December 2023: Books I Read Last Month

Written by Graeme

Hi everyone,

November was a bit of a weak month for me for reading due to two trips.

I first went to San Francisco for a 5 days, and then Covington, Georgia for a week. My wife and daughter wanted to go to the Vampire Diaries convention there. I’ve never watched the TV show, nor read the book series by L.J. Smith, but I still had a lot of fun there. Everyone was super nice and I thought the panels were super interesting.

Here’s what I read:

The Exchange by John Grisham: The “sequel” to The Firm. No – it was not. Look – don’t go into this one expecting a true sequel because it isn’t. It’s a pity it is billed as that because it’s an enjoyable if non-thrilling story. But it’s Mitch McDeere in name only. I generally enjoyed this regardless, but it wasn’t a true sequel.

The Coworker by Freida McFadden: A solid standalone thriller by Freida and the usual sort of book that I just inhale. Read this very fast. I had one issue with it where they gave this big hint to the twist that I thought was a red herring – but then it turned out that it was not. It was really obvious, and took the book down a couple of notches due to that.

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy: Solid book even if it is hard to read Cormac’s style sometimes. What I liked about this is it made the movie a whole lot better. I already enjoyed the movie when I watched it years ago, but when I watched it again after reading the book I enjoyed it a heck of a lot more.