April has been a productive month for reading, and I felt like I was hitting my stride and properly enjoying reading again. This post is all about everything that I read and listened to in April. I’ve made a video on my new booktube channel about this too, which you can find here. I thought by way of a change, I will run down my ten reads starting with my least favourite all the way up to my top book of the month.
10. Deadly Decisions by Kathy Reichs
The month didn’t get off to the best start. I wrote elsewhere on this blog about my dilemma of whether to get rid of books I wasn’t keen on. That was because my first book of the month, Deadly Decisions by Kathy Reichs was not one of my favourites. I did get in to in towards the end, but I have decided to let the rest of the series go to a new home, freeing up nearly a whole shelf. I just can’t spend any more precious reading time on a main character like Temperance Brennan, who I just don’t like.
9. Smoke and Mirrors by Elly Griffiths
This was my first audiobook of the month, and it took me a lot longer to get through than its series predecessor The Zig Zag Girl, which I listened to in March. It really must have been a good month reading-wise because I didn’t dislike this book, it was a good listen. I don’t think I liked the subject matter much as it involved (minor spoiler, but the whole book revolves around this so it was probably on the blurb) two missing children turning up dead in the snow. Detective Inspector Stephens investigates, and his stage magician best friend Max Mephisto takes a bit more of a back seat in this one. I liked the newly introduced female detective Holmes, and I enjoyed the fairy-tale links but otherwise it was a fairly standard listen. I will listen to the next book in the series, but I’m going to have a break from them.
8. Caught by Harlan Coben
This was a good read too, but reading it straight after a Jack Reacher book made it seem tame in comparison. I like Harlan Coben as an author, but I’ve enjoyed some of his other books a lot more. Again, this had subject matter I didn’t love, but the plot did get really good once I got into it. This one was about a reporter called Wendy who believes she has found a paedophile in the community, and it also involved a missing teenage girl. I liked the characters and it had a good ending.
7. The Guest List by Lucy Foley
I kept hearing about this book, so I listened to the audiobook. I think it would have come out ninth on this list if I’d read it in paperback form. It’s very contrived, but it did have a pretty gripping hook and it was saved by the great performances of the multiple narrators. This book is about a wedding on a remote island. We hear the story mainly told by Jules (the bride), Johnno (the best man), Olivia (the bridesmaid), Hannah (the plus one) and Eoife (the wedding planner). In between times, we get the story of the wedding night, told in third person. The best thing about this book was the brilliant opening chapter; I loved how it set up all the action and it was almost Christie mystery-esque in its style. Sadly, the rest of the book does not meet up to the high expectations I built up from that chapter. I may listen to the author’s other book The Hunting Party, but I’ve been told it’s similarly contrived. If anyone has read both, I would love to hear what you thought and whether you’d recommend giving it a listen?
6. Madame Zero – Sarah Hall
I wrote a lot about this one in my comparison of the two short story collections I read this month, which can be found here. i’ve not put this any higher up the list, because some of it was too surreal for my tastes. If I was judging only on my favourite story ‘Later, his ghost’, this book would be higher up!
5. Night School by Lee Child
I wrote a lot about Jack Reacher after reading this book. You can find that blog post here. I really enjoyed this book, although it isn’t my favourite of Jack Reacher’s Military Police adventures. It probably would have been higher up the list, but I read a lot of different things this month.
4. Persuasion by Jane Austen
This is only the second Jane Austen I’ve tried, and I read the other, Northanger Abbey, many years ago. I’m not a huge fan of writing from this period, or at least I always think I’m not. However, last year I really enjoyed the classics I read towards the start of the year (more about that here), and it was around the time I was reading lots of classics (for me) that I got this out of the library. Then all the libraries shut, and my local one has only just reopened, so I didn’t end up reading Persuasion until the end of April 2021. I found it difficult at first to get into the right head space for the language that Austen uses, but once I got tuned in, I really started to enjoy the story of Anne Elliot and her uncaring family. I loved the middle section, towards the end of volume one, where the plot thickens and gets exciting. As for volume two, it has a very satisfying ending! I liked this book a lot.
3. I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
This was a rare example of a book where I had seen the film first. It was very different from the film, but I enjoyed both in their own way. I possibly enjoyed the film more, but the film expands the book a lot, and changes the ending significantly. I enjoyed the stark and to the point style of writing here, and I liked the different ending. In this book, Robert Neville seems to be the last man alive. The rest of the population have become vampires. He spends his days struggling with his existence and swinging between drinking to drown his sorrows, killing vampires, and researching how to cure the problem. It’s a very bleak book, but I enjoyed its post-apocalyptic story.
2. Help the Witch by Tom Cox
This is the other short story collection I compared here. It was by far my favourite of the two and I explain why in the previous post about it. Deserving of being one of my favourite reads in April.
1. Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson
What can I say? This was Kate Atkinson’s debut, and I’ve put off reading it for such a long time because I didn’t like the sound of it. When I finally did read it, last month, I could immediately see where the excellent Life After Life, which I read last year, came from. This is almost like a practice run, or perhaps a Life After Life if you took away the main concept of living multiple lives. Narrated by Ruby Lennox, this book takes us from the moment of her conception, through her life, with a series of chapters about other generations of her family interspersed in Ruby’s story. There was one thing that required a lot of suspension of disbelief, but that aside, I loved it. Mostly, it makes me want to reread Life After Life. i had a great time reading Behind the Scenes at the Museum, and I highly recommend this book.
That brings this wrap up of April’s reading to a close. If you’d like to hear me trying to describe these ten books and how much I did or didn’t like them please do check out my new youtube channel. I’d love to hear from you in the comments if you’ve read any of these books.
In April I managed to read 7 books from the giant TBR, 1 library book and 2 audiobooks. I added three books to the TBR. (I know! But it didn’t break my no book buying rule because one of them I supported last year on unbound and it’s just arrived, one was a prize from a competition on twitter, and one was a pass on from my mum). To make up for adding three, I am unhauling 7 unread books (the Temperance Brennan series). Not bad.
- Currently Reading: A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
- Currently Listening to: Animal Farm by George Orwell
Alice and the Giant Bookshelf 