January Reading Wrap Up

[@Molly-s6u]

highlights of mine from January were The Stone Witch of Florence and Peach Blossom Spring. Happy reading 📖

[@playsintraffic2]

The Three Musketeers is on my TBR for the year as well as the sequel Twenty years After.

[@dqan7372]

Where did January go? You're off to a good start.

[@novellenovels]

I do need to read the three musketeers but for some reason I’m never rushing to it although I’ve had it a while..

[@nataliemoon1512]

I would love to hear your thoughts on the memoir ~ lead me where the light is ours by n. galilea ~ blurb books

[@Dinadoesyoga]

Milady is one of my favorite characters in literature! She makes that book. I can totally see the James Bond comparison. 😅 Thank you for your thoughts on Gentleman in Moscow. A few years ago I dnfed it at about page 75 and I've had fomo about it ever since. I felt like it was trying to be like a classic without actually being one. 🤔 Anyway, I will listen to the audio soon. Maybe I'll like it that way.

[@johnhaggerty-z8d]

Kate Kruimink's wonderful historical novel *Astraea* (2024) got me through a lung infection and Catherine Lacey's mesmerising alternative history *Autobiography of X* (2023). I also found novelist Helen Garner's collection of journalism *True Stories* in the Waterstone sale. Her review of Andrew Marr's bio of Patrick White has sent me back to White's *Voss*.

[@millercgr]

I read The Fixed Period a few years ago and really liked it -- possibly just because it was so different from Trollope's other novels. The most recent book finished was For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway. I think it's Hemingway's longest novel but it is very fast paced. I didn't think I would like it as much as I did although the Spanish Civil War has inspired some excellent artistic creations and this is one of them.

[@johnhaggerty-z8d]

Mary Dearborn's life of Hemingway is essential. Richard Bradford's biography *The Man Who Wasn't There* is too harsh and judgemental in places. Before he killed himself Hemingway was reading love letters from Agnes von Kurowsky, the Red Cross nurse who treated his wounds in Milan in 1918. *Hemingway in Italy* by Richard Owen goes over this period as does *Hemingway and Women* by Lawrence R Broer. Hemingway longed for a daughter and loved to talk to women. *Hemingway in Spain* by Jose Luis Castillo-Puche is full of atmosphere especially on the bad blood & mistrust *For Whom the Bell Tolls* in fascist Spain under Franco.

[@leorapier9389]

I want to read the Three Musketeers. Though I will probably start with the shorter Count of Monte Cristo.

[@michaelwright6702]

If the Three Musketeers audiobook is Penguin Classics, the translator is Pevear.

[@Shellyish]

I didn’t love A Gentleman in Moscow either. I felt parts were really cheesy and the book was overlong.

[@jamesduggan7200]

A relatively recent movie, The Adjustment Bureau (starring Matt Damon), uses the device of the 88 Bus. The two main characters meet (again) on a bus but alas her phone number is lost! Much of Act II is the travail of reconnecting. I read a lot of books in January, but most of them short and without importance beyond that I liked them. You, however, might benefit from James Patterson's The Trial of Alex Cross, which is historical fiction about a trial in Mississippi involving Detective Dr. Alex Cross's great-great ancestors there. As I've said before I'm a big fan of Cross, the American Sherlock Holmes.

[@badfaith4u]

I finished A Good Girl's Guide to Murder in January.

[@leorapier9389]

Unfortunately I don't read as fast as Katie Lumsden. But I read a couple of American novels - Go Set A Watchman and To Kill a Mockingbird. And a nonfiction - On Zionist Literature - about the modest conflict.

[@wendycayless]

I DNF-ed A Gentleman in Moscow. It just seemed indulgent and irritated me intensely.

[@jackiesliterarycorner]

Sorry you didn't like A Gentleman in Moscow, but like you said not every book is for everyone. You seemed to have a good reading month.