I have had a good start to the year, reading 11 books in January. Here are my thoughts on the books that I have read in the second half of the month of January!
Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.
This week’s prompt was to choose the first 10 books that you randomly grab from your shelf. Then they suggest that you talk about whether you have read them, and if so, what you thought of them. I thought it would be fun to have my daughter (who is 6) pick 10 random books from my shelf while my back was turned. After some ominous crashing sounds ( 😂 😳) here were the 10 books she brought me!
Spells for Forgetting by Adrienne Young ~ 352 pages ~ published September 27, 2022 by Delacorte Press
A rural island community steeped in the mystical superstitions of its founders and haunted by an unsolved murder is upended by the return of the suspected killer in this deeply atmospheric novel.
Emery Blackwood’s life was forever changed on the eve of her high school graduation, when the love of her life, August Salt, was accused of murdering her best friend, Lily. Now, she is doing what her teenage self swore she never would: living a quiet existence among the community that fractured her world in two. She’d once longed to run away with August, eager to escape the misty, remote shores of Saiorse Island and chase new dreams; now, she maintains her late mother’s tea shop and cares for her ailing father. But just as the island, rooted in folklore and tradition, begins to show signs of strange happenings, August returns for the first time in fourteen years and unearths the past that no one wants to remember.
August Salt knows he is not welcome on Saiorse, not after the night that changed everything. As a fire raged on at the Salt family orchard, Lily Morgan was found dead in the dark woods, shaking the bedrock of their tight-knit community and branding August a murderer. When he returns to bury his mother’s ashes, he must confront the people who turned their backs on him and face the one wound from the past that has never healed—Emery. But the town has more than one reason to want August gone, and the emergence of deep betrayals and hidden promises that span generations threatens to reveal the truth behind Lily’s death once and for all.
I have been seeing this tag all over the blog-o-verse, as well as on BookTube, and it seemed like so much fun! I have read a total of 83 books in the first half of the year. I thought this would be a fun way to take stock of what I have read so far and evaluate what I want to read for the second half of the year. Here we go!
This month I read a total of 18 books! I honestly didn’t think I would ever surpass last month’s total, but I guess I proved myself wrong haha (To be fair, a couple of these books were less than 50 pages…but I think they still count!)
While I am aiming for 150, I am also aiming to diversify my reading. I am trying to break into genres I don’t typically gravitate toward. I am hoping to read more non-fiction and classics. And, as always, I am taking part in several reading challenges.
Let’s get into it!
This was a prompt on an Instagram photo challenge the other day, and I thought it would make for a fun list. I took a look at my shelves, and I pulled a selection of books that have one-word titles. I thought that these would be a bit difficult to find, but I had a lot more than I originally assumed that I would.
Whit Reads Lit 