My Bookish Month of December 2024

Hi and welcome to another monthly overview!

First of all: Happy New Year 🥂 I wish you all the best for the new year!

December was a busy and exhausting month. Fortunately, I had some time off work, but even so, I was knackered for most of the month.

The kittens are doing great, they have a lot more energy than yours truly, that’s for sure 😅 Here is Lola helping me wrap presents and Cappuccino dreaming of playing outside:

Bookishwise, December was an excellent month, especially for my book budget: I snapped up a fantastic Black Friday deal at Audible.com, I didn’t only get the usual three months at 99 cents per month, but also a $20 voucher! Many audiobooks were also on discount, so I put my best maths skills to work and managed to get 6 audiobooks for 15 cents (and the voucher, obviously)! I spent a credit as well, and I had a few Audible UK credits left to spend too, and then I was given another voucher to tempt me into keeping my UK subscription (didn’t work but I did get another audiobook out of it 😂) Check out all my purchases below.
I was also tempted to start another Kindle Unlimited trial period, which was also a Black Friday deal, but I resisted temptation, as I wanted to prioritise my own books and a few ARCs.

On the blog, it was a quiet month, although I did write lots of reviews, but they are scheduled closer to pub date. Readingwise, I read the same amount of books as in November but I did read 1,000 pages more, as I wanted to get a few of my chunkier books off my Mount TBR. I had a few duds, but I enjoyed most of what I read, as is evident from the list and gallery below. I’m so pleased that the pretty books with the pretty covers and/or spredges were also great stories!

Honourable mentions to Into Thin Air, Helle’s Hound, The Courting of Bristol Keats, The Garden, The Phlebotomist and The Hitchcock Hotel, but these were my favourite reads of the month:

In figures December looks like this:

December
Novels: 6432 pages across 17 books
Audiobooks: 51 hours across 9 novels

And here’s what I did in December:

What I read:

Somewhere Beyond the Sea, T.J. Klune
The Darkest Part of the Forest, Holly Black
Into Thin Air, Ørjan Karlsson
The Fury of the Gods, John Gwynne
Helle’s Hound, Oskar Jensen (review to follow)
The Fox Wife, Yangsze Choo
The Courting of Bristol Keats, Mary E. Pearson
Death Comes at Christmas
A Trial in Three Acts, Guy Morpuss (review to follow)
The Garden, Nick Newman (review to follow)
Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret, Benjamin Stevenson
The Toymakers, Robert Dinsdale
The Betrayal of Thomas True, A.J. West
The Christmas Stocking Murders, Denzil Meyrick
The Phlebotomist, Chris Panatier
Dead Fall, A.K. Turner
Mandíbula, Mónica Ojeda

What I listened to:

The Trials of Marjorie Crowe, C.S. Robertson
The Hitchcock Hotel, Stephanie Wrobel
The Boyfriend, Freida McFadden
The Veil, Rachel Harrison
Decorum at the Deathbed, Josh Malerman
The Last One at the Wedding, Jason Rekulak
Grimm Curiosities, Sharon Lynn Fisher
The Undoing of Violet Claybourne, Emily Critchley
The Ghostwriter, A.R. Torre

I also had a look at my books under the tree. (As predicted: zero books under my tree.)

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

One hardcover with spredges:

Eleven audiobooks, two eBooks I’d been meaning to read for a while and bought with vouchers, two 99p deals and two NetGalleys:

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