Podcasts and Books of January

Woo hoo, January is over! I was not at all sad to see this month come to a close and I won't be sad when February is over either. Bring on March and the arrival of our baby/end of this pregnancy! I have no looks to share this month. I wore a lot of the same things over and over again!

Podcasts:

Slow Burn: As I mentioned in my currently post, this is a podcast that I started listening to in January that I really enjoyed. It's about the Watergate scandal during the Nixon presidency. Man Nixon was a horrible person.

Books:

I was sick at the beginning of the month and then the pain of my blood clot set in around mid-month so I got a lot of reading done since I was couch-bound for much of this month. I read so many books (10 books) that I had to split them into 2 different photos!

The Big Book of Birth by Erica Lyon - 5 stars - This was an excellent book to read in preparation for labor. It was written in an easy-to-understand non-judgmental manner as the author covers all sorts of births from natural to epidural to c-sections.

The Science of Mom by Alice Callahan - 4 stars - This was a great book about many of the decisions you will make in the first year of your child's life. It covers things like the vitamin K injection at birth to vaccinations to when to introduce food and what to introduce. She presents the science behind each decision but does so in a really entertaining and engaging way.

Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney - 3 stars - This was a book of the month club selection from earlier this year. It started off slow but I am glad I stuck with it as I ended up enjoying it. It's about a woman in her 90s who takes a walk on New Years Eve and reminisces about her life.

The Wife Between Us by Greer Hendricks - 4 stars - This was a good page turner/suspense novel. I don't want to say much about the book as I think it's best to go in without knowing much about the plot line!

The Windfall by Diksha Basu - 2 stars - This is another book of the month club selection. This one fell flat for me, though. It's about a poor couple in India that comes into a large sum of money when the husband sells a website he developed. They go from rags to riches and the husband really lets the wealth go to his head and change who he is. I think this was supposed to be cute/funny but it didn't work for me.

Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann - 4 stars - This was Amazon's pick for non-fiction book of the year in 2017 and I can see why. It's a narrative non-fiction book about a series of murders that happened to the Osage tribe in Oklahoma. It's crazy that this is a true story because it reads like a fiction. I can't believe how many murders happened (in pursuit of the money left behind by those being killed - this tribe Indians lived on an oil field.)

A Certain Age by Beatriz Williams - 3 stars - I bought this on my kindle over a year ago and finally got around to reading it. It was an entertaining read, but infidelity is a prominent part of the story line and I always struggle to really love novels that feature that.

The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott - 3 stars - This was a really well-written literary fiction novel about a family living in Brooklyn. I can't remember the era - maybe it was the 1950s? At the start of the story, the husband commits suicide while his pregnant wife is out getting groceries and the story unfolds from there.

Bonfire by Kristen Ritter - 2 stars - This novel is about an environmental attorney that returns to her hometown to determine whether a plastics company has been dumping chemicals in the local reservoir that the local residents use as their water source. I liked it initially but then the story line became way too far-fetched and dramatic I kept reading because I wanted to know how it ended but it elicited a lot of eye rolls from me, hence the 2-star rating.

The Things We Wish Were True by Marybeth Mayhew Whalen - 3 stars - I read this book as a palette cleanser after a series of heavier books. It's a light read that follows various people in a community in North Carolina over the course of a summer. The point of view changes so you get to see what is happening in their different, interconnected lives.

How was your January? Were you glad to see it go like I was??