Happy Wednesday!

We have chosen new books in my two book circles! At work, we’re currently reading Pride and Prejudice of Jane Austen. We have very interesting discussions and I’m very tempted to buy an annotated version (one of the others are reading it) and it seems to be very interesting!

At my old university book circle, we’ve chosen the book A Long Petal of the Sea (Långt bortom havet / Largo pétalo de mar) by Isabel Allende. I’m listening to this one at the moment, we’re going to discuss it on Friday. I like Allende’s writing and find the book quite interesting.

I also fell down a list hole again.

I just realised that I can access a lot of magazines across the world through my library and then I was thinking of something Booksandlala said in one of her videos, planning to read books from a magazine ten years apart.

I’ve so far looked into the 2026 issues of Cosmopolitan (UK) and Elle (UK) to see which books are mentioned. I’ve limited it to the fiction books because it’s typically what I’m interested in reading. I picked out the books in the pictures, mentioned in interviews and if there was an adaptation talked about, I added it if it was mentioned based on novel or named the author of the book. So, for example if they just talked about Bridgerton but not mentioned that it was based on books or wrote Julia Quinn, I didn’t add it to the list.

For Cosmopolitan, I had access to two issues; 12 books were mentioned, I had previously read four and had of one them on my interested-to-read-radar since before. My average rating of the read books is 3,5 out of 5 stars.

For Elle (UK), I had access to three issues; 27 books were mentioned, I had previously read two and had two on my radar. My average rating of the read books is 3.

Do I want to tick them all off? No, but it’s a fun way to browse for books! there are a couple of books that I want to look more closely at to see if I want to read them. And of course there is a little challenge waiting in the back of my head where I want to find the magazine that is most in line with my reading taste. I’m not interested in fashion or beauty tips that are the main topics of these magazines but I thought we would get a different set of mentioned books here than from literary critics in other magazines.

The books were mostly different, both magazines mentioned Yesteryear, a book by Caro Claire Burke that I recently read.

I was pleasantly surprised that they had so many books mentioned because when I tried to do the same in a Swedish women’s magazine that I found at the library, I think they mentioned one or two books in two issues. Quite disappointing. I don’t know if Cosmopolitan and Elle do Swedish issues as well, and if the contents is different or just translated, it would be interesting to compare the books if they are different. For this I think I’ll have to travel to the biggest library in down to get a chance to figure it out.

What are you currently reading? And where do you find new books to read?