Category: Monthly roundup

Monthly roundup

Monthly Roundup: April 2019

Stephanie4 Comments

Where did April go? (I feel like I start off every post saying something like that, but seriously, this year feels like it’s flying by.) Last month, I figured I would read fewer books once the weather started warming up, and so far, that’s been true. Of course, I spent a bunch of days being sick this month, and then spent several more cleaning up after being sick (have you ever seen pictures of, say, Buckingham Fountain or Niagara Falls? That’s pretty much what my daughter looked like for four days straight, except with vomit and not water. Picture that and you’ll have an idea of the amount of cleaning and laundry I had to do. Even when she made it to the bucket in time…she usually didn’t make it alllllllllllll the way in the bucket. Laundry, laundry, laundry). I’ve also been spending some time working outside in the yard that’s been badly neglected the past four years (due to my daughter being too young and not a great listener. I couldn’t trust that she wasn’t going to run off into the road while I yanked weeds!). I’ve been ripping out dead and unsightly plants and s.l.o.w.l.y. moving wagonful after wagonful of rocks from in front of my house to behind my yard. When that’s done, the area will look nice, but I’ve got a start on it! However, it does eat up my reading time, so BOO to that.

Let’s start this recap party with a list of all the things I’ve read this month!

Books I read in April 2019

1. Janesville: An American Story by Amy Goldstein

2. Flocks by L. Nichols

3. Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator by Roald Dahl (no review; I read this out loud to my daughter)

4. Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman

5. River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey

6. To Kiss the Blarney Stone by Kate Curry

7. Accidental Jesus Freak: One Woman’s Journey From Fundamentalism to Freedom by Amber Lea Starfire

8. Circling the Sun by Paula McLain

9. Ahimsa by Supriya Kelkar

10. Summer of the Mariposas by Guadalupe Garcia McCall

11. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl (no review, I read this out loud to my daughter)

12. The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq by Dunya Mikhail

13. Beezus and Ramona by Beverly Cleary (no review, I read this out loud to my daughter, who finally understands why I call her Ramona all the time)

14. Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing- A PEN American Center Prize Anthology, edited by Bell Gale Chevigny

15. Chasers of the Light: Poems From the Typewriter Series by Tyler Knott Gregson

16. The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World by Sarah Weinman

17. They Come At Night by Nick Clausen

18. Ramona the Pest by Beverly Cleary (no review, read out loud to my daughter)

19. Jesse’s Girl by Tara September

20. Rabbit-Proof Fence: The True Story of One of the Greatest Escapes of All Time by Doris Pilkington (review to come)

21. Watched By Ancestors: An Australian Family in Papua New Guinea by Kathy Golski (review to come)

Not too bad! Poetry, fascinating nonfiction, thought-provoking middle grade and adult fiction, plenty of new-to-me authors, and some childhood rereads that I was able to share with my daughter (who both adores Ramona Quimby and is horrified by her behavior…which mirrors my daughter’s behavior SO often!). The numbers are okay, but in this list are two novellas, a bunch of children’s books, a slim volume of poetry…yup, my reading definitely slowed down this month!

Book Challenges Update

I’m closing in on completing Book Riot’s 2019 Read Harder Challenge! I blasted through a ton of books from that this month, and here’s what my list looks like now.

Three books left! I’m working on the cozy mystery right now, my library has a copy of a novel by a trans author, and then I’ll pick out a humor book and be done!

I completed some tasks from Modern Mrs. Darcy’s 2019 Reading Challenge this month as well. I finally read Watched by Ancestors: An Australian Family in Papua New Guinea by Kathy Golski (review to come). This came to me via my friend Sandy, who read and recommended it to me (and then sent me her copy! Thank you again, Sandy!), so I’m counting that as task #4, a book recommended by someone with great taste. 🙂 And as for a book published before I was born, I’m counting Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator by Roald Dahl, which I read aloud to my daughter. Bonus points because I never finished this one as a kid (probably because it wasn’t one of Dahl’s best). Here’s what my challenge looks like now:

Three more and I’ll have completed this as well! 🙂 For someone who used to start challenges and then immediately fizzle out, I’m pretty proud of myself. 🙂

Books I Acquired in April 2019

I won the copy of The Woman in the Dark by Vanessa Savage from a giveaway at Always with a Book. Thanks, Kristin! (Okay, technically, I won in March, but the book arrived in April, so I waited to count it for this month.) And I picked up a copy of Purity by Jackson Pearce when I stopped by the thrift store in search of books for my daughter’s birthday. Their children’s’ books, YA included, are ten cents apiece, so I figured for that price, it was worth it!

OMG!!!! I’m a huge fan of the Dummies books, along with the Complete Idiots Guides. They give great overviews of broad topics, and I always enjoy delving into something new. I found this copy of Opera for Dummies at a church yard sