Well, January felt long. And also boom--gone already! How can time seem to go by very s-l-o-w-ly, and at the same time, very fast?!!
I did change up my exercise routine. I plank for 1 minute, balance, plank for another minute, balance, and then plank for a minute again. So in all, I have increased my planking, but by doing repetitions instead of one big long test of endurance.
I read 7 books this month:
1. Love Scene, Take Two (2018) by Alex Evansley, was one of Rachel's books to give away, and it was not bad, actually. It was a pretty entertaining read. The male lead, Teddy Sharpe, met M.B. Caldwell on a plane and that was "Love Scene, Take One." Which he blew. And so then, on the movie set in which he is playing the male lead in the screenplay of her book, he gets "Take Two," which is perhaps going to be permanent. I thought the story was charming and well-written, but the author made M.B. Caldwell be 18 years old, and that was just such a stretch for me. Had her character been 20, even, it would have worked so much better for me. But the author just had to keep reminding me of her youth, and it just didn't work for me. Otherwise, a cute story.
2. Smart Cookie (2018) by Elly Swartz, another free book from Rachel's stash, was about a young girl and her father who run a B&B, but someone seems to be sabotaging it, and her grandmother is a hoarder. It was a book for middle grade readers, probably, but was a sweetly told story, I thought.
3. The last devil to die (2023) by Richard Osman. The latest installment in the Thursday Murder Club series. I do so love the characters Osman has created: Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron need to solve the mystery of Kuldesh's murder. He was a friend of Stephen, Elizabeth's husband, who we met in an earlier book. This book is sad because Stephen's battle with Alzheimer's disease also has its final curtain. Yet, the foursome of sleuths soldier on and find the solution. (Osman is, after this book, taking a break from the Thursday Murder Club to follow another writing idea, and I will also want to read that. He tells a good story.)
4. I enjoyed that book so much, I googled "books like Thursday Murder Club" and got some interesting suggestions. This was one of them. The maximum security book club: Reading literature in a men's prison (2016) by Mikita Brottman is nonfiction and not at ALL like Osman's books! But it was very interesting, and I really got into it. Mikita Brottman ran, and is still running, a book club with maximum security prisoners. She chose some books to read with Lifers that I would not have chosen, but still, it was interesting to read about how the men reacted to the books, and what the book club meant to various of the convicts who were a part of it. (According to the book, they like to be called convicts, because that is what they are.)
5. Cast, in order of disappearance (1975) by Simon Brett was another of google's suggestions. Well, I had not read Simon Brett before, though I was familiar with his name, because of working in public libraries in the 1990s. I ended up liking the story, and felt it was well-told overall, but I almost stopped reading it, because there was so much sex, or talking about sex, and it felt unnecessary to the plot, gratuitous even. But I guess that was what the 70s were like. I ended up liking the characters, but I did not like the title. Many of the people in the book were actors or producers or whatever, but the title sounds like one play and the cast is getting picked off, but it wasn't like that.
6. Lucky for me, while on my daily walk one day, I cruised by the sorting shelves in Junior Fiction, and there was The Swifts: A Dictionary of Scoundrels (2023) by Beth Lincoln, and I really enjoyed that! Shenanigan lives with her sisters, the dully-named (in this family) Felicity and the scientific Phenomena, their uncle and great-aunt. There is to be a Swift Family Reunion, which happens once every ten years to these dictionary-loving, word-loving members of a unique family. If you love words and definitions, and the way language changes over time, you might also like this book.
7. Back to one of google's picks for me--it recommended The Marlow Murder Club (2021) which I think came out the same year as the first Thursday Murder Club, and also involved old ladies. The author, Robert Thorogood, is British like Richard Osman, and works in television, like Richard Osman, and tells a good story, like Richard Osman. Their stories and their voices are very different, however. If you like the TV show Death in Paradise, which I very much did, you might note that Robert Thorogood was the creator of that fine BBC product. I enjoyed this book very much, too. Robert's 77-year-old Judith solves the complicated mystery, beating the police to the solution, and certainly beating me to the solution, too! Her friends Suzie (50-something) and Becks (40-something) are great foils to her character, and watching their friendship grow is also important to the story. At least to me it was.
And those are my seven books. On to February!
