May Round Up

 

Another month gone - and thanks to the unseasonable heatwave we spent a lot of time outside. When not out and about in nature it was often a bit too hot for reading anything too deep or complex.

June's Read the World group met earlier this week and we visited India this time -  even the weather joined in with a mini monsoon storm in the middle of the meeting! As ever we all picked different books and authors but even so we found some common themes and had a great time talking about them and the books. Very few of the books this month were actually in translation which was interesting too. Our next meeting is on Bastille Day and so we're reading France for that!

In my own journey around the world, apart from Paraguay, the only new countries I visited were Burundi and Jordan but other locations included Japan, Korea (North & South), and Russia.

Looking back at the books I did read very few novels were stand outs but I did enjoy If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation by Daniel Hahn and Wild Pavements: Exploring Britain's Cities with an Urban Naturalist by Amanda Tuke. 

June should be a book filled month - the next round of one of my reading projects starts and I have a beach holiday to look forward to!

Where did January go?

How can a month that seemed to last about a 1000 days have passed in such a flash that I didn't manage to blog at all? Especially as somehow I read 27 books!

The first book I read this month is already one that I think will end up on my best of the year lists - it was recommended to me by a lot of people on BlueSky and they were absolutely right.

The Woman in Blue by Douglas Bruton (Fairlight Books) is a slender novel and all about one man visiting the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam just to look at one Vermeer painting and then his response to it. It is also the imagined story of the woman in the painting (Woman Reading a Letter). A wonderful gem of a book to start the year on.

My non fiction book of the month's reading was Frostlines by Neil Shea (Macmillan) which recounts his time spent with different communities living well above the Arctic Circle and how their societies have changed over the years thanks to cultural and environmental pressures. I am not a huge fan of the cold but he made me really want to see a lot of the places he visited before it is too late. 

A friend and I  also started our new Reading the World Book Club in January and at our first meeting just chatted about our favourite books in translation and related topics but for February we're going to be looking at all things Nordic. I've really enjoyed a lot of the books I've read from this region but I've never got to grips with the genre 'Nordic Noir' .

Having now tried one from Norway, one from Sweden and one from Denmark as well as ones written by women as well as men I can definitively say that they do not float my boat in anyway at all - however as I am not a crime/thriller fan in general perhaps I need to read some British/American ones from the genre too. 

February is #ReadIndie month where people are encouraged to read and support Independent Publishers - something I really enjoy doing so who knows perhaps there will be more reviewed in Feb!