Month: January 2024

Review Roundup | The Mystery Guest, The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels, and Raiders of the Lost Heart

Posted January 3, 2024 / Book Reviews, Review Roundup / 0 Comments
Review Roundup | The Mystery Guest, The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels, and Raiders of the Lost Heart

THE MAID was a pleasant surprise and a bit of a roller coaster for me (which is weird considering it’s a somewhat “basic” cozy mystery). I almost DNFed if because I just wasn’t connecting with the story and didn’t really care about what was happening. As usual, a chapter or two after considering the DNF, I became a bit hooked… and I ended up giving the book 4.5 stars! I was excited by the premise of the sequel and immediately requested it from the library. I was really intrigued by a second story with Molly and loved how this one tied into her past. Molly is solving another murder mystery – this time it’s the famous author that her grandmother once worked for. The story involved flashbacks to her time spent in his mansion and all of the goings-on there. It didn’t feel like the author was retroactively adding things or changing things to make the plot work either – enough negative things were included about the victim from book one to make me feel like this was a well-planned sophomore follow-up. There are some times with these books where I start to lose interest a little bit and that’s the only reason for a 4.5 rating instead of 5 stars. I just don’t get THAT feeling unfortunately. I was sad that Juan Manuel was missing throughout this book because he was visiting family but it made sense to keep the mystery plot moving without getting the romance in the […]

Top Ten Tuesdays #436: Favorites

Posted January 2, 2024 / Top 10 Tuesdays, Weekly Memes / 0 Comments
Top Ten Tuesdays #436: Favorites

Favorites of 2023 Top Ten Tuesdays were started by The Broke and the Bookish and are now hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, where we make lists of our top ten books (or something else!) based on that week’s prompt. The topics are provided ahead of time and can be found here. Book links bring you to Goodreads or my review. I made a couple of graphics for Instagram to highlight my favorites, so I thought I would share them here! I had a great reading year as you would have seen yesterday in my stats wrap-up. Of the 115 books I read, only 11 of them ended up with five stars. The first graphic has my five-star reads of the year. It absolutely pains me that I couldn’t add one more book on this one but I’ll take what I can get. This graphic was a little competition between favorites from each month this year. I knew which book was going to take the crown as my #1 favorite this year. I wanted to share this as well because it shows a few books I gave 4.5 stars and were therefore not on my five-star list above.

2023 End of Year Wrap-Up and Stats

Posted January 1, 2024 / Features, Wrap-Ups / 1 Comment
2023 End of Year Wrap-Up and Stats

115 Books Read I’m so happy that I ended the year on a nice cute number like 115! I thought for sure I’d read one more book but I love finishing the year in 0 or 5 lol. I got sick right after I finished my 115th book on the 29th and just decided to totally lay low and not read anything else until 2024. It made life easier so I could work on my wrap-up posts earlier too 😉 This one has my stats about books I read and acquired. Overall, it was the best reading year I’ve had in a few years! Books Read One of my major goals recently has been to continue to diversify my reading from a genre perspective. It’s so exciting to see that I have a huge fantasy chunk this year! Thank you, long ass series! I wanted to read less than 75% contemporary and mystery books, and I finished the year at 69% between those genres. I can’t believe I actually read more mystery/thrillers than contemporary romance too! That’s huge. Fantasy is up from *1%* last year to *19%* this year. Yay!! I love reading books in multiple formats and that’s clear for 2023. I read more “mixed” books this year. This is partially because Everand (FKA Scribd) has more titles, I subscribed to Libby through the Charlotte NC library system, and Spotify rolled out audiobooks. I love having the option to listen to an audiobook in addition to reading it. Okay […]