January was full of un-packing, catching up with friends too sick to celebrate the holidays last month, and tackling all of the work that everyone agreed could wait until the new year, so I’ll admit it was a strange month of reading. Instead of my usual variety I have only three entries:

The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman was first up. What happens when you finish a fun, engaging mystery that pulls you out of a holiday funk like The Thursday Murder Club and can’t figure out what to read next? Be grateful it’s a series of course. After poking around my shelves trying to switch genres and worlds I realized I didn’t want to go anywhere else just yet so I picked up the second novel. Thankfully it’s just as good as the first providing a great new mystery and more time with and development of our core characters. I’m not going to read number three just yet though… I imagine there’s a Sunday in my future where I’ll really need it and be glad I saved it.

After half starting three other books (one non-fiction, one short story collection, and one folklore) I turned back to mysteries with Ian Sansom’s The Case of the Missing Books. Sansom’s detective character, Mr. Israel Armstrong, is the opposite of the Thursday Murder Club members – he’s young, not very charming, and a bit… useless. He arrives in rural Ireland ready for his first post as a librarian only to discover the library is closed and all of the books are missing. This is a dark comedy of errors and Israel is your classic city outsider in a rural community which should be a great setup but the book’s pacing didn’t quite work for me. His harried introduction to the town takes most of the book (the first four chapters alone are dedicated to his disastrous first evening in town). The second half speeds things up and solves our mystery but I will say I was able to immediately guess the ending based on a very clear clue left at the very start of the novel. Now I believe that is because the reader was supposed to pick up what Israel missed and the main point of the novel was about Israel connecting with his new community rather than solving the mystery, but it did make me miss the twists and turns of a usual detective story.

The final book of the month was an audiobook that I have been listening to for a while now but thanks to my literary restlessness got more of my time this month. One Hundred Saturdays by Michael Frank is a truly beautiful, heartbreaking listen (and I do think you should listen). It’s the story of Stella Levi who grew up in the Jewish community in Rhodes, survived the Holocaust, and then built a new life in Italy and America after the war. This is part memoir, part oral history of a culture eliminated by the war (which is why I think the audiobook format works so well). Sometimes Frank’s retelling is interrupted by Stella’s voice – often singing – and you realize something has been preserved that would otherwise have been lost. Some stories are meant to be told aloud and this is one of them.