Looking Back at January 2023 Reads

One goal/non-goal I have for 2023 is to set aside time to read. It's so easy to get caught up in scrolling on your phone randomly and before you know it, you've fallen down the YouTube rabbit hole for hours with nothing to show for it. Other than baking recipes you'll never make or debunking videos for things you would never try in the first place. If you get my drift.

So for me, reading five books in January is monumental! And not a single one of them was manga! Not that there's anything wrong with reading manga. I personally love reading it. But it's usually a pretty quick read and not very challenging. So I'm proud of myself for reading five non-manga books in January.

My favorite read in January was actually The Woodcarver's Daughter, followed closely by Pride and Prejudice.

How about you? What was your reading accomplishment in January? Did you have a favorite read?

Enjoy scanning my list of reads and my thoughts on each of them. You can also see my February 2023 Reading Goals. I would love to know if you've set any reading goals for yourself this year!

 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Classic Literature. The plot is pretty self-explanatory so I won't go into it again. I started Pride and Prejudice in December, and it was the first book I completed in 2023, which was refreshing. The above cover is the cover of my book from my darling boxed set that my sister gave me for Christmas a few years ago. Re-reading it reminded me of little things I had forgotten. Like Mr. Bennet being a pretty terrible father figure. He is just so disengaged from his family, and willing to let crazy things happen just so he doesn't have to deal with his daughters' irresponsibility on his own turf. Once again, I can't blame Charlotte Lucas for making the choice she did. I've never disliked Charlotte, honestly, and she settled on something that would give her security. I'm not sure anyone else has the right to say she made the wrong choice, including Elizabeth, when it's her life and there is genuinely no right or wrong choice in that. It's really quite a dramatic and scandalous story overall. I think I always knew that, but it's been reaffirmed. What I appreciate is that because of when it's written, we're not subjected to all the nasty nitty-gritty. We know that Lydia and Wickham weren't just playing cards when they were living together, but we don't need all the details of exactly "what" they were doing. It's why I tend to like classic literature, because it doesn't feel like it has to go there. Most of it, anyway. So I enjoyed re-reading Pride and Prejudice. It's been quite a while since I've read it, so that was rather delightful.

The Bicycle Spy by Yona Zeldis McDonough

Kid's Fiction. This one is set during World War II, in France. A pre-teen boy loves bicyling and dreams of being a racer and ends up befriending a little Jewish girl his own age who is better at bicyling than he is. It's the story of two worlds colliding over a common interest and broadening horizons. I liked the idea of this book, but not the execution. I like this author a lot, but this book felt really stilted and stiff, which is a shame because it's the first of her books with a male protagonist. I like the idea of the story, and there's a secret underground to get Jews out of France, and all of that is awesome. But the basic execution just is not stellar.

The Woodcarver's Daughter by Yona Zeldis McDonough

Kid's Fiction. Loved this book. It's a story of Russian Jews who end up having to immigrate to America for their own safety. I'm not 100% sure when it's set, somewhere in-between WWI and WWII, just not sure. So the confusion of the era is a little difficult, but that might have just been me. I love how the little heroine is determined to be a woodcarver even though it's a male dominated profession, and she just pursues that. There's a lot of adventure in this story, a lot of passion, and even the carving of carousel horses, and I love it. This one was really, really good.

The Thief of Blackfriars Lane by Michelle Griep

Christian Historic Fiction. This one started out strong, but I did lose focus about 80 pages from the end, which might be more on my attention span than on the writer. But I follow books like Pride and Prejudice without any issues, so yeah, I'm just not sure. Regardless, we have a likeable if naive new police officer working in the City of London (an interesting inner-circle of London that I didn't know existed). He's pretty attractive overall, although not my aesthetic since I have an aversion to facial  hair. I love the spunky heroine. She's a tough cookie and she has her own set of ideals that lives by, things she will and won't do. She's a "thief" but not really a thief. I just wish the end of the novel hadn't felt so muddled to me. So it was pretty good, and mostly fun, but I got distracted at the end.

The Cats of the Doll Shop by Yona Zeldis McDonough

Kid's Fiction. This is the sequel to a book I read in December, and I really love this sequel since it deals with cats, although parts of it are a hard read, made even harder since it was something the author actually witnessed when living in New York City. We have a Jewish family around the time of WWI, or a little before, who live in New York City, and run a doll shop. There are three sisters, each of whom has a doll (that story happened in the first book), and now we have a scenario of stray cats thrown into the mix that the girls want to take care of, and a cousin who is coming from Russia to stay with them. It's really about traversing sibling relationships as the oldest daughter is reaching young womanhood while the younger sisters are still very much children. It's told from the perspective of the middle child. This one is a delightful read that I really couldn't put down. I was so invested to know if the father would let the girls keep the cats.