I think I may have hit on a new labour-saving idea for titling my posts. It saves a lot of thinking, though it probably won’t seem such a brilliant solution by the time we get to the far end of January.

I have now also reached Number 2 in my reading target, having just completed Death of Yesterday ,a  Hamish Macbeth mystery by M. C. Beaton. It was formulaic, dull, and badly produced – the blurb on the jacket was so inaccurate that it could have belonged to another book. I’ve actually read it before, but didn’t realise after reading the summary. I did say, a couple of years ago, I wouldn’t be reading more of these, as the editing was so bad. What I didn’t tell you was that I’d read it the week we were away, just before lockdown, and I threw it away in the hotel bin. So badly edited.  I may be being unfair on M. C. Beaton, and am still quite fond of Agatha Raisin, but the books did go off at the end.

I’ve also finished The Haibun Journal (Issue 3.2). It has 61 pages of haibun, so it’s as long as some poetry books and I’m claiming it as an allowable book. I’m in it, so this is a biased view.

I started both of them on 31st December, but I’m counting them for this year. At the end of the year I won’t count anything that I haven’t finished. Just a word of warning – don’t look for any good books in my list, I tend to gravitate to murder mysteries and a variety of oddments. You will see what I mean as time goes on.

At the moment I am reading The Siege of Mr Khan’s Curry Shop by charliecountryboy. It’s a bit more heavyweight than my average reading and is going slowly. It is my downstairs book that I keep by my chair and dip into in a reflective manner, so it could take some time. So far I’m enjoying it, though nobody has been murdered and Scotland Yard  hasn’t been called in. Each to his own . . .

(The  link to the book is the Kindle edition – I have the paperback, but can’t find the link on Amazon).