2019 Reading Challenge Reviews - Books 9 & 10

For 2019, I've decided to participate in the Pop Sugar Reading Challenge. (For more information check out my 2019 Reading Challenge Overview post, or look up the challenge on popsugar.com.) 

Here are my thoughts on the 9th and 10th books that I read.

Book 9: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

I gave this book 3/5 stars on Goodreads, but I think it really deserved 3.5 stars if half stars were an option on the app.

The prompt I chose for this was "A Book that has inspired a common phrase or idiom." 

I can't believe that it took me this long to finally read such a classic book. To be honest, I'm a little bit disappointed in myself. It wasn't a long book, and I've seen so many different movie versions, but just had never picked up a copy of the book to read.

Being that it was a classic, there were definitely parts where the writing was a little bit hard to get through, but once I got into it, there were parts that were so interesting that I didn't want to stop reading.

I think it's a great story (whether you watch all the movies or read the book) with an equally great moral about spending time and energy with the people in your life.

Book 10: Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

I gave this book 4/5 stars on Goodreads. 

The prompt I chose for this was "A book set in an abbey, cloister, monastery, vicarage, or convent." 

When I first got the reading challenge prompts and looked up books for this prompt, I immediately chose this book as one that I was going to read this year. However, at that time I didn't realize just how long the book is. However, as I got into the book, despite how long it was, I wanted to keep reading it and finished it surprisingly quick (much faster than some of the shorter books I've read this year).

There were a lot of characters, but I became deeply invested in finding out what happened to every one of them. Despite there being a large quantity of characters, their character development felt complete. I loved seeing each character grow as different things were thrown at them throughout the years of the book.

Finally, I love reading historical fiction, but the time frame covered in this book is one I hadn't known much about. It was fun to look up some of the actual history around the time frame as I was reading the book.