Earl Grey Books

What a start to the year, hey?

2021 has already been different to what I was anticipating. If we ignore all of the world events for a moment, this month turned out to be much, much busier for me than what I was expecting. I have some exciting things happening in the next few weeks and beyond, but I’ll talk more about some of that stuff later. But as a result, I didn’t get to do a lot of reading this month. I was also in a bit of slump where I just didn’t know what to pick, so this month’s post is kind of a small one but let’s get into it.

Favourites

The Duchess Deal by Tessa Dare

I often try not to include too many historical romances in these posts because I tend to talk about them at length elsewhere throughout the month and continuously after that. But, I just couldn’t help myself with this one. This was my first time ever trying something from Tessa Dare—I’ve been listening to the hype about her for the last year with a bit of skepticism. Honestly, the blurb of this book didn’t immediately excite me, it sounded good but I wasn’t sure it was quite as amazing as everyone was saying. I was wrong, of course. This is just such a beautiful story—it’s fun but it also discusses some pretty serious topics as well, and it does it all while being incredibly heartfelt and of course, sexy as hell. I recently ordered myself the next two books in this series and I’m hoping to get to them in February, or possibly March depending on how much time I end up having to read. Either way, this was brilliant.

Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett

I just finished this one last night but I felt like it deserved a place on this list so here it is. I’ve been reading the Discworld series in the order set out by Pratchett—this is only the third one so you can see how well I’ve been doing with that so far. I am making a conscious effort to read the series this year as part of the Turtle Recall challenge, so props to me for getting to this one already. I think out of the three this is probably my favourite so far in terms of characters—I always enjoy books about female characters more than male so this instantly had an advantage over the previous two. I don’t really know that I have much else to say about this one right now, but I’m extremely excited to be getting to the next one, Mort, as so many people tell me that Death is one of their absolute favourite characters from the series.

Disappointments

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

Well, I better you never thought we’d end up here. If you’ve been following me for a while, I’m sure you’re more than aware of my love for Margaret Atwood. She’s one of my favourite authors and I talk about her a lot. I had picked out The Blind Assassin as part of my Summer TBR a few weeks back, and then started it as my second book for 2021. I DNFed it at about 160 pages, I think? So there are two stories in here—one following this elderly woman Iris as she looks back at her past and the death of her sister, Laura, and then the other one follows two unnamed characters carrying out an affair and there’s a storytelling element to it. I really liked that second part, it was intriguing but that first part was extremely boring and I just couldn’t be bothered to read this 600-something page book if I wasn’t at least enjoying it. This was one of the oldest books, so if nothing else at least it’s now off my TBR finally and I can be moving onto other things.

The Midnight Lie by Marie Rutkoski

If you saw my discussion post with Angel yesterday then this probably comes as no surprise to you. This was one of my most anticipated books of last year and it turned out to be a huge let-down. You can read that discussion if you’re interested in seeing a deeper explanation of why I felt like that, but to sum it up, nothing in this book felt like quite enough. Everything, the characters, the plot, the world, the relationships felt unfinished and not completely fleshed-out. I absolutely adored Marie Rutkoski’s Winner’s trilogy which is probably why I was so disappointed in this. Unless book two suddenly gets rave reviews, I’m pretty sure I won’t be continuing on with this series. I hope Rutkoski will put out other books that show-off her writing skills a lot better than this one has because she’s an author I would love to still support.

What did you read this month that you loved, or maybe didn’t?