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Progress report for November and tentative reading plan for December

Of the books I named as possible November reads, I only finished The Three Musketeers and Twilight. I only read one Top Mystery instead of the 2 or more I had planned for, but managed to read 8 TBR books.

As to A Kiss Before Dying and Innocent Blood , I am going to have to pay a hefty fine to the library for keeping them too long, so I’ll read them later. Instead I have a mind to read some Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett for the Top Mysteries Challenge, as well as The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, which is also my Chunkster Challenge book for the month. All of these have the advantage that they overlap with the TBR challenge.

I am way behind schedule with my reporting for the 365 short stories challenge, but I hope to remedy that so I will not be posting those reports far into next January. The theme for November was ‘women only’.

I am still reading Lark Rise by Flora Thompson, which has turned out to be an excellent slow read, but I expect to finish it in December and start reading Over to Candleford, the second book in the trilogy.

I have also been reading Christmas stories, mostly romances, some of which I have enjoyed and others not so much. While I found Dickens’ The Cricket on the Hearth disappointingly sentimental and melodramatic, I do plan to read his The Chimes in December, as well as some Christmas stories I have dug up for the short story challenge. I might also re-read A Christmas Carol once again.

In addition, I have started reading the Buchmesse challenge book for December, which is 101 Reykjavik by Hallgrímur Helgason. I am about 50 pages in and already like/dislike the main character and hope he will redeem himself.

Finally, I will probably delve into one of my two new books in December, and read Svörtuloft, last year’s installation in the Erlendur books by Arnaldur Indriðason.
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