I feel like I may need to start doing some of those silent BookTok videos about the books I’ve read – they look a lot quicker and easier to do than writing them out! What’s funny is that when I abandoned the blog, I’m pretty sure TikTok wasn’t even a thing, or at least, I wasn’t onto it quite yet. Nowadays it’s another part of my daily routine as it’s something I manage for clients…which means I have totally ignored my own presence on there!
Anyway, enough with TikTok rambles, I’ve got 4 pretty awesome books to tell you about in January. I definitely got my year kicked off to a good start with reading!
Numbers Game by Rebecca Rode – 8/10
Having said that was enough of TikTok rambles, this book had a distinct TikTok fiction POV feel about it – in a very good way! Does anyone else get these pop up from time to time? They’re like mini fictional stories where you’re seeing one character’s POV and are often a little bit fantasy/sci-fi/dystopian future.
This book had that premise and delivered on it well. In this world, citizens are rated with a number – the higher the better, and each colour is assigned a colour that divides society: green, yellow and red. We follow two characters: Treena, who desperately wants to be rated the same as her boyfriend so they can be together, and Vance, someone she meets later on who helps to flip everything its on head for her. There’s a great love triangle that goes on, excellent worldbuilding, and a whole lot of tension. I enjoyed the fast pace and the twists that pop up here and there, even if they were somewhat predictable. I would like to read the rest of the series in future, but it wasn’t one where I had to immediately buy the next book to continue the story.
The Last Murder at the End of the World by Stuart Turton – 9/10
This was the book that really got me back into reading after my “I had 2 babies and lockdown happened” slump. The synopsis describes it as a puzzle where there is a murder to be solved on an idyllic (we all know it’s not going to be!) island where the last remaining members of humanity live surrounded by the deadly fog that wiped everyone else out. But there are a couple of catches too: the murder has triggered something which is allowing the fog to creep in, so they’re on a time limit to solve it; and everyone has had their memories wiped.
I knew right away that this was a perfect book for me, blending a murder mystery into a dystopian future, with a bit of isolation and survival thrown in for good measure. It was a slow pace at the beginning and the actual event (the murder) which is promised in the blurb doesn’t happen until a good way through. There are enough strange details and mini mysteries that keep you reading. In fact, the murder itself is only a tiny part of the overall mysteries this book has in store! Despite the initial slow pace, the short chapters made it absolutely addictive, and I found I needed to know answers as much as the characters did.
You’ve also got a lovely unreliable, omniscient narrator who lets her characters know only what she wants them to know, and who does the same to us but makes us privy to details that the others don’t know yet in places. It’s a fun way to read a story and see it unfold before you and the characters together!
It immediately made it onto my elusive favourites list and is one I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend!
Eat More, Live Well by Dr Megan Rossi
I’ll make this a brief review as it’s a cookbook and a healthy lifestyle book rather than fiction, but I feel like it helps me to introduce something that’s been a big part of my life in the past 6 months. After coming out of that fog of a not so easy baby, Ben and I realised that we weren’t living the healthiest of lifestyles. While we thought we ate well, with balanced meals, we were eating a lot of not very wholesome snacks (not that there’s anything wrong with these, and I have a lot more to say on it in future posts that aren’t supposed to be about books!) and not moving much.
I read an article about eating 30 plant points a week, which recommended Dr Megan Rossi’s book and a recipe by her. I reserved it at the library thinking it would give us some nice recipes, but it was the intro, which I don’t normally read in cookbooks, preferring to jump straight to the recipes, that caught my attention. It all just made sense somehow. It wasn’t too preachy about eating fancy veg or only veg, but it gave enough detail about everything that had me hooked.
This was the starting point for us to jump into an entire lifestyle change with our eating and moving. We followed up this with the audio book of Ultra Processed People by Xand van Tulleken. Like I said, more about this another day (and probably another day after that…and another…), but let’s just say, it has been a HUGE turning point in our lives.
Wakenhyrst by Michelle Paver – 7/10
When a book is described as gothic, I’m already interested. When it apparently toes the line between what’s real and supernatural, I’m very interested. And when I see the author is Michelle Paver, whose book Thin Air is one of my all time favourites, I’m sold.
Wakenhyrst is set in the early 1900s where Maud feels isolated after her mother’s death in childbirth and her strict father doesn’t seem to care a thing about her. She discovers his diary and uncovers a range of dark secrets, including his obsession with the “doom”, an ancient painting he happened upon at their church which haunts him
For me, this didn’t have quite the same impact as Thin Air and Dark Matter (which I read immediately after this one, review to follow!), which surprised me as it’s set in a more familiar location. I did thoroughly enjoy it, but the tension in it occasionally dissipated through some chapters, which I didn’t find with her other books.
