In truth it hasn't been much of a reading month. I was interviewing for a new job and not feeling very enthused in my current job. My daughter and I came down with the flu, which made concentrating on books very challenging and just over all I wasn't super feeling it.
This means that my reading essentially fell into two categories: New Reads and Re-Reads.
New Reads
100 Years of Betty by Debra Oswald
I loved this, it was just such a journey with a character that it was easy to identify. It's so illuminating seeing a story unfold through such changes over time - from poverty-stricken war-torn England to modern day Sydney. People see such changes in the course of their lives. I wonder what I will see.
The Good People by Hannah Kent
Kent is one of my favourite authors and I have always loved her books, until this one. It's not that I didn't like it but it was easily my least favourite of her books. There just wasn't anything about it that grabbed my attention or connected me to the characters. I do feel very fortunate to have a signed copy though, which I picked up when her saw her speak earlier this year at the Sydney Writers Festival.
The Quiet Grave by Dervla Tiernan
This is the final book in the Cormac Reilly series by Dervla Tiernan; a fairly standard crime series set in Galway, Ireland. I wasn't too fussed on the first book in the series, but persevered with books 2 & 3 which I increasingly enjoyed. The Quiet Grave fell a little short for me again. Like the first book, the resolution came so suddenly, and was just so unlikely, that it was a little disappointing.
Re-Reads
I re-read a fair few cosy detective novels this month. Agatha Christie came in with Appointment with Death and Dumb Witness. I also listened to Murder on the Links as an audiobook read by Hugh Fraser.
I read Australian author Kerry Greenwood's Away with the Fairies, The Castlemaine Murders and Murder in Williamstown.
The Picture of Dorian Gray also got a look in. I remember really enjoying this book when I first read it but reading it again now my enjoyment was far less. Perhaps I just wasn't in the right mood to be reading men mansplaining their personal views on life and the world but honestly, I found it pretty dreary this time around.
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