Sunday Summary: January in review

The last month has been a fairly quiet one after the madness that is working the Christmas season in retail, and now I get some recovery time in my first holiday since the beginning of November. Next Saturday is the London Bookshop Crawl which Bex has been organising, and which I am so excited for. A big group of us are getting together to stock up on books and cake, beginning at Foyle's and ending at the big Waterstone's in Piccadilly before heading off to Pizza Express afterwards. I've met Bex and Laura before, last year, and I recently found out one of the other attendees, Hannah, also lives on the Isle of Wight, so we met up for coffee the other day to get to know each other a little, and ended up geeking out wildly about books in general, and TV and Netflix series - always a good starting point for a new friendship. And I'm very excited to meet a couple of people who I've "known" online for years but never met.

So, how did I do with my January reading?

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke

The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet - Becky Chambers (In progress)

Upstairs at the Party - Linda Grant

The Drawing of the Three - Stephen King

Silence is Goldfish - Annabel Pitcher

The Rest of Us Just Live Here - Patrick Ness

Disclaimer - Renee Knight

Career of Evil - "Robert Galbraith"

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (reread)

Our Mutual Friend - Charles Dickens

Also Read:

The Ghost Hunters - Neil Spring (begun December 2015)

Sofia Khan is Not Obliged - Ayisha Malik

Second Term at Trebizon - Anne Digby

The Tree of Seasons - Stephen Gately

The Trebizon boarding school stories were one of my favourite series when I was growing up, alongside the Chalet School and Malory Towers books, but they were rather lesser-known than the others, marking the very end of the school story fashion. So imagine my delight when I learned that Egmont have started reprinting the books again. I found this out through Robin Steven's Twitter feed, and practically started screaming with excitement. I'm pretty sure that Miss Stevens must be at least partly to thank for this rediscovery, with the success of her Wells and Wong mysteries making old-fashioned boarding schools cool again. Yes, I do own all but one of the series already, but I actually quite like the modern-style covers a lot more than, say, the Enid Blyton redesigns which I have grumbled about before, and I'm so pleased that a new generation will get to meet Rebecca, Tish, Sue and the others. I've no intention of buying second copies of all of the books, but I do need to show my support of the reprint, don't I? (Plus one or two of my old editions are very battered.)

February To-Read Pile

Note: I don't expect to stick closely to this list, what with the bookshop crawl expected to add at least another half-dozen books to my shelf, but these are some of the books I'd like to read in the not-too-distant future:

Left over from January:

• The Rest of Us Just Live Here - Patrick Ness
• The Drawing of the Three - Stephen King
• Upstairs at the Party - Linda Grant
• Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell - Susanna Clark

New or re-entries:

• A Place Called Winter - Patrick Gale
• The Book of Strange New Things - Michel Faber

Books I want to reread soon:

• The Charioteer - Mary Renault
• American Gods - Neil Gaiman. 

American Gods was on my shortlist but not read on Bex's last Rereadathon (are we going to do another one this spring?) With the work apparently coming along nicely on the TV adaptation, and the casting of Ricky Whittle as Shadow, (not someone I know, but he looks the part more than any other actor I've seen suggested) that book has made its way back onto my to-read list. I've read most of Gaiman's books several times, and American Gods seems to come out every two or three years or so. It's time once more.