I squeezed in one more book before the end of the year: Finished reading A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum by Emma Southon, a fun and chatty look at Roman law and society through the lens of homicide. Southon uses a good chunk of her page count pointing out how little we know about the lives of Romans other than the richest men, and showing us a bit we can infer about the rest.
My Christmas gift to myself was not reading the book on the 24th or 25th.
Finished reading Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt. Reporting on the show trial of the bureaucrat who kept the trains running to Auschwitz, Arendt uses it as a narrow lens to look at the Holocaust. Her discussions of then-modern Germany and Israel are not generally relevant today, but the question that will keep coming back to me is how to resist from within such a system.
Finished rereading The Ionian Mission by Patrick O’Brian (Aubrey–Maturin series, book 8). We’ve kind of settled into the sweet spot of the series, if memory serves, and in any case this book is its own sweet spot, a pretty balance of sailing, spycraft, politics, and interpersonal drama, along with a return to the beloved H.M.S. Surprise.
Finished reading The Citadel of the Autarch (as the second half of the Sword & Citadel compilation). This was far and away my favorite of the four books, with a narrator who finally seems human, and something of an explanation for some of the seemingly-irrational events of the earlier books. Was the payoff worth it? Yes; I’m still not a fan of the semi-inscrutability of the earlier books, but they had their own compensating virtues.