books I read last month

I ended up reading quite a lot of books last month which is slightly more rare for me so I thought I'd share with you all the books that I read in January.

So the first book that I finished was Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows. I had finally decided to start reading the Harry Potter books after I had given up on Chamber of Secrets years ago when I was younger. I hoped to finish them all by the end of the year but I still had the final book to finish at the start of January. I absolutely loved reading the Harry Potter books and if you want me to go into more detail with how I felt about these books then definitely let me know!

My second book that I finished was A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. I started reading this on Christmas Day in the hope to read it all on that day, however I didn't finish it that day and I just sort of forgot about it until now! This is my first Charles Dickens novel and I can say that I actually really enjoyed it. Unlike a lot of other classics, the writing in this is more simple which is something that really helped me get through this quickly. I have also always loved the story of A Christmas Carol having grown up watching various versions of the films.

I then read Into The Water by Paula Hawkins as I had absolutely loved Girl on the Train when I first read that. One thing that I really love about Paula Hawkins novels are the short chapters with the changing perspectives. This helps me get through her novels so quickly as I see that the next chapter is only 3 pages or so and carry on reading. There are a lot more character perspectives in this compared with Girl on the Train which was fairly confusing at first as it took me a while to understand who each character was and what relation they all had to each other but once you get around that then it follows a great story and even though I was able to guess some of the twists in the story I still really enjoyed it!

A book that I wasn't that sure about reading but picked up this month anyway was Aristotle & Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz. I was never too sure of the description of this book but I had heard so many great things about it and when I saw it in one of my local charity shops for just £1.50 I couldn't turn it down! Once again this was something that I read so quickly and I really fell in love with the characters. I would definitely recommend this if you're looking for a more light hearted book and even if you don't like the sound of it at first then still try it out as I ended up really liking this book.

The next book I read was Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler. There are such lovely illustrations in this book that really add to the story and pull you into it a bit more. This wasn't one of my favourite reads this month but you really do feel every emotion that the characters are going through in the book which I think is great. If you weren't aware, Daniel Handler is also known as Lemony Snicket who wrote A Series of Unfortunate Events and I loved reading these books when I was younger.

I then read Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie. I saw the film of this which was released at the end of last year so I did actually already know the ending but I was still really looking forward to reading it. I loved the way that Christie split the story and how she wrote to build suspense. I am definitely going to end up picking up more novels by Christie.

The final book I read in January was Animal Farm by George Orwell. I am hoping to read some more classic sort of novels this year as I am going to university in September to study English Literature so I thought I'd get myself more in the head space of looking at a novel in a studying way. Most people my age have read this before at secondary school, however my class never did but there were always so many connections to this book when I have been studying other things so I decided to read this and I ended up making some notes on this as I was going along and I really enjoyed this. George Orwell is definitely becoming one of my favourite political writers as both Animal Farm and 1984 have such great underlying messages to them so I would definitely recommend this as even though it was focused on the Russian Revolution and the behaviours of Stalin and Trotsky, it is still so relevant to todays politics.

I hope you have enjoyed this post and definitely let me know if you would like to see more of these as I am such a book worm and since I have a lot of spare time at the moment, I am trying to get through a lot of books that I have been meaning to read for a while. I also have a goodreads account if you want to keep up to date on what I am reading and my username on that is beths98.

bethany x