The new year was off to a promising start at least reading-wise, but not so much sharing-wise as this post is coming towards the end of February! Travel to Spain mid-month put that plan on pause.
In 2026, I look forward to doing another lap around the world. I have tweaked my world map to isolate the Nordic countries from Western Europe. There are now 12 regions and I’ll aim to visit at least one a month. View the 2026 edition of my Read Around the World challenge.
My Nordic Literature Reading Challenge continues slowly since there is no time constraint. This year I aim to read at least one book for each of the Nordic countries to make some more substantial progress.
I was hoping to commit to another reading challenge beyond my regular annual Read Around the World and Nordic literature challenges, but I haven’t had time to make those plans (yet).
Have you read any of the books I read in January?
The Last Party (DC Morgan #1) by Clare Mackintosh (2022) 📖
Narrated by Chloe Angharad Davies 🎧
This small town, slow burn murder mystery took me to the borderlands between England and Wales during present day. A new development of vacation homes has been built along the lake, and the wealthy newcomers have invited the local folk to a lavish new year’s eve party. The next morning the host is found dead in the lake. A local Welsh detective has to collaborate with an English detective in a case where practically all are suspects and secrets abound. I really enjoyed the setting and camaraderie between the detectives, and the story was satisfyingly deep and complex. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
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Read Around the World: Western Europe (United Kingdom)
Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy (2020)
Narrated by Barrie Kreinik 🎧
I really enjoyed this book and wonder if it might even have been a 5-star read for me if I had read it instead of listened to it. Then I would have picked up on the formatting that was not obvious in the audiobook but affected the listening experience a little (italics and section breaks). It’s subtly set in the very near future when the world is experiencing a climate-driven extinction crisis and most wild animal life has vanished. Franny is on a mission to follow the last Arctic terns on their migration from Greenland to Antarctica. Her mysterious past and what led her to this journey is slowly revealed through jumps back in time. It’s not a thriller but the suspense grew the closer she got to Antarctica.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Read Around the World: Arctic & Antarctic
The Water Rituals (The White City Trilogy #2) by Eva García Sáenz (2017)
Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor (2021) 📖
A few years ago, I read the first installment of this trilogy and really liked it. Once again, I was transported to the Basque Country in northern Spain, immersed in a complex investigation centered on ritualistic murders rooted in the area’s history from long ago, both elements that really intrigued me. However, I was turned off by the main character’s romance with his superior and how unrealistically his muteness from an incident in the first book was handled. Over time that did improve as he healed so I finished the book on a positive note in that sense and am openminded to finishing the trilogy. ⭐️⭐
- Read Around the World: Western Europe (Spain)
The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo (2024)
Narrated by the author 🎧
I loved the author’s The Night Tiger (Reading Lately, July 2019) and her latest has been on my radar since it was published. It’s a mystery that takes place in Manchuria in Northeast China in 1908. The storyline alternates between Bao, who is investigating the death of a courtesan found frozen in a doorway, and Snow, a fox in the form of a woman, who is on a quest to avenge the death of her child. Slowly but surely the storylines merge. I really enjoyed this mix of genres with its insight into the East Asian cultures and folklore of the time. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Read Around the World: Central & East Asia (China)
What have you been reading lately?
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“Kim Leine’s great epic, ‘Profeterne i Evighedsfjorden’, is the story of the Danish priest Morten Falck who travels to Greenland at the end of the 1700s. Through this unfolds the tale of Danish colonisation as a completely crazy and meaningless project. The Danish officials try to keep hold of power and customs but are plagued by homesickness and resignation. Grief and anger smoulders amongst the Greenlanders, and some of them seize Christianity and the European ideas of freedom as an inspiration for rebellion against colonial power. But as well as being a critical, historical novel that reminds us of Denmark’s problematic past as a colonial power, the book is also a depiction of dirt as mankind’s basic element.”
“Her [Sofi Oksanen’s] third novel, Purge, is about the Soviet occupation of Estonia and its consequences. Unfortunately, it is also very much of current interest with its stories about human trafficking around the Baltic. The book’s two time levels are 1992 – one year after Estonia won its independence – and the 1940s – when tens of thousands of Estonians were deported to Siberia and agriculture was collectivised. On a summer morning in 1992, old Aliide Truu finds an exhausted and confused young woman in her vegetable garden. This Zara has been tricked away from her home in Vladivostok to work as a sex worker in Berlin. On the way to Tallinn where she was supposed to start selling her body to Finnish sex tourists, she manages to escape.”
“The Blue Fox is a novel about an Icelandic pastor and a fox hunt. Sjón makes use of the Icelandic folktale to tell his story. One of the principal characters is the pastor Baldur Skuggason. He has an evil, dark side to his character. Another key figure is the strange offspring of a cat and a fox following the story – Sjón’s style has elements of a very unique Icelandic sense of humour. The Blue Fox is a short novel with a few sections. Some pages only consist of a single written line, surrounded by large white surfaces calling to mind the Icelandic expanse. This concreteness can be said to balance on the line between prose and poetry. ‘Skugga-Baldur’ is also a contemporary novel which brings up some of today’s ethical questions. Are the weak, deformed babies with developmental disorders welcome in a world where they could have been discarded already prior to birth?”
“The Ice Palace is a novel with two 11-year-old girls as the protagonists: extrovert Siss and quiet, introvert Unn. The day after a meeting of the girls at which Unn revealed that she is carrying a dark secret, Unn travels to the ice palace. This is a huge ice formation which builds up at a waterfall in winter-time. As it turns out to be made up of several ice rooms, she walks into the palace. Unn is enthralled by the beauty of the rooms, but in the seventh room she loses her way and cannot find her way out. She freezes to death with Siss’s name on her lips. The novel concludes with the story of Siss’s life and her reaction to Unn’s death. Siss now becomes the quiet and lonely one. She goes into an inner ice palace until she is finally redeemed and can move on into adulthood with a profound insight.”
“Blackwater is a detective novel set in the town of Svartvattnet in Norrland. It depicts a woman from Stockholm, who moves in with her boyfriend in the town to work as a teacher in a commune. However, events revolve around a double homicide that remains unsolved and the consequences of this trauma for the people in the town. Kerstin Ekman’s story invites many reading styles; it can be read as a Bildungsroman, as a critical analysis of gender roles, as a mythical story with symbolic elements, but, of course, also simply as a thrilling detective novel.”