The Blog

 I keep finding reasons not to write this blog, and frankly I'm tired of it. I have no theme for this post and nothing planned to say. I want to write about books, and walking through the fields near my home, and things that I see. Nothing exciting or adventurous. Nothing complicated. Just things I love. That's all.

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Favourite Books of 2022

 In 2022 I read 123 books. Storygraph tells me this is 32,151 pages. The authors I read the most books by were Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, and Robin Stevens. Here are my 15 favourites. 1. Why Didn’t They Ask Evans - Agatha Christie I’d either never read this before, or read it as a teenager and forgotten it. It was a really fun adventure with engaging characters. It’s become one of my favourite Christies. 2. The Murder Most Unladylike series by Robin Stevens It’s hard to pick just one from this series - if I had to, I’d go with the final book, Death Sets Sail, but they’re all wonderful. They’re fun, adventurous, the characters are brilliant, and the many nods to golden age detective fiction make them even better. I’ll definitely be reading these again. 3. Write It All Down - Cathy Rentzenbrink I read this at the start of the year and it was really inspiring. A writing guide that focuses on what stops us writing was really helpful, and I managed to establish a daily writing practi...
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Favourite Books of 2021

 To give this some context - I read 125 books in 2021. 100 of these were fiction and 25 non-fiction - I think this is more heavy on the fiction than usual, but I did a lot of comfort reading and re-reading last year which has made the difference. I re-read a lot of books I'd read before (almost the whole of PD James's Adam Dalgliesh series) and also read 28 Agatha Christie books - many I'd read before, but some I definitely hadn't. I've narrowed it down to 20 books - mostly in the order I read them. 1. A Caribbean Mystery - Agatha Christie I re-read the entire Miss Marple series, having not done so for probably 20 years, and they were all good - Miss Marple is probably one of my favourite fictional characters. It was hard to choose a favourite, but I went with this one - the setting is great, and I like the character of Mr Rafiel a lot. 2. Dead Beat - Val McDermid I read the whole Kate Brannigan series, and the whole Lindsay Gordon series, neither of which I'd e...
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Favourite Books of 2023

In 2023, I read 136 books. 31 of these were Agatha Christies, which were all re-reads except one. I’m not including re-reads on this list, because obviously if I’m reading something repeatedly, it’s likely to be a favourite. So all these were new to me this year. I’m also interested to note that I read 16% non-fiction, but there are still four non-fiction books on this list - and more on the long list that I made. So I should take that as an indication to read more non-fiction, as I tend to rate it highly when I do get to it.  These books are in no particular order.  1. The Square of Sevens - Laura Shepherd-Robinson I read all three of her books in 2023 and honestly it was hard to decide whether to pick this or Daughter of Night because they were both excellent. On another day I might have picked that instead. But I loved this and felt totally immersed in the world. I thought the main character was complex and interesting, and it reminded me of Fingersmith by Sarah Waters whic...
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