My Bookish Month of December 2020

Hi and welcome to another monthly overview!

Not just a new month, but a new year as well, happy new year, lovelies! I took a bit of an impromptu break during the last two weeks of December. Reading went really well but I found I couldn’t be bothered to sit down and actually blog, work was terribly busy in the days before the holidays and I couldn’t stand the sight of my laptop once I was on my break. But I’m back!

December was a highly satisfying reading month. I managed to finish two of my all-time favourite audiobook series: Harry Potter, and the Diviners, and I also discovered the Cherringham series on Audible, short cosy mysteries that were a nice change from the much longer Harry Potter and Diviners books.

For my Spanish challenge I read the Spanish translation of The Marsh King’s Daughter by Karen Dionne, a book I adored when I read it in English a few years ago, but had trouble getting into now. Not sure what happened. Was some of the magic lost in translation, did it grab me less cos it was a reread, did I get bored cos I read slower in Spanish, were too many other books winking at me from my TBR shelves? I’ll never know for sure.

One thing I do know: December was my best bookish month of 2020, with more pages read and more hours listening time. I didn’t even try, and I have no idea what happened, but considering the books that went in it’s probably a good thing a lot went out as well 😬

In figures December looks like this:

December
Novels: 6526 pages over 22 full novels, a novella and a short story
Audiobooks: 83 hours over 8 audiobooks

And here’s what I did in December, and some of what I’ll be posting in January:

What I read:

The Nothing Man, Catherine Ryan Howard
Bound, Vanda Symon (review to follow)
Afraid of the Christmas Lights (An anthology of crime fiction)
The Spiral, Iain Ryan
The Ten Thousand Doors of January, Alix E. Harrow
A Pocketful of Crows, Joanne M. Harris
How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories, Holly Black
Secret Santa, Andrew Shaffer
In Darkness, Shadows Breathe, Catherine Cavendish
The Thursday Murder Club, Richard Osman
People of Abandoned Character, Clare Whitfield
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
The Burning Girls, C.J. Tudor (review to follow)
Kingdom of the Wicked, Kerri Maniscalco
Snowblind, Ragnar Jónasson
The Captive, Deborah O’Connor (review to follow)
The Hollow Places, T. Kingfisher
Midwinter Murder, Agatha Christie
If I Whisper My Christmas Wish, Louise Beech, Michael J Malone, Matt Wesolowski
The Glass House, Eve Chase
La Hija del Pantano, Karen Dionne
The Curator, M.W. Craven
Shielded, KayLynn Flanders
There’s Only One Danny Garvey, David F. Ross (review to follow)

What I listened to:

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, JK Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, JK Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, JK Rowling
Old Dogs Old Tricks, AB Morgan
The King of Crows (Diviners #4), Libba Bray 
Murder on Thames (Cherringham #1), Matthew Costello & Neil Richards
Mystery at the Manor (Cherringham #2), Matthew Costello & Neil Richards
Murder by Moonlight (Cherringham #3), Matthew Costello & Neil Richards

What I read earlier but reviewed in December:
Sins of the Father, Sharon Bairden
Body Language, A. K. Turner
Deity, Matt Wesolowski
Smoke Screen, Thomas Enger & Jørn Lier Horst

I also hosted a guest post / excerpt by David Ellis Overttun and I had a look at my life in books.

Let’s have a look at the books that landed on my lap in December:

Two blog tour proofs, one courtesy of Zaffre Books and one from Frame Tree Press:

Three Orenda babies:

Two hardbacks and a paperback that I actually ordered last month (but took their merry time to arrive) and a gorgeous FairyLoot hardback:

Two gifts from my neighbour who is trying to make room for new books, a classic I’ve been dying to read and another FairyLoot hardback:

Four Dome Press books won in a Rachel Read It giveaway:

Five eBooks, four of which 99p bargains:

Two Audible freebies, an audiobook I won in a Hobeck giveaway, a credit buy and quite a few bargains (including but not featured here: the first ten or so Cherringham novellas):

I hope you had a good month and that you are safe and well! Thanks for joining me today and happy reading xxx