Echoing the story of David Copperfield, Kingsolver wove in the ups and downs (more of the latter) of Dickens’ David to the sad and sorry tale of Demon. Born to a mother already addicted to pills and booze, his childhood was doomed from the outset to be a struggle. Demon faced his lot with realism, learning fast that if he needed help, then he’d better look within himself than expect or rely on the kindness or duty of others, be they the good-hearted Peggotts next door or the overworked social workers assigned to his case. The rotten luck and bad treatment that Demon encounters seems to be endless but Kingsolver’s’ ability to capture the voice of a disenchanted, world weary 11 year old who still retains a kernel of pluck and spirit keeps you in the story’s thrall. Come to this book with fortitude, as you will need it as you join Demon’s journey.

To provide lighter relief from the dark days of Demon’s life, I took refuge in a string of other books. The One Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of a Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson was the perfect foil. I can’t even recall how long this book has been sitting patiently on my Kindle bookshelf. I have a vague recollection of buying it when it was one of the 99p specials after a good friend recommended it. It’s Allan Karlsson’s 100^th birthday and he really doesn’t want all the fuss of the party the nursing home has planned for him, so he opens his ground floor window, steps gingerly out into the flower bed and hot foots it away as fast as his slippers and 100 year old body can carry him. As Allan makes his escape, the time-shift story flicks back to his youth and through his life. Although school wasn’t his forte, he learned early on how to use explosives and became quite an expert at blowing things up. And so his adventures begin. Chance decisions bring him into the path of some of the most memorable figures of 20^th century history like a centenarian Forrest Gump. You can’t help but be pulled in by Jonasson’s epic caper. It reads a bit like a fireside yarn spun by your favourite Grandpa, happenstance and incredulity dripping off the page. If you haven’t read this yet, get hold of a copy and enjoy. This was my first 5 star book of the year (before I turned the last page of Demon).

Keeping it light, I borrowed from my niece the second in the All Four Stars series about Gladys Gatsby, 12 year old restaurant critic for the New York Standard newspaper. In the second instalment, The Summer of Stars, Gladys has to try to keep up with her secret side hustle while attending summer camp. That would be difficult enough, but when her fellow critic tries to steal her assignments and sabotage her reviews by giving her a fake assignment to find New York’s best hotdog, Gladys has her work cut out. Tara Dairman makes this KidLit book as entertaining for its target audience as well as their aunts. This one was just what I needed. And needless to say I wanted a hotdog myself by the time I’d finished this one.

In early February, a long road trip with my sister was the perfect opportunity to use one of my Audible credits and buy a recent release to listen together on the journey home. Piglet by Lottie Hazell had come up in my Bookstagram feed a few days earlier and the donuts on the cover sold it for me. Piglet (the nickname of our female MC) is soon to marry Kit and is in the throes of last minute wedmin while juggling her day job as a cook book editor. Each scene plays out with food at the centre, whether around the dining table, a test kitchen or restaurant, it’s a series of meals rather than chapters. Though this sounds like it should very much be my cup of tea (with a biscuit please), it just didn’t hit the spot. Just 3 stars for this debut.

Back to the dusty to be read shelf at home and I sought out a long-term resident. One for my Baby by Tony Parsons had resided on my shelf since I lived in London the first time around, a Tesco bargain with discount sticker still on the cover (£3.84 in those days was a steal). Time to come on down and have its day. Opening in Hong Kong (a place where I spent 6 months in my early 20s as a junior lawyer) I was immediately drawn in to the scene on the Star Ferry, remembering numerous trips back and forth in Hong Kong’s harbour. Alfie Budd bumps into his perfect woman, the One for him, who will become his wife. But their life together is short-lived as his wife dies barely two years into their marriage and Alfie returns to London to pick up the pieces of his life. He’s a bit of a grumpy chap, Alfie, bumbling along back in his parents’ house. As Alfie mourns his lost future with his wife, his own father throws decades of marriage away by leaving his mother and shacking up with his mistress. The story follows Alfie’s string of ill-advised couplings with his students at the foreign language school where he has found a job. I spent much of the book wishing that he would open his eyes to what was right under his nose. And wishing I was at the end of the book already. This wasn’t one of those rare gems lurking on the shelf. This was one of those that I should have abandoned and ditched. You win some, you lose some.

