New for 2019 – a monthly wrap up – we LOVE reading other people’s round ups of their month of reading, so we thought we’d share what we’ve loved and not-so-loved this month in our bookish world.

First up, what have we read?

Becca:

Third Watch by Robert Dugoni 🌟🌟🌟🌟

The Twelve Dice of Christmas by Gail Oust 🌟🌟🌟

The Red Dahlia by Lynda La Plante 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Gone by Midnight by Candice Fox 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Kate:

Kate has also finally got her act together and has published the below three book reviews this month- all books that she really enjoyed reading at the end of 2018.

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 To all the boys I loved before (trilogy) by Jenny Han

🌟🌟🌟🌟All souls – A discovery of witches by Deborah Harkness

🌟🌟🌟🌟 All souls – Shadow of night by Deborah Harkness

Books Kate has read this month, on the other hand, include:

🌟🌟🌟Wardrobe Wisdom by Alicia Healy

🌟🌟🌟🌟Glass Sword by Victoria Aveyard

🌟🌟🌟🌟An Edited Life by Anna Newton

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 Queen Of Air And Darkness by Cassandra Clare

🌟🌟🌟🌟 The Cruel Prince by Holly Black

We generally don’t find that we read books we don’t like, so our star ratings will probably not go below 3 🌟 . We don’t know if this is because we are too safe in our reading choices – whereby we pick from a genre we know we do like and hover around authors we have read before. Perhaps we need to read more outside our comfort zones? Here are some stats from this month:

Authors we’ve read before –    Becca: 3/4          Kate: 2/5

Genres –    Becca: Crime 3/4 Christmas 1/4         

  Kate: YA Fantasy 3/5 Lifestyle 2/5

The Beautiful Book Break Book Swap is a way we have tried to get around this comfort. See our post and find out what happened when Kate read one of Becca’s favourite thriller books, and Becca attempted one of Kate’s chic lits. 

💖What was the best book we read this month?💖

Obviously, because our reading preferences differ so much, it would be hard to pick a favourite book between us. So we thought we’d fight it out! 🙂  Not physical fistycuffs, but with our words…  

K: An Edited Life by Anna Newton- I’ve been a long time fan of Anna’s both in her current incarnation as the Anna Edit and her previous Vivianna Does Make-up. So when I saw that this book was coming out I was very excited and immediately pre-ordered it. The aim of this book is to help you simplify and edit your life for less stress and less forgetting things. As I think Becca will agree, I can be very unorganised and I can very easily get worked up and stressed out. It’s too soon to say if this book will help me be more organised and less of a ‘hot mess’ as the kids are calling it, but even just reading the book helped me feel more chilled and ‘grown up’  just by reading it. I don’t think Becca needs to take any tips from Anna as she is already very much like Anna but I will be recommending this books to other friends who are as scatterbrained as me- trust me it’s a wonder I am still alive sometimes with the blonde things I do 🤦🏼‍♀️

B: The Red Dahlia was my favourite read this month, only because it was a book I’d been eagerly awaiting since I read the first in the series, and it turned out to be as good as I’d hoped. When you have a favourite book, it can be dangerous to read a sequel, because there is a chance it is going to be terrible and ruin your thoughts on the one you like so much. That didn’t happen and thus my love of Lynda La Plante and DI Anna Travis continues…

Which do you think deserves to be the winner this month? We’ll see which book gets the most love and let you know next month.

📣Blog news📣

Do we have any blog news for you? Well, excitingly we do. Aside from our new monthly wrap ups (which we have yet to know if they are a success or not!) we have got plenty of other things coming up this year, here are a couple of them: 

✳️We are currently involved in a reading challenge, being hosted by Ginger mom and co, called The 2019 A-Z reading challenge. For each letter of the alphabet we are going to read one book each. Go check out our post to see how far we’ve got. 

✳️We have chosen our February book challenge on Instagram, so if any one wants to join in with that, come find us at thebeautifulbookbreak.

✳️Upcoming bookish trips: The Beautiful Book Break are going to Manchester! 🙂 We are going to see Cassandra Clare and Holly Black do a talk, and we will let you know how it goes.

So that’s our January Wrap Up. What do you think? Shall we do it again next month? Thanks for reading everyone, bring on a new month of bookish delights!