I got to read a lot over Christmas break. Christmas break is the one time every year that I can devote to some serious reading. For a number of years, I read Lord of the Rings every Christmas. (It’s too long and complicated to read it during the regular year; other things keep intruding and intrusions make me lose the plotline.) Later, I decided that, as much as I like Lord of the Rings, there were too many other books I hadn’t read.

This year, I read:

Pride and Prejudice. I like Jane Austen, but had never gotten around to reading this before. The first half is pretty boring – a bunch of people sitting around playing cards and gossiping (with the women acting catty). The second half is much better, and I actually stayed up til 3 am one night reading it.

The Complete Sherlock Holmes. The second half of it, at any rate. The first half I read a number of years ago, but never got around to finishing it. I made frequent breaks to read Pride and Prejudice, as Holmes can be insufferable sometimes. The last book (“The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes”) is the weakest, with “mysteries” I guessed the answer to within the first page and gimmicks like having Sherlock Holmes himself write a couple of the stories in first person. Other than that, it was pretty good.

D-Day and Pegasus Bridge. Two great histories of World War Two by one of the most readable historians around – Stephen Ambrose. The first book covers the first 24 hours of the invasion of Normandy; the second book covers a single action of the British Paratroopers during that day. Painstaking research combined with vivid prose makes for compelling reading.