Well July is here already and I feel so behind. Half the year has gone by already and summer is finally here. I’ve just started a new job after having been unemployed for a while and I’m really enjoying being back to work, my new colleagues and the work itself but of course, it means that I have less time for both reading and blogging. Currently I’m working my way through The Count of Monte Christo and it kind of takes a long time getting through 1188 pages when you only read about 10-20 pages a day – or nothing at all. I’m hoping to get more time to read and blog when I get used to being back at work. Or if that fails, at least I have three weeks of summer holiday in a week!
But right now my focus is on looking back at the last 3 months. Even though I haven’t reviewed all of them, I’m hoping to get some more reviews written soon because I have read some really good books this year and I want to share my thoughts.
Here’s a list of the books I’ve read this quarter with links to reviews:
- Félix J. Palma: The Map of Time
- Haruki Murakami: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
- Erik Valeur: Det syvende barn
- Nina Sankovitch: Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading
- Charlotte Rogan: The Lifeboat
- Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone
- Dan Brown: Inferno (Robert Langdon #4)
- Andrew Taylor: The Anatomy of Ghosts
- Joyce Carol Oates: Mother, Missing
- F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
During these last three months, 4 books really stood out. The Map of Time and The Moonstone were both amazingly entertaining romps which I just adored. But Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle was so impressive, so inventive and just so good that I thought it would be the best book of this second quarter. However the last book I read, beat it, I think. There is just something about The Great Gatsby which really speaks to me. I’m so impressed with it and really want to reread it soon.
While I read 17 books in the first three months of the year, I only read 10 books in these second three months. But 27 books so far is on track for my goal of reading 52 for the year. Still, I have some chunksters on my list of reading goals (books like Don DeLillo’s Underworld, all the Sherlock Holmes novels and short stories and of course The Count of Monte Christo) so I will have to get back to reading more each day to be able to read enough during the next 6 months. But that’s a positive problem, right? To have to read a lot and to have a lot of great books to look forward to.
And as I mentioned above, we’re soon going on our summer holiday and we tend to not watch tv in the evenings while on holiday but read instead so I’m hoping to get a lot of reading done during the week we’re away.
Have a wonderful summer, all you lovely people.
Related post:
The Literary Bunny 
Congrats on the new job, hope the settling in period goes relatively quickly for you. I loved The Moonstone too, such an entertaining book. Enjoy reading this summer 🙂
Thanks! I hope it will go quickly too but the days just seem to disappear. The Moonstone is just so good – as is The Woman in White. Collins is really a great writer!
Good job getting all that reading done. Quality over quantity! 🙂
I really enjoyed Wind-Up Bird, too. It was the first Murakami I ever read, and it got me hooked on him.
I’m so happy you liked The Moonstone! That was a really fun book to read. I totally love Betteredge, best old man character everrrr!
Congrats on the new job. The Moonstone is a good yarn even if I always forget who was responsible for the theft!