MY FINAL 2023 TOTAL BOOKS READ IS 187!

I did a monthly book bracket—which was hard because some months had more than one great book!

That said, my top 12 bracket books of the year were:

  • January – Verity
  • February – Spare
  • March – Winners
  • April – Under the Whispering Door
  • May – In the Lives of Puppets
  • June – The Bones Beneath My Skin
  • July – Housemaid’s Secret
  • August – Dark Matter
  • September – Big Little Lies
  • October – A Man Called Ove
  • November – The Wishing Game
  • December – Never Lie

And the winning bracket book of my year is Under the Whispering Door.

Other books I’d highly recommend:

Beartown (series)
•Project Hail Mary
•Midnight Library
•The Rose Code
•The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches
•Undercover Bromance (series)
•Remarkably Bright Creatures
•The Authenticity Project
•Gone Girl
•Drowning
•In an Instant
•Finley Donovan series
•Thursday Murder Club (series)
•Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice
•I Will Always Write Back
•The Wild Robot
•None of This is True

Bah humbug.

Katie tested positive for Covid (her second time!)—she even took two tests. I blame the cesspool of middle school. Tom and I are as boosted as we can be so fingers crossed we don’t get it.

She was super upset and crying when we got the results—she really wanted to go to Gramma’s house. I’m just glad we decided to test her at all because we thought it was just a cold.

12 in 12 (2024)

If you’ve been following along this year, you know I’ve read a ton (I’m at 175 and I’d like to finish at least five more in the next 13 days—I passed my original goal of 125 in August). I still have hundreds on my list, but I enjoyed all of the recommendations I got last year—so I did it again! Here are the 12 books recommended to me by 12 friends!

Back is at it again.

OMGGGGG Y’ALL. So I hurt my back yesterday just doing housework prepping for the cleaners…but I took an Oxy which pretty much made me forget about it.

Fast forward to the middle of the night when I woke up and couldn’t move! Freaked me out until I realized that the Oxy had just worn off and my back was super sore again—and it was just tough to move.

Stayed in bed laying down because it didn’t hurt if I wasn’t moving. Got out of bed at 9 to take another Oxy and sat on the couch hoping to take a nap until it started working…but the dogs kept playing and making noise and jumping on me and waking me up. So I kept floating in and out of sleep.

Guess who’s JUST NOW finally getting up?! OMG it’s almost 2:30.

And look who FINALLY settled down now that I need to get up.