Murder by Death

January is always the best reading month for me for the simple reason that it's summer holidays here Down Under and I'm off work for 4 weeks.  MT's at work for 3 of those weeks, which means 21 blissful days of reading for hours, uninterrupted.  

I knocked 33 34 books off my pile this month and because it's the first month of the year, it was easy to see on the challenge page that I'd read 7685 8029 pages.  I got a bug in my ear about that page number thing and went through all the books I read, updating them so I could see an accurate pages read number.  I probably won't do that again, but I am inspired to try and check for accurate page numbers as I finish each book.

I had been quietly aiming for a book a day, so I'm super pleased to have slightly exceeded that.  Most of the books weren't at all long, but I was going for maximum number of physical books knocked off the top of Mt. TBR, so I was purposefully going for the low-hanging fruit.

I had a lot of very good reads this month but far and away the two that made me the happiest were Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume  and The Bookshop on the Corner.  

I had 4 other 5-star reads:

A Certain Age 

Rare Books Uncovered: True Stories of Fantastic Finds in Unlikely Places 

Leonardo da Vinci 

What A Plant Knows: a field guide to the senses 

and 5 4.5-star reads (3 of which were vintage children/YA books):

Around the World in 80 Cliches: Overused Expressions from Across the Globe

Freckle Juice

Then Again, Maybe I Won't

It's Not the End of the World

You're Saying It Wrong: A Pronunciation Guide to the 150 Most Commonly Mispronounced Words--and Their Tangled Histories of Misuse

Back to work today, and walked in to find the critical piece of equipment controlling the wi-fi up and died over the break and teachers in a panic, so I'm making up for those 21 days. But it's totally worth it.  :)

ETA: Updated books read and page count because I finished my last book quicker than I expected on the 31st.