I have a very busy week coming up so please accept this tag instead of a book review 🙂

Lord Peter Wimsey Audio Series – Summer 2022

Plot for Book 1: The stark naked body was lying in the tub. Not unusual for a proper bath, but highly irregular for murder — especially with a pair of gold pince-nez deliberately perched before the sightless eyes. What’s more, the face appeared to have been shaved after death. The police assumed that the victim was a prominent financier, but Lord Peter Wimsey, who dabbled in mystery detection as a hobby, knew better. In this, his first murder case, Lord Peter untangles the ghastly mystery of the corpse in the bath.

This entire series helped me through all of my commutes to work in the Summer of 2022. I hadn’t tried listening to radio drama adaptations of books before but I thought I would give it a go to help fill the gap from home to work. I ended up getting sucked into the world of Peter Wimsey and would listen to these collections any chance I got! They were so good. Now I am reading the novel versions of the stories for 2023.

Legendborn – New Years Eve 2022

Plot: After her mother dies in an accident, sixteen-year-old Bree Matthews wants nothing to do with her family memories or childhood home. A residential program for bright high schoolers at UNC–Chapel Hill seems like the perfect escape—until Bree witnesses a magical attack her very first night on campus. A flying demon feeding on human energies. A secret society of so called “Legendborn” students that hunt the creatures down. And a mysterious teenage mage who calls himself a “Merlin” and who attempts—and fails—to wipe Bree’s memory of everything she saw. The mage’s failure unlocks Bree’s own unique magic and a buried memory with a hidden connection: the night her mother died, another Merlin was at the hospital. Now that Bree knows there’s more to her mother’s death than what’s on the police report, she’ll do whatever it takes to find out the truth, even if that means infiltrating the Legendborn as one of their initiates. She recruits Nick, a self-exiled Legendborn with his own grudge against the group, and their reluctant partnership pulls them deeper into the society’s secrets—and closer to each other. But when the Legendborn reveal themselves as the descendants of King Arthur’s knights and explain that a magical war is coming, Bree has to decide how far she’ll go for the truth and whether she should use her magic to take the society down—or join the fight.

I had a very quiet NYE last year and spent the evening reading this book and planning my reading year for 2023. All my goals, books and ideas I wanted to incorporate to my blog and social media were mostly planned on that one evening. Legendborn also happened to be the book I chose for the first ever Book Club I hosted!

Night Train to the Stars – Commute 2023

Plot: Dark and innocent, sublime and whimsical, Miyazawa’s stories have the ageless feel of the best fairy tales. There are animal allegories such as ‘The Ungrateful Rat’ where a rude rodent insults all the objects he meets – until he meets the Rat Trap/ There are morality tales such as ‘The Restaurant of Many Orders’, where two hunters become the hunted. There are also transcendent stories of childhood and mortality like Miyazawa’s best-known ‘Night Train to the Stars’, where a magical steam train carries children through the night and up to the heavens.

This was the first ever book I read on my new commute to work. It takes me anywhere between 30 mins to an hour to get to work, depending on the traffic, which means I get loads of reading done. This book was the first of many books I have read during my morning and evening commutes. I will be honest this book was not great and neither is the journey hahaha.

The Book of Eve – First Bookish Event of 2023

Plot: Beatrice is the convent’s librarian. For years, she has shunned the company of her sisters, finding solace only with her manuscripts. But she longs for knowledge of the outside world – a world ruled by men in which women can play no part. One carnival night, it seems her prayers are answered: two women, badly injured and desperate for help, are abandoned at the convent’s gate. Moments from death, one of them presses something into Beatrice’s hands: a bewitching book whose pages have a dangerous life of their own. But the men of the city, bent on the book’s destruction, are closing in. Beatrice must do all she can to protect it – no matter what the cost.

Yes, I planned and hosted my first event of 2023 with the amazing Meg Clothier talking all about her latest book. I really enjoyed the event, Meg was super lovely and I was super happy to getting back and doing events with authors and publishers.

The Last Tale of the Flower Bride – Stuck on a bus for ages!

Plot: Once upon a time, a man who believed in fairy tales married a beautiful, mysterious woman named Indigo Maxwell-Casteñada. He was a scholar of myths. She was heiress to a fortune. They exchanged gifts and stories and believed they would live happily ever after—and in exchange for her love, Indigo extracted a promise: that her bridegroom would never pry into her past. But when Indigo learns that her estranged aunt is dying and the couple is forced to return to her childhood home, the House of Dreams, the bridegroom will soon find himself unable to resist. For within the crumbling manor’s extravagant rooms and musty halls, there lurks the shadow of another girl: Azure, Indigo’s dearest childhood friend who suddenly disappeared. As the house slowly reveals his wife’s secrets, the bridegroom will be forced to choose between reality and fantasy, even if doing so threatens to destroy their marriage . . . or their lives. 

I had no plans to finish this book when I did. I was still about halfway through the book by the time I got on my bus to work. Well. The roads had iced over so we were waiting ages for a gritter to turn up and grit the roads and then I was stuck in bumper to bumper traffic. It was so long I finished my book with about 10 mins to spare before I had to get off the bus!

Promise Boys – Amsterdam 2023

Plot: The prestigious Urban Promise Prep school might look pristine on the outside, but deadly secrets lurk within. When the principal ends up murdered on school premises and the cops come sniffing around, a trio of students—J.B., Ramón, and Trey—emerge as the prime suspects. They had the means, they had the motive—and they may have had the murder weapon. But with all three maintaining their innocence, they must band together to track down the real killer before they are arrested. Or is the true culprit hiding among them?

I read this for the majority of my trip to Amsterdam. 1. I had never been to Amsterdam and it was amazing and I want to live there 2. The book was really good! I started it on the airport to Amsterdam and finished in the airport to go home!