It appears that I live my life in a perpetual cycle of being surprised that time has passed, and honestly, I am yet again feeling surprised that I’m already writing my January round up. It feels as if I just wrote the December one a few days ago, and yet it’s already the end of the first month of 2023.

What I have read

I have set my 100 books goal for 2023. Goodreads was telling me I was a few books  behind schedule at one point (I barely read anything the first week or two of the year) but I have caught up again now. 

What I have read:

• Crazy in Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop (Lonely Hearts Bookshop #3) – Annie Darling
• First Class Murder (Murder Most Unladylike #3) – Robin Stevens
• Santa Grint (Time Police #4.5) – Jodi Taylor
• The Bookshop of Yesterdays – Amy Meyerson
• The Dead Romantics – Ashley Poston
• Lies, Damned Lies and History (St Mary’s #7) – Jodi Taylor
• Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte (Featured heavily in Crazy in Love… above, turns out rather than a romance of any kind it’s far more about abused and emotionally stunted people abusing and emotionally stunting the next generation, in two families with about three names between the lot of them)
• And the Rest is History (St Mary’s #8) – Jodi Taylor
• Christmas Past (St Mary’s #8.6) – Jodi Taylor

And I’m still working on:

• Enid Blyton’s Christmas Tales (Yes, we are still reading this even though it’s been a month since Christmas!)
• Better than Fiction – Alexa Martin
• One Last Stop – Casey McQuiston
• Enid Blyton’s Holiday Stories
•  An Argumentation of Historians (St Mary’s #9) – Jodi Taylor

As you can see I have made a good start on the ‘books about bookshops and libraries’ category – Dead Romantics is about a ghostwriter and her editor so also on a bookish theme.)

What I have watched

• I’ve carried on with Richard Osman’s House of Games, Only Connect, and George Clarke’s Amazing Spaces (I loved the episode where they built a caravan from the most beautiful detailed designs by a POW in a Japanese Camp) and finished Willow.
• Call the Midwife started a new series so I’ve watched that every week.
• I also finished The Originals and annoyingly the spin-off series is not yet available in the UK anywhere. So instead I moved on to watching Smack the Pony which I haven’t seen since it first aired.
• We got through a few Mission Impossible movies at the weekends namely, Ghost Protocol, Rogue Nation and Fallout. 
• Tuesday nights films were Enchanted and the sequel Disenchanted. 
• Brodie watched his first Ice Age film with us, and laughed hysterically at the poor squirrel and his various doomed attempts to bury his nut.

What I have done

• The Quentin Blake jigsaw I got for Christmas (very tricky). 
• Tidied up after Christmas, put the tree away, bought more storage for Brodie’s toys (again!)
• Finally learned how to 3d print and ran off ten successful prints (I didn’t count up the failures but there were several as I learned along the way, including the print that snapped at the bottom and I cut two fingers on the scraper in the process).
• Had a very cold walk on the beach
• Had ‘the worst Burns supper ever’ according to Brodie who did not like the pie I made with the vegetarian haggis, even though he helped me make it.