January check in!

Current TBR List: 17
Currently Reading: 9
Books Finished in January: 6

Kicked off the year by finishing my audiobook Death Masks by Jim Butcher. This is book 5 in the Harry Dresden series and I am really liking the stories and cannot wait to continue on with the series!

Continuing on with Stephanie Plum series with Four to Score by Janet Evanovich. This series still has me giggling out loud. There is more sexual content in this book them previous ones but good old Stephanie Plum just knows how to hit the funny bone with her antics. RIP yet another car.

Then kind of a bummer, American Drifter by Heather Graham and Chad Michael Murray. This book was far from what I expected. I felt that the overall tone of the story was overwritten. This story was only 316 pages long but with all the blank pages and constant repetition it could have been, and probably should have been, shorter. By the way publishing companies, it is a total waste to have so many blank pages… It also makes me feel like you were forcing the page count to be higher. This story was a 1-1.5 for most of it. Then literally the last chapter I was “oh wow, great!!!!” so I made this a two star read. It just was really painful to get through. I have another Heather Graham book that I was sent for review and I am really hesitant on picking it up. I really hope it was the partnership that dragged down the writing and not her overall style. I will eventually find out!

Then with my girls at CBB, we are rereading the Harry Potter series! Its been over 10 years since I picked up this series. I have read the first book over 8 times. As I was waiting for the next one to release I was rereading the entire series in the week leading up. I remember reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and loving it, re-reading it and reading the second and being like. WTF, the first one is SOOOO lame. Every time I picked up the next book I would re-read from book one and always dreading reading the first one since I found it so boring compared to the new stories. Its been 11 years, at least...Now I feel really old...since I read the series. I LOVE/hate this book. It makes me super uncomfortable how Harry Potter is treated in book one. It reminds me a lot of how poorly the dynamics were in my own childhood. I think this might be why I LOVED it so much the first time then grew to despise it and still have a love/hate now with it. It is amazing being so far removed from this series that I am rediscovering the world with Harry. There are so many little details I forgot or that have been blurred overtime with what happens in the movies. It was amazing dipping my toes in and I can NOT wait for the next book!

I then listened to the audio book of Into the Water by Paula Hawkins. This wasn’t what I thought it was going to be. I thought, as it was blurbed, that it was going to be like Gone Girl or Girl on the Train but instead on focusing on domestic violence it was more focused on the relationships of people in a very small town. How unspoken resentments can spiral out of control as people are operating under different assumptions of the same event. It was a very interesting book but I sometimes has issues keeping all the different characters as individuals. Though it was a good listen I think this book might need to be read so there are visual ques on when the perspective changes since there are so many characters involved.

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