My Bookish Month of January 2022

Hi and welcome to another monthly overview!

January was the month covid finally caught up with me after my successfully dodging it for almost two years. It turned out to be the gift that kept on giving, with new symptoms popping up every few days. Fatigue is an issue for me on any given day, so obviously that’s the symptom that’s been causing me the most hardship.

My covid-addled brain didn’t always want to cooperate, and without my daily commute and with me doing none of my usual household chores, I didn’t listen to many audiobooks but it was still a pretty great bookish month, seeing as for most of the month, reading was pretty much all I felt up to doing, even if I did have to do it in between naps and coughing fits. Blogwise, it was fortunate that I had scheduled all my January posts well in advance!

The best thing to happen in January was my mum telling me that she had rediscovered her love for reading. She has this problem with her eyesight glasses can’t fix which makes reading physical books quite difficult. I had asked her a bunch of times if I should get her an e-reader but she was always making excuses, but I decided to give her one for Christmas anyway. She’s taken to it like a duck to water, reading more in one month than she did in the last couple of years. As she was the one who introduced me to books and instigated my own love for reading, it means the world that she can read effortlessly again and that she’s loving it so much 💜

These were my favourite reads of the month:

In figures January looks like this:

January
Novels: 9370 pages across 24 books
Audiobooks: 40 hours across 6 audiobooks

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

What I read:

The Gathering Storm, Alan Jones
The Haunting of Las Lágrimas, W.M. Cleese (review to follow)
Burke’s Last Witness, CJ Dunford
The Bright & the Pale, Jessica Rubinkowski
Frozen Charlotte, Alex Bell
Sour Candy, Kealan Patrick Burke
The Little Book of Sloth Philosophy, Jennifer McCartney
Blanky, Kealan Patrick Burke
El libro secreto de Frida Kahlo, F.G. Haghenbeck
Little Moments of Love, Catana Chetwynd
Flight of the Shearwater, Alan Jones (review to follow)
Sundial, Catriona Ward (review to follow)
Reputation, Sarah Vaughan (review to follow)
Wonderland: An anthology
The Hemlock Cure, Joanne Burn
These Hollow Vows, Lexi Ryan
Ruthless Women, Melanie Blake
The Turn of the Tide, Alan Jones (review to follow)
Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History, Art Spiegelman
Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began, Art Spiegelman
Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie
The Glass Woman, Caroline Lea
River Clyde, Simone Simone Buchholz (review to follow)
The Beach House, Beverley Jones

What I listened to:

The Radium Girls, Kate Moore
The Running Man, Stephen King
Heartstone, C.J. Sansom
The Cat Who Saved Books, Sosuke Natsukawa
Spider’s Web, Agatha Christie
Murder Most Wild, Matthew Costello & Neil Richards

What I read earlier but reviewed in January:

Demon, Matt Wesolowski
The Twyford Code, Janice Hallett
Faceless, Vanda Symon
Always the Dead, Stephen J. Golds

I also had a look at my bookish year in stats and at my challenges and goals for the new year. I shared instalment 7 of what I’ve learnt from reading fiction and an excerpt from Bitter Flowers by Gunnar Staalesen.

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

A FairyLoot hardcover that took two months to get here due to problems at customs:

Two sequels I just had to buy, three 99p deals and a NetGalley ARC I received a widget for:

One audiobook (I added the narration to the eBook because I loved the first instalment of this series in audio format):

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