Y’all…fall was a blur. Like literally it came and went without a trace. Were it not for college football I would swear we went straight from summer to winter.
When last I posted I had just come back from the most amazing trip to Cape Cod. I didn’t have much time to wallow in wishing I was back there because life hit the high-speed button. I moved. The day job got CRAZY busy and Caleb’s school and sports schedule took over any empty calendar slots.
Amidst it all, I did find a few cracks and crevices to read a book or eight. I mean, this is how I keep my sanity.
Of my list of fall books to read, I completed six of the 11. You can see my list of fall reads here. Once again, I didn’t get to Platform or The Year We Turned 40. It’s quite possibly because of Rory and Lorelai. So, with the binging and revival over, those will be 2017 reads. I also didn’t make it to The Things We Wish Were True or The Perfect Girl. To January they go! And, though I had good intentions of getting to The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo, I read enough reviews to skip it without regret.
But, I did get in some good books this fall, including:
I Let You Go – Claire Mackintosh (My favorite book of the fall)
Disclaimer – Renee Knight
The Status of All Things – Liz Fenton & Lisa Steinke
The Couple Next Door – Shari Lapena
Uninvited – Lysa TerKeurst
In addition to the five above, I also took in:
Wake Up Happy – Michael Strahan
Truly, Madly, Guilty – Liane Moriarty
Wait and See – Wendy Pope
My biggest disappointment came with Truly, Madly, Guilty. I adored Big Little Lies and was really excited about this novel. Y’all, I suffer from some for-real book guilt if I start a book and don’t finish it. I’ve gotten better with giving myself permission to be an adult and put away a book that doesn’t captivate me, and this one almost got put aside. I was listening to the audiobook version and I felt like it would never end. The story continued to hint at something awful that happened at a barbecue, but getting to the details took somewhere near 70 chapters. I was truly beginning to not care about what happened. But once it finally was revealed I was 3/4 of the way through and stuck with the story until the end.
With the Christmas holidays quickly approaching, I like to add a few holiday-themed books to complement my incessant Hallmark Channel movie watching. These are the three I’ll be enjoying with my cocoa:
Winter Storms, Elin Hilderbrand – The third in the Quinn family trilogy, this book came out in October but I couldn’t read it until the holidays were upon us. This is the final book of this series and will bring to closure all of the family drama with the Quinns on Nantucket. I love this series so much that I’ve got attending the Nantucket Stroll to my calendar in 2017.
A Baxter Family Christmas, Karen Kingsbury – I don’t read much Christian fiction because what I have read often feels too fluffy and predictable (do not compare this statement to my Hallmark Channel addiction). But, Karen Kingsbury is an author I started reading about two years ago and I adore. I have read the entire Baxter series and pretty much consider myself one of them. This one brings the whole family back together with a little family drama around a stranger at Christmas Eve dinner.
12 Days of Christmas, Debbie Macomber – I tend to like my holiday reads like I like my Hallmark Channel movies, which is why this is a perfect holiday book. I first heard of Debbie Macomber when her book Mrs. Miracle was a Hallmark holiday movie! This one is the cute story of a woman who starts a blog about how she’s going to win over her humbug neighbor with 12 days of kindness.
What will keep you turning pages over the holidays? I’d love to know if you’ve read any of these or plan to…and what you think.
And, if you’re looking to bump up your reading in 2017, join me in embarking on Modern Mrs. Darcy’s 2017 Reading Challenge. There are two different plans to choose from, both with genres of books to guide you when choosing titles for 2017. Let me know if you’re doing the challenge and which plan you choose. I’m doing the reading for fun plan!
Happy Page Turning!