Another year is coming to a close and the best thing we can say about 2016 is at least there have been some good reads! Every month your For Reading Addicts Admin team come together for a bookish chat and we talk about the books we’ve loved (and haven’t) over the last month.
We don’t just talk about our reads either, and our Hit of the Lits post with your top 40 will follow in the next couple of days, but without further ado here are the books we’ve been reading this month.
Kath
Well for me this month it was a case of the good, the bad and the embarrassing as I worked through a mixed stack of reads.
The good would be Water for Elephants, I just finished today and it was a beautifully written read, well researched, thrilling and with a satisfying ending. I particularly loved the way it flipped back from youth to old age giving a perspective of life as a full thing. Beautifully written I found myself thinking about it even when I’m not reading.
The bad, well bad is a harsh word but after plodding on and really trying to get into Half of a Yellow Sun, I’ve quit. It’s very slow and I just can’t keep enough interest to read more than a few pages a night. I really wanted to like this book, I think I’ll put it back on the shelf for a later date.
The embarrassing would have to be that I picked up Five on a Treasure Island last week and read it through in two nights, finding it impossible to put down. It’s 30 years since I’ve read the Famous Five books, but I loved it and I’m hoping to spot some more around the second hand shops.
Thom
Currently reading Lolita. It’s beautifully written, engaging, humanising, and even funny at times. But all of this makes me feel weird because it’s essentially a book about a child molester. Has anyone else read it? I look forward to reviewing it.
Shan
I’ve dabbled a bit this month and there are a few I picked up and put straight back down again but the two I’ve read and loved were The Veil Testaments I and II by Joseph D’Lacey which is a unique take on the post apoc/ zombie genre. These Zombies don’t want to eat your brains,but that doesn’t mean you’ll want to be touched by one. A two part book that tells two completely separate yet concurrent tales with the promise of more to come this was a fairly quick and absorbing read.
I’ve just finished reading Dean Koontz’s latest offering Ashley Bell, the story of a girl who decides that she’s not going to die despite being informed that it is inevitable. Beautifully written, full of twists and turns and strange goings on my only criticism is – please Dean, enough with the Golden Retrievers, we know you love them, we know you’re obsessed with them but can’t you pick another breed? I don’t know maybe a chihuahua or a St Bernard, or give those poor Pitties some literary loving.
Rosie
Other than some random and wonderful reads on Wattpad (see blog post for details), I’ve mostly been reading non-fiction. The Peasant Speech of Devon by Sarah Hewett and the biography of Hannah Snell: The Secret Life of a Female a Marine, 1723-1792 have been fascinating and very useful preparation for my research for a project my husband and I are working on.
And that’s our admin reads summed up for the whole year! See you again in 2017.
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