June 2024 Reading

I tend to read less in the summer, unlike when I was a kid.  This is not an advantage of being a grown-up.  However, my new habit of audiobooks is allowing me to multitask:  I can do my craft projects and read at the same time!  (Yes:  audiobooks count as reading.)  This month, I read eight books.

The first six of those were, in fact, audiobooks.  (Have I mentioned that I LOVE Hoopla and get my audiobooks from the library?  Check it out!  It’s free and really cool!)  I am listening my way through the entire Louise Penny works.  This month, it was A Rule Against Murder, The Brutal Telling, Bury Your Dead, A Trick of the Light, The Beautiful Mystery, and How the Light Gets In.  As I keep saying every time I read Penny’s books, she has a knack for writing cozy thrillers.  I’m not sure that’s a real genre, but that’s the best description I can manage for books that both feel comforting and put characters I love in deadly peril.  I want to hang out in Three Pines and drink Scotch and eat fabulous food and have Armand Gamache solve all my problems.  Try them; you’ll like them.

 

In paper book form, I read The Adventures of Tom Bombadil by J.R.R. Tolkien.  It’s a collection of poems, several featuring our friend Bombadil from LOTR.  In true Tolkien fashion, the commentary and origin stories and other stuff takes up more space than the actual works.  We all need to geek out every once in a while and it was fun.  Plus the book is really cute.  It would be a great gift for the Tolkien nut in the family (looks at T.R.).

 

Speaking of T.R., for my birthday he gave me A Sinister Revenge by Deanna Raybourn, the next in the Veronica Speedwell series.  There is nothing not to like about the series as a whole.  There’s a lepidopterist detective, a sexy taxidermist, and plenty of Victorian skullduggery.  This particular one resolved a situation from the end of the last one, so it was particularly satisfying.

 

On to July.

 

June total:  8

Summer total to date:  8

Year to date:  60