I just realised I was missing Litsy! I don‘t know why I stopped posting but I‘m here again now!

I loved this story about Ruth, the mother of a heroin addict daughter, who pretty much kidnaps her baby granddaughter to care for her. Seemed to me it had realistic characters and relationships. A moving story composed of mundane details. And an excellent ending.

My all time🏆 fave series, all the other contenders have dropped by the wayside for one reason or other, Vic keeps going. Here she finds a teenage girl badly injured on rocks on the Lake Michigan shore and the story keeps finding its way back to the water and the river. As always there is white collar crime, and I‘d expect police brutality, but in the end, without spoiling anything, it‘s a story of families and the strength of their loyalties.

My May #bookspin roundup is a bit late as I have been busy and away from home lately. I haven't even got round to finding my #maybookspin book and I've decided not to post a new list for June but use the numbers to plunder this or an older list instead. I feel like adding in new books each month is making me feel backlogged in itself, though in a different way to usual, so I'm twisting the rules a bit to suit myself better.

I‘ve been struggling to find the concentration to read lately. Today I‘m enjoying this book in the sunshine though.

And here's my #bookspin list for May. I'm just getting started on the tagged book which was my #doublespin choice for April that I didn't get to yet.

April feels like it was a really good reading month even though I apparently only finished three books. But they were all great! I muddled up the bookspin numbers & haven't started my #doublespin yet, but I will get to it. I didn't fill in my blank spaces for birthday present books because one of them was Little Wing which was already on my list because I wanted an excuse to buy it, and I haven't started my other gift book yet.

Loved it! Not as overtly a romance as her earlier books, though there is still one in there of course. I‘ve always enjoyed Freya‘s books and she‘s just getting better as she (and me) get older. Great sense of place in this one which ends up on the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides. Definitely requires tissues too.

This was my #bookspin for April. I was really looking forward to it having really enjoyed the first in the series, and it did not disappoint. Fab account of Elma‘s journey to found a colony on Mars in an alternative version 1960s in which Earth is growing uninhabitable.

This was fab. Story of a young nurse providing palliative care for an old man in a sleepy French village. There were a couple of bits of the plot that I found a bit weird but it‘s her first book and overall I found it very promising & will be looking out for what she does next.

My #bookspin list is late as ever, though I had it ready yesterday and was just too busy to post. Tagged book is one I have already started in on, and I've left myself two blank spaces to fill up with 🎂birthday 🎁presents... if no one gives me any then I'll have to buy my own 😁 It's a pretty good bet that my partner will raid a bookshop on my behalf though. It's why I keep him around 😂

March was a DNF sort of a month. It turned out I'd already read my #bookspin and my #doublespin is also, probably, being abandoned as it's just boring me. Solomon Farthing, I think this is probably a good book but my brain was in too many other places to follow it at the time. On the other hand all the books I did finish were fabulous and Nightingale, which I'm leaving on the list for April as I've only just begun, is also very promising.

I‘m going to persevere a while longer but this early book from Ann Cleeves really isn‘t hitting home for me at the moment. A jumble of characters seem to have been introduced with little rhyme or reason and I‘m not much intrigued by the murder. 🫤

Well, that‘s an easy #bookspin - sat down to read and realised I‘d actually read it already! Now I‘m wondering why I thought I hadn‘t & if there is another book in the series lurking about unread somewhere!

Well, that was quite a journey! I found some of the middle bits hard going but I‘m very glad I stuck with it as altogether the story is glorious.

Another episode of me trying to get my head into science fiction. Enjoying this but finding the two intertwined stories hard work to switch between.

I love Tessa Hadley's writing. This is 1967 and suburban housewife Phyllis runs off with her younger lover leaving her two children and husband behind. You see how this affects everyone in the family and one of the things I like is how all the viewpoints complement each other, there's no one victim, and you see how things wouldn't have been perfect if Phyllis had stayed either. Really good character portraits all around.

Good stuff. I‘ve read the 2nd, 3rd & 4th books in this series and went back to read the 1st. Sometimes that‘s a disappointment as the author is still forming the characters and they don‘t quite add up with their future selves. Ben Kitto leaps out as himself straight away here though and stuff that turns up in later books is seeded here too. Really well done.

I'm super late with my March #bookspin list but I haven't peeked at the numbers posted by @TheAromaOfBooks yet I promise. It's pretty much the same as last month with one book I read replaced by its sequel, two books added that are lying around the house, and two books that I'm still reading left on the list.

I feel like I got short changed in February - where are the last two or three days of the month?! I'll be leaving the two books that I've started and not finished on the list for March I think. My #bookspin - tagged - was one of the new hardbacks I put on the list so I'd have an excuse to buy it and it's fab and I don't want to rush it.

Hmm. I‘m not a short story person. I always get interested and then it ends and I‘m all “where is the rest of the book?!” Penelope Lively is one of my favourite writers though so I thought I‘d have a go at her short stories. But I still feel much the same way even though I think some of these stories are great! This was my February #doublespin - good but the form just doesn‘t work for me.

I‘m often fooled by book covers. This was a free book of the week on Apple Books a while back and I started reading it expecting pleasant nonsense. And some bits of the plot are quite outlandish but that‘s what fiction‘s for, and I ended up loving the unconventional family in the book. Perhaps the ending was all a bit tidy but again, it‘s fiction, let‘s dream life can turn out so neatly.

Last year I ticked off four books in Jan and five in Feb. This year I got five ticked off in January so I need to get another four in February to stay even with myself I guess? The tagged book is Volume 8 of A Dance to the Music of Time, a series I want to finish this year so I'm planning on reading it this month no matter what the #bookspin numbers turn up for me! There are several books here I want to buy to read, so let's see what happens!

I gave myself a head start for January and still only just about got to five books. That'll do though! Journey to Fear was my #bookspin and I really enjoyed it. It's been one of those books knocking round the house for ages and I'm glad I got to it.

I very nearly sent this one back to the library about a quarter of the way into it. I‘ve read enough Candlish to expect unreliable narrators and wild twists. I kept going and I‘m glad I did as I liked it in the end. I should have written down all the theories I had at that quarter way mark - I reckon about half of them were right, but there was more I hadn‘t thought of, and besides it‘s the excellent characters that make these, not the twists.

This was completely fabulous. I don‘t quite do New Years resolutions but have a plan to try and read a bit more across some different genres in 2022. Picked pretty much randomly from the library this is a fun and interesting story in an alternative timeline where a meteor hits Washington DC in the 1950s and the space race accelerates as Earth becomes inhospitable to life. I‘m pleased there are more books in the series.

My #bookspin for January was a non fiction book about how less traffic makes life better in all kinds of ways. The authors moved from Vancouver 🇨🇦 to Delft 🇳🇱 and detail their personal experiences of the effects a more liveable city had on them and their children as well as lots of transportation geekish stuff. The takeaway for me was learning how the Netherlands also had a “that won‘t work here” attitude on its to becoming a bike paradise.

I'm totally cheating myself a good start to 2022 as I already have three of these partially read for my January #bookspin list 🤣 Happy New Year! 🥳

Just managed to finish the tagged book, which was my #bookspin for December, in time. Very good too, I'll post more another day. I'll take four books read and another in progress for December, it's more than I thought I would manage. I've started a couple of new books over Christmas but I'm going to put those on my January list so I have a head start on the next year if that's not cheating too much!

I must be on the nice list 🎅🏻 😍 Susie Dent‘s word of the day for Dec 25th is ‘confelicity‘, finding pleasure in the happiness of others. I hope all your Christmases are happy and bookish!

It‘s #jolabokaflod o‘clock, which comes just after the annual viewing of The Snowman. I have the tagged book, my other half has a book of Christmas mystery stories, the 16yo has manga. Love this tradition! We only discovered it a few years back but it‘s a firm fixture on our Christmas calendar now.

I picked this to try and get me into the seasonal spirit, something I always struggle with. I enjoyed it and of course all is well in the end though there were heartaches beforehand. Actually it helped me reading about characters who weren‘t necessarily expecting Christmas to be the best thing ever.

As seems to be the pattern for me lately this one was slow going for the first half and then the second half flew by. It was my #doublespin book for December. One of Kinsey‘s elderly neighbours (not Henry!) has a fall and ends up the victim of a elderly care scammer. I enjoyed the change from a regular murder mystery, I just wish it hadn‘t taken me so long to engage with the story.

This was a tough read and even though it‘s quite a short book it took me a while to get through it. You know in the beginning that the narrator gets out of her abusive marriage in the end but that barely takes the edge off it. It shows very well how “why didn‘t you just leave him” is never as simple as it sounds like it should be.