Rounding of the month, I had been spending time at the gym listening to another audiobook, Atomic Habits by James Clear. Funnily enough it was particularly helpful at cementing in place my new habit of going to the gym or doing some other activity before 9am. Clear breaks down the thinking behind how it’s the actions, the habits, which are more important than the goals themselves. And further, that to become long lasting the habit you wish to foster should become part of your self-identity. It was an interesting listen, but the kind of thing I will probably have to listen to twice for it to fully sink in. There’s one habit I already have well and truly nailed: reading books wherever, whenever, and however.

I started the month by finally finishing the last pages of A Suitable Boy, a doorstop of a book which had such a woven cast of characters, I felt I lived the year with them. At over 1300 pages, it felt like an achievement to have even finished it. Next stop War and Peace!

Early in January, I saw a post from a fellow book blogger, Bestbookforward, that she was hosting an online book club and the chosen book of the month happened to be one of the many books on my to-be-read shelf. A couple of Christmases back, my sister bought me Old Baggage by Lissa Evans. I’d made a start once before but wasn’t ready to read it then, and I’d never picked it up again. This was the perfect opportunity. Bestbookforward played a blinder and managed to get the author to join the book club call, which was a great opportunity to hear more about the book came to life. The middle book of a three story trilogy, Old Baggage also works as a standalone story of a former suffragette in her middle aged years figuring out how to keep fighting for equality and find her place in a changing world. Her character really comes off the page, strong, forthright, sometimes a little oblivious of her own impact and the book is a gem. I’d be interested to read the other books in the series to see where some of the other characters develop.

Next on my list was the first book sent to me from my Mr B’s book emporium subscription. Finding Hildasay follows the real life journey of Christian Lewis who has been struggling with civilian life after being in the army and who finds himself with no home other than his tent. He starts to walk the entire coast of the United Kingdom, following the water’s edge as much as possible. It takes a couple of years to wend his way around the Welsh coast to the west of Scotland, across to Northern Ireland and back. Each inhabited island and sea loch, no shortcuts. The weather is brutal and his reliance on the generosity of strangers to help keep him fed make each day challenging. The book finishes part way around the coast, paving the way for another book to complete the coast. I enjoyed reading about this incredible feat but occasionally found the way the book was put together disjointed, particularly Christian’s back story and relationship with his daughter which gives context to how he ends up on his coastal odyssey.

A couple of months ago I was drawn to a book title and cover while mooching in Waterstones. Bob Mortimer, the British comedian, has written The Satsuma Complex. It’s a rambling, farcical caper of a boring, invisible man who finds himself caught in the middle of gangsters and a murder. With the help of his tech wiz geriatric neighbour, he tries to keep himself out of hot water and find out who killed his work acquaintance. It’s filled withthe bizarre quirkiness of Mortimer’s comedy and moves along with a well-paced plot.

I’ve made a start of Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, the modern retelling of Dicken’s David Copperhead. It’s as good as you would expect if you have read any of her other stuff. But boy is it bleak. I’d seen other book bloggers saying they had to read it in chunks because if was so heavy. Now I get it! Unfortunately, making a start on the book also coincided with me coming down with a chest infection which laid me low for close to two weeks. I really struggled with the tragic story and so have read some other lighter bits in parallel.

First of these diversions was an art crime thriller by Jeffrey Archer. This book had found its way on to my shelf via my parents’ book shelf. It’s perhaps one of the last books that my dad read before he died. He always had a book on the go, his favourites genres being Westerns, crime and thrillers. False Impression tells the tale of a New York art historian working for a finance company. After valuing the art collection which makes up the collateral of one of the company’s borrowers, she finds herself mysteriously fired on the morning of 9/11. As she’s being unceremoniously escorted from the office, a booming explosion rocks the building. She’s in the north tower. Barely escaping with her life, she has an opportunity to disappear to try to get to the bottom of her former employer’s questionable lending practises. The book was light, pacy and intriguing enough to get me through a couple of bad days of flu.

Looking for something suitably light, and needing an e-book to read in the night when my cough would keep me awake, I scoured my kindle library for something that would be a hug in a book. The Library by Bella Osborne fitted the bill and didn’t disappoint. A young boy with a secret love of romance novels reacquaints himself with his village library. While there he makes an unlikely friend in the shape of an elderly book club member who he tries to help when he spots her being mugged. Each filling an unspoken need of the other, they join forces to help save the library from pending closure. The story is similar to The Last Chance Library which I read last year but this one was better written, with some lovely characters.

