Sunday Summary – 13th February 2022
Good evening and welcome to my Sunday Summary post for this week. As always, I hope you’ve had a great one?
On Tuesday I shared a Top Ten Tuesday post with you. This week‘s topic was around the theme of love. Now you know I’m not a big romance person and so to make this thing work, I decided to cover my top ten books I’d love to re-read. It’s a bit of a flimsy connection, I know. However, I’ve found a lot of books lately that I’ve decided I want to re-read. Therefore, it made sense to me to document these all in one place so I can go back to them later!
My Friday feature this week was a First Lines Friday post. I didn’t set myself a particular challenge or topic from which to choose my book from this week. However, I didn’t struggle to find one. And I’ve been thinking a lot about my reading just prior to setting up my blog, and in particular, Terry Pratchett. He has been a big influence on me and so it felt only natural to feature one of his books in this post.
Books Read
This week has been great for reading progress! As of last week‘s Sunday Summary update I was just over 10% through Clockwork Magpies by Emma Whitehall. I really enjoyed this book and I’ve flown through it this week (no pun intended)! It’s a great steampunk fantasy novel and and I really enjoyed the steampunk element. It’s not something I read a lot of, however I do really enjoy it. This book has not long been published and I received an advance reader copy in order to share my thoughts. I can’t wait to do that with you very shortly!
I then picked up Son of Mercia by MJ Porter and of sharing this post, I am around 60% of the way through the novel. Son of Mercia is a historical fiction novel which will appeal to fans of Bernard Cornwell and The Last Kingdom series. It’s because of my love of this that I agreed to sign up to the blog tour, and I’m honestly glad I did! The story is told (at least for a significant majority so far) from a unique viewpoint. I’ll share more of the details of that in my blog tour post on the 21st; it’s not what I was expecting but I think it’s better for that! I can’t wait to finish this over the next few days and to share my post with you in about a week’s time.
I have also picked up The Original Folk and Fairytales of the Brother’s Grimm one evening this week. I only read a few stories so it’s not a significant contribution, but it is there so I’m documenting it here. Once I’ve got my blog tour read out of the way, I plan to read this before bed a little more to help me get through it. As it’s short stories it’s not a book to read in one big lump. It’s better to pick up and put down little and often in my opinion.
Books Discovered
I confess that there are quite a few books added to the list this week! What’s interesting about them is that there is a wide variety of genres and stories represented in the selection. It goes a long way to proving how diverse my reading tastes are.
At the beginning of the week I was listening to a podcast by A Need to Read which featured Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. Stolen Focus is a non-fiction book which discusses a number of different causes to the human dilemma of our inability to concentrate. Some of the statistics are quite shocking – teenagers can focus on one task for only 65 seconds at a time, and office workers average only three minutes. Isn’t that dreadful? I want to read more about this and the studies that have been done into it, that’s why I’ve decided to pick up this book. Who knows, maybe even I can find ways to improve my own attention span!
The next book on my list was added to my list as a result of an Amazon recommendation (albeit for some reason they recommended the second book of the series to me!) This book is an epic fantasy adventure style novel, but the thing that stood out to me is the sound of the characters, and an author I really like has highly recommended this book. So, I’m really interested to give The Black Hawks by David Wragg a go.
The third book on my list is also a recommendation from a podcast called Currently Reading. Yes, I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts lately! Although Kaytee and Meredith talk about a lot of books in their podcasts, Meredith’s review of The Kingdom by Jess Rothenberg really stood out to me. The Kingdom is a theme park, and the protagonist Ana is an AI within the park. However, when a park employee, Owen, is murdered, Ana is accused and an epic trial of the century ensues. One of the interesting things that drew me to adding this to my list is that the story is told through a variety of mediums. Courtroom testimonies, interviews and Ana‘s memories are examples of the way in which the narrative unfolds. It’s very unlike anything I have read before and for that reason, I can’t wait to give this a go!
Last night I went to see a show produced by a local theatre group – The Hunchback of Notre Dame. It was a fantastic performance and hats off to everybody involved. Naturally, it has drawn the bookworm in me to want to pick up the novel by Victor Hugo.
It has also been my birthday this week, and I was very lucky to receive copies of A Cuckoo’s Calling and The Silkworm. A Cuckoo’s Calling was already on my TBR, but I have added The Silkworm to my list as I now have a paperback copy of each sat on my shelf waiting to be read!
Coming Up…
This week I am going to be reviewing Clockwork Magpies by Emma Whitehall. Now typically it takes me a lot longer to get round to reviewing books after I’ve read them. However as Clockwork Magpies has just been published, I’m keen to share my thoughts with you whilst the publication launch is still fresh in the minds of anyone who may be interested to read it, or equally to put it on peoples radar if they haven’t heard of it yet. I really, really enjoyed reading this book and I’m sure that will come through in my review!
Later in the week I’ll be back with a Shelf Control post, and I’ll be featuring the next book on my TBR and sharing with you just why I’m excited to read it!
And finally, I’ll be rounding off the week with another Sunday Summary update.
What have you been reading this week?
