OKAY! In and around other things - reading for work, reading with kids, reading about knitting, reading my chainsaw manual - I finally finished reading the Witcher series, putting a nice bow on my 2020 reading. At least, I thought that's what I did. I read the first Witcher book (which lines up with Season One on Netflix), and then the boxed set of three (Blood of Elves, The Time of Contempt, Baptism of Fire). And I have to say, I was totally disappointed with how it finished! You know, at the end of a book? When there’s another book to read? And there's a teaser chapter (which there totally was for the second and third Witcher books I read)? Well, the fourth book handed me a teaser chapter for a totally different series. And I'm like, hey! This is how it ends? What happened to Ciri? Did Geralt just give up looking for her? What about this war they’re in the middle of? What the....
After stomping around about this for a few days, I spotted my problem - there are seven Witcher titles, not four. I don't know why the publisher was teasing me with some new series; but in any case, I now know that I've yet to read the Tower of Swallows, Lady of the Lake, and Season of Storms. Some light reading for 2021, I guess. Actually, I've been down this road before with Ender’s Game which I thought was a series of six books but turned into twelve and became the longest book series I'd read since my Nancy Drew days.
What didn't disappoint me was my family's Christmas Eve reading tradition, a thing my family has been doing for more than 20 years. Ever since my kids were little, we've put out cookies and milk, hung up our stockings, and then sat to listen to a family member reading Clement C. Moore’s T'was the Night Before Christmas. This year, one of my sons had to join us by zoom call - bittersweet - but we were still together and whole, and I'm grateful for that.
And with that, I'm wrapping up my year of writing about reading. Thanks for reading along.
Cheryl Brown (@CherylAnneBrown) is co-creator of the Storytent and Bookwagon programs, QLNB's Community Literacy Coordinator, and long-time advocate for and facilitator of a variety of family literacy initiatives. In these posts, she has been documenting and sharing snap-shots of some of her daily reading.