Back to my paper TBR, I was scanning my shelves last week and fixed on a hard back book called Cooking Lessons by Daisy Garnett. This was a long time resident of the TBR shelf after I had acquired the book based on a magazine recommendation/plug but then never got around to reading it. It was Daisy’s story of how she came to be a keen cook after a childhood where her family were looked after by a housekeeper and cooking was rarely necessary. That was until she was on board a small yacht crossing the Atlantic and was volunteered to be the cook. Learning to cook in a listing galley was a baptism of fire (or it would be if she could get the gas to light). Having the privilege of being acquainted with Rose Gray of the River Cafe and other talented chef friends, Daisy rapidly develops skills to create classic dishes.

I’m still only a third of the way through Demon Copperhead. I hope it doesn’t take me as long to digest as A Suitable Boy, it is after all only half as thick. But I have to take abject misery in small doses. Maybe next month I can report on having completed it.

Reading is to me, another way of exploring. I don’t have any authors or genres that I stick to. Most things are fair game, but I do tend to leave heavy sci-fi, fantasy and horror well alone. What I read is driven by my mood. I can start a good book but not feel ready for it, and I might be drawn to something less mentally taxing, in need of a literary Snickers rather than a carefully handcrafted Belgian truffle (chocolate is one of my other favourite things if you will pardon my analogy).

Among the things I have read over the past few months have been:

• a whole series of murder mysteries where the supersleuth was none other than Her Majesty The Queen;
• an audiobook about the importance of sleep, most of which I read on an overnight flight and the possible irony being that I nodded off through some parts;
• a few different psychological thriller and detective novels from authors new to me, covering themes like gaslighting and coercive control, how to be a serial killer and a good dad at the same time, as well as classic police procedurals;
• two sides of an American marriage, when one spouse has been wrongfully imprisoned;
• letters home and a diary written by an author 40 years apart, giving an insight into the literary high society of north London;
• a two-parter from a popular author that has been peppering Bookstagram and Booktok for the last couple of years (late to that party!);
• two recently released hot hot hot books (Yellowface and Really Good, Actually) that each left me cold cold cold (don’t believe the hype);
• a Pulitzer winning book within a book within book about the great depression of the 1920s;
• two books from a Turkish/British author which each had a mystical element; and
• the sixth instalment of a cosy mystery series set in a bookshop (which is a definite guilty pleasure).

A couple of the books that I read were free ARCs (advanced reader copies) through Netgalley, a website which opens a door into the world of publishing for book enthusiasts.  It’s quite a privilege to be able to read new stuff before it has been released and to play a (very small) part in that book coming to market. The mistake I have made each time I’ve dabbled with Netgalley is being a bit too enthusiastic when requesting books to read and then being accepted for more than I can comfortably read and review. It’s especially difficult if I haven’t enjoyed the book, as writing a constructive review can be as hard work as trudging through the book itself. This time I was accepted for four books, two of which I’ve now read and reviewed. I am looking forward to the next two, one of which is the next Katherine Webb “Detective Lockyer” mystery called Laying Out The Bones and the other is an audiobook of a translated Japanese book called Days at the Morisaki Bookshop. I always love a book about a bookshop!

As the end of the year approaches, and having overshot my start of the year target of reading 52 books a year, I’m starting to turn my mind to things that I want to read next year. I’ve got some exciting things on my shelf, some of which I have acquired recently from my sister and from charity book shops in my neighbourhood. These include The Whalebone Theatre, which is a recent release and which my sister read for her book club. She thought it was a great read, and my sis has made some excellent recommendations recently. A few weeks ago, I was delighted to find a copy of Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, which is a modern retelling of Dickens’ David Copperfield. I haven’t read David Copperfield but I have read a couple of Barbara Kingsolver’s books, which were both excellent. Another good friend has lent to me Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, which has a beautiful front cover with a stylised image of The Great Wave Off Kanagawa by Japanese artist Hokusai. She also told me that it was a great read, so I think these three books will make it straight on to my TBR for 2024.

I also have something else to look forward to in 2024. When I left my last job, my lovely colleagues (knowing me so well) bought me a reading subscription from Mr B’s Emporium in Bath. I can expect 11 books over the year (not in January as they say we will be reading our Christmas gifts) hand chosen for me by Mr B’s book therapists. To get a flavour what I like and don’t like, I’ve filled out a questionnaire about my reading tastes and things that I’m open to trying as well as gathering info about my other interests, likes and dislikes. Before the book is shipped, they will send me a teaser about the book. If it sounds unappealing, I can request a different selection. But I’m excited about exploring new and different corners of fiction and non-fiction and seeing where the book subscription will take me.