Ooops, that‘s my December #doublespin and I do not have 12 hours free to read right now! I hope the next reader is less tardy than me & I get it back before the end of the month, or at least before I‘ve forgotten the plot.

Rolling in late with my December #bookspin picks. One book is still in progress from November so I've left it on the list. No idea how much reading time I'll find this month but let's try anyway. (whispers) I'm really not a Christmas fan, I find it all a bit overwhelming and chaotic and full of too many demands so I just hope I manage to find some quiet reading time in among the madness to satisfy my soul!

November's #bookspin went pretty well, five books finished including the two selected ones, and the tagged one still in progress. That'll do me nicely, thank you.

Loving this series - each one is set on a different Scilly Isle. This time it‘s high summer on St Marys, the largest island, and a young woman has been murdered and dressed as a bride. I think this is the fourth in the series, I started on the second and am planning on going back to read the opening instalment soon. This was my #bookspin for November.

A fairly cozy sort of a mystery set in the Lake District. I‘d read the first in the series a while back and thought it was ok. This was the second and I nearly put it down after a few chapters but the second half got a lot more interesting and I‘m glad I stuck with it.

Approaching the end of this and I have had a feeling that I‘ve read it before growing on me for a while. I‘ve kept track of everything I‘ve read since 2000 and this was published in 1999 so I either missed it or I just have mystery that uses same devices as other mysteries false memory syndrome. 🤷🏻‍♀️

I adored this. The story of twins, Georgia & Bessi growing up, mostly in London with a spell in Nigeria, in the 1980s and 90s. They were about the same age as me so the cultural nostalgia was strong. The end of the book gets sad and had me in tears😢 This was my #doublespin book for November.

Enjoyable, but it‘s about the twelfth in the series, if it wasn‘t enjoyable I wouldn‘t still be here! I thought the plot was pretty thin in places though, it felt like you could have pinned the crime on any of a number of characters and the non-recurring characters could have been fleshed out more. Still fun all the same. This was October‘s #doublespin book.

New month, new plans! Though not very different from October as I hardly got through anything. Tagged book is my leftover #bookspin from October which I've started and am now speeding through. Let's hope that bodes well for the rest of the month. Thanks as ever to @TheAromaOfBooks for organisational goodness!

Where on earth did 🍁October go to? I think I must be reading my calendar wrong as we can't be more than a few days into the month yet? I'm certainly planning to finish the tagged book, at number 1, before the end of the weekend but think there's zero chance of me getting through my #doublespin too. And both books I did read, including my #bookspin, were pretty short and easy reads as well. @TheAromaOfBooks

Enjoying this. It‘s much better written than I‘d expect books that turn up as 2 for Qd at the garden centre to be! Slow reading though, just because the atmosphere it creates seems to want to be savoured that way.

That‘s my October #bookspin read. A quick thriller that teeters on the edge of predictable but then falls the other way. It has all the Christie-based clichés of a group of people trapped on an island with a killer but it knows it and plays with the genre quite nicely. A modern twist that I quite enjoyed.

A quiet and interesting book. I thought I was going to end up unsatisfied with it and in a way I am, but also, the ending wasn't what I was expecting and so I was satisfied. I read it without knowing what it was about so I don't want to spoil it for anyone too much. In the end I think it was an exploration of how we piece together ideas and belief systems. Nothing mind bending, but definitely thought provoking.

Another enjoyable romp round Venice with Nathan Sutherland and his cat Gramsci. This one‘s set in the summer and features the inheritance of a summer house on the island of Pellestrina, out in the Venetian lagoon. All sounds good except the Venetian mafia seem to have links to it too. Interesting setting, fun characters, plot gets a bit outlandish but that‘s fun too.

Didn‘t really work as a beginning-to-end read as it was lots of separate essays by different people and got a bit repetitive. Lots of interesting facts that often counter popular opinion though. One to dip into slowly.

I'm all ready for October's #bookspin - I doubt I can reach September's seven books read but I'm all stoked up and ready to try. @TheAromaOfBooks

September was a much better reading month than I've had lately 🥳🎉 Five books finished and another two almost done so I'm rounding it up and calling it seven. Hurray! #bookspin #doublespin @TheAromaOfBooks