It’s Monday – What are you reading? is a place to meet up and share what you have been, are and about to be reading over the week. It’s a great post to organise yourself. It’s an opportunity to visit and comment, and er… add to that ever growing TBR pile! So welcome in everyone. This meme started with J Kaye’s Blog and then was taken up by Sheila from Book Journey. Sheila then passed it on to Kathryn at the Book Date.
Happy first Monday of 2017 – here’s hoping that the year finds everyone with lots of new books to read, new authors to try and old favorites to fall back on!
One of my goals for 2017 is to be a more consistent blogger – I’m aiming for at least 12 reviews a month, including a couple of audiobook ones, as well as 4 blogging posts (kind of like this one). I also need to be better at planning posts for reviews, so that I’m not writing them on the day they are supposed to go live (yeah, I did that a few times last year!). My other non-blogging related goal is to make sure that when I buy kindle books that I log them onto my shelves on Goodreads! I just spent the last couple of days logging 3 years worth of purchases (and I’m still not done yet). Yes, I read a lot, but most of those picks were based on books I had listed on my Goodreads and not other ones that I owned. According to my shelving, I bought 420 books from Amazon in 2016, and only read like 15 of them (out of the 350 odd books that I read). (This also means that I should apologize to any Goodreads friends who may have had me spam the heck out of their feed the last few days as I was shelving books).
Now onto what am I reading…in true fashion, I spent most of yesterday in bed reading and finished up my first book of the year – Crossing Hearts by Kimberly Kincaid – I won this in a giveaway on her Facebook author page and wow! My review will go up closer to the book’s release date (Feb 7, 2016). Now, I’m digging into some older books that are in my kindle archive – several of which I’ve owned since the first year I bought my kindle (2008/09)…Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay and Fire and Ice by Liz Andrews.
On the audiobook side of the house – i’m still slowly chugging away at Les Miserables (you can anticipate seeing this update for the next couple of months). For context, Valjean and Cosette are currently on the run from Javert and have just found themselves in the Convent in Paris. I am also listening to Promises in Death by JD Robb (and all I can saw is Morris 😦 ). One of my goals this year is to listen to at least one of the In Death books a month – which will put me in the high 30’s range by the end of the year (not quite caught up but getting there). When I finish up Promises in Death, I’m going to jump over to the next book in Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski series, with Blood Shot.
Stay tuned for my first Bout of Books 18 post that will be going live soon and have a great first Monday of the year!
My First Book of 2017
On a audiobook front, I’m alternating between three different books to include my third attempt at Les Miserables – I swear one of these days I am going to finish this book! I’m alternating my listening of Les Miserables, with The Poisoner’s Handbook – which is all about the development of forensic chemistry in the 1920’s and different ways that poison’s that killed people (either through murder or incidental causes) were identified and how it influenced the overall body of medical examinations and death investigations. And while at work, I’m listening to the next book in JD Robb’s In Death series – 
On my kindle – i’m working my way through my normal wide variety of books – I’m on a pretty solid contemporary romance kick right now. I’ve had both 
Dirty Like Me
Wild Zone
Worth the Risk
Hours 21-24 Update
I read one of Dr Hashimi’s books a few months ago (she is a pediatrician that works in DC), and so when I was looking at the list of authors who would be attending the National Book Festival in DC and saw her name on the list – I thought it was a good opportunity to read another of hers. Set in Afghanistan, A House Without Windows is a book with the main thrust of the story is the criminal case surrounding an Afghani woman accused of killing her husband and the Afghani born, US trained lawyer who is hired to defend her. Before the beginning of the readathon, I’d read about 100 pages of it, so I was hoping to be able to finish it – but realized quickly that it wasn’t going to be a book that I could easily binge read – it was one that was better read in segments throughout the day (in fact, I just had just finished reading a part of it when I took my unanticipated nap this afternoon). I’ll be posting a review later on, but I can safely say, this was a 4 star read for me and one of my favorite of the read-a-thon. 
The Final Stretch:
Dee's Book Blog 