I'm excited to start this book!

I can’t remember the last time I read a book that I truly enjoyed and wasn’t for a class. I’ve been so busy reading the things I have to, that when I actually pick up a book of my own choosing, its usually just a quick and simple one that I never actually enjoy but feel accomplished when I finish it. For the New Year, one of my goals is to make time for more pleasure reading and hopefully complete my Goodreads Reading Challenge for once. I am hoping that instead of going on my phone for hours before I fall asleep, I will use that time to read a book. And more recently, I’ve realized that my favorite time to read is in the morning before class. But in order for me to spend more time reading what I want, I had to find a book I want.

Last Saturday, January eleventh, my LLC took a trip to Trident Booksellers. In my building, I am a part of the Book Club LLC so our launch event was to get a book. After looking around for a while I found The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton. From the synopsis on the back, this book seems to be a “whodunnit” mystery. Evelyn Hardcastle was murdered and we as the reader, through the prospective of Aiden Bishop have to figure out who killed her. There is a bit of a twist though, in that the way Aiden is meant to figure out who killed her, is to inhabit 8 different witnesses and put the pieces together, reliving the day over and over again until he deduces who the killer is. It is set in mid 1900s London, in an extravagant estate all based around a dinner party. What drew me to the book was that it was described as a mix of an Agatha Christie novel with Downton Abbey, and for some reason that is exactly what I want to read at the moment.

I looked up the author, Stuart Turton and found out that this is his first novel! He has previously worked as a freelance travel journalist, and he described writing the book as “just awful”, which I found interesting and a bit amusing because I’m sure that it made it that much more satisfying to finally have the book published! The book was published by Sourcebooks, a publishing company that I have never heard of. Looking into them, though, I saw that they are an independent publishing company, who base their work on the idea that “Books. Change. Lives”. They have also published a lot of other books I have read, like This is Where it Ends by Marieke Nijkamp. It was cool to see that I was familiar with some of their other books, something I would not have found if I hadn’t looked into it further. Overall, this seems like a very interesting novel and I am excited to start reading it!