and opportunity. The characters are realistically unlikeable at times and, although there’s a certain amount of social satire going on, there isn’t a lot of flab either. I enjoyed this a lot!
The Deaths of December by Susi Holliday
Competent police procedural that I bought in a charity shop last January and have been saving up for Christmas this year. A serial killer (referred to for most of the book as “The Photographer”) sends a grisly advent calendar to the local CID; behind most of the doors is a photograph of a crime scene from an unsolved murder, which only the killer could have taken. Needless to say, there is also an elaborate code involved, linking dates, locations and numbered doors on the calendar. Can the police catch the killer before the last few empty doors are filled? (Yes, of course they can.) There was nothing earth-shattering about this book, but the writing was not terrible and the exploration of the characters’ back stories raised it above many other pot-boilers of this type.
The Thirteen Days of Christmas by Jenny Overton
A childhood favourite that I haven’t read for ages, which was brought to mind recently by a conversation with DD (and I see that ChessieFL also read it very recently). I was fretting that it wouldn’t live up to my memories of it, but I needn’t have worried – it was wonderful 
. The four Kitson children live with their widowed father Ralph; the oldest daughter, Anne (who prefers to be known as “Annaple” because she has romantic notions) is being wooed by the wealthy young merchant Francis Vere, but won’t have him because she feels that he is too prosaic. The younger three children conspire to get Annaple married off (partly because they’ve had enough of her terrible cooking), and egg Francis on to think of more and more ludicrously romantic gifts to present to Annaple on each of the twelve days of Christmas.
Like a lot of my favourite books from childhood (it was first published in 1974, and I would have read it in the mid-1980s), it involves a historical setting – weirdly, this is never mentioned explicitly, but judging from Shirley Hughes’ illustrations, I reckon it’s some time in the second half of the 17th century. The setting, the understated period details and the spare but evocative language all meant that this was a magical read for me – like The Children of Green Knowe and The Dark is Rising, both of which I’ve also just re-read. Like those books, it is really wonderful at evoking atmosphere – each of the chapters is titled with the relevant feast for that day (so not just St Stephen’s Day, but also Churching Day, Adam’s Day, Eve’s Day and Dancing Day). The celebrations and carols for that day frame the action, and give a real sense of Christmastide as a time for communal celebration rather than just personal feasting/present acquisition or sickly “family time” as modern books tend to emphasise. I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to re-read this (probably because it was in a box under my bed until a couple of months ago 
) but it’s definitely going to be a regular re-read from now on!
Dead Famous by Greg Jenner
I started this months ago and then got bogged down and distracted by other books. Once I’d got going again, I flew through it! It’s an entertaining but fundamentally serious-minded look at the history of celebrity: when did we start to have “celebrities”, what is the difference between “celebrity”, “fame” and “notoriety”, and how did people become (and stay) famous in the past? There are loads of colourful and entertaining anecdotes, as you would expect, but there is also a serious attempt to grapple with cultural theory and to put it in its proper context (as the historical consultant for Horrible Histories, I reckon Greg Jenner is probably uniquely suited to this job). Chapters cover the routes to stardom, money, celebrity bodies and merchandise, and everything is meticulously referenced (he mentions in the epilogue that it took him 6 years and 1.4 million words of notes to put this book together, and I believe it – it even spills over onto his website!). Among the more obvious suspects like Byron, Lizst and WG Grace, you get to find out about the now-forgotten stars of their age, like the firebrand Tory clergyman Henry Sacheverell (arguably the first modern “celebrity”), the sultry dancer Cléo de Mérode (whose affair with King Leopold of Belgium led to the brilliant portmanteau nickname Cléopold, and whose fans were creepily obsessed with her ears), the “divine Master Betty” (a Regency child star who was a cross between Shirley Temple and The Beatles), and, er, Clara the Rhino (who was the hottest star to tour 1740s Europe).
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Haven’t read this for years, but it was a lovely way to spend Christmas/Boxing Day (I listened to the Hugh Grant version that Audible are giving away free at the moment). I’d forgotten how funny some of it is!
Grimble and Grimble at Christmas by Clement Freud
Another book I haven’t read for at least 20 years! Grimble is a boy of about 10 (“You may think it is silly to say someone is about ten, but Grimble had rather odd parents who were very vague and seldom got anything completely right”). This book is really two long short-stories put together. In the first, Grimble comes home from school one Monday to find an empty house; his parents have left a globe with two flags stuck in it, one in England (saying “GRIMBLE”) and one in Peru (saying “US”). Further notes around the house (his parents like leaving cryptic and sometimes trolling notes around the house) suggest five different people he can call on while they are away, from Colonel Featherstone to the station master. Each day, he calls on a different person, only to find that they are also mysteriously out and have left him notes with instructions on how to make dinner. In this way, he manages to spend the time until his parents return. The second half is about Grimble’s attempts to earn enough money for a “proper” Christmas because he thinks that his parents will be too forgetful/disorganised to do it themselves (not quite as sad or neglectful as that makes it sound!).
The book is illustrated by Quentin Blake, and is a bizarre mixture of surreal humour and cookery advice (Clement Freud was both a food writer and an MP when he wrote this book) that was right up my street. To give you a flavour of it: [Grimble’s parents have sent him a telegram saying “THINKING ABOUT YOU. MESSAGE IN THE IRONING CUPBOARD. DON’T FORGET TEETH. LOVE FATHER AND MOTHER.”]
“He went up to the ironing cupboard, rummaged about a bit among the clothes, and finally in the pocket of his bathing trunks he found the message. It was written in green ink on a large squashed-fly biscuit and said, DO NOT EAT THIS BISCUIT BECAUSE EATING GREEN INK IS BAD FOR YOU. LOVE FATHER AND MOTHER. ‘If that is a grown-up joke I am glad I am a child,’ though Grimble, brushed his teeth angrily, and looked at the list of people his parents had told him to go and see if he needed anything.”
Ruth's First Christmas Tree by Elly Griffiths
I downloaded this 6 months ago as a Kindle freebie and this seemed as good a time as any to read it. It’s a short story that is number 4.5 in the series, going between A Room Full of Bones and A Dying Fall (indeed, there’s a long excerpt from the latter at the end of this book). It was weird going back so far in the series now that I’m on book 12 and a lot has happened in Ruth’s turbulent love/professional/crime-fighting life! The story itself is pretty short but sweet – not the most enthralling mystery (in fact there are a couple of loose ends left untied) but a nice, easy, atmospheric read for fans of the series.