End-of-the-Year Reading Rush

I have a hate-love relationship with the week between Christmas and New Year's Day. I have always felt like a very lame and somewhat down-in-the-dumps duck during this so-called holiday week. The big holiday is over and nothing I want to do to get settled and start moving forward into the New Year is open and available. People are away, having visits with their grandchildren, and every public place is loaded with tourists. This year I must wait for Tuesday, January 3rd to really plunge into the New Year because Monday, January 2nd is the business New Year's holiday.
So I suppose I'll just read on and on until the New Year really begins.

I keep having days that find me reading most of the day. I just finished Persuasion by Jane Austen an hour ago. I was interested to learn that Austen was suffering from an undiagnosed illness during most of the time she was writing it. Critics and biographers say that it is also her most autobiographical novel. ????  I read Persuasion for the Classics Club and my review and additional information will hopefully go online tomorrow.

I am also about to finish Jodi Picoult's Small Great Things. At 467 pages, I thought it might take me until New Year's Eve to finish, but it is a compulsive read and I predict I'll finish it early tomorrow morning. Picoult wrote that she had always wanted to write a novel about racism in the U.S., but she had to wait years to find her subject and her will to do it.  This novel was published this fall, but the buzz about it everywhere has been growing, and not only online. So my thoughts on this are forthcoming as well.

So this leaves me with four days to finish another book or maybe two.
I have Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance  out of the library, and A Woman under The Influence, a novel  by Joyce Maynard will be on hold for me at the library tomorrow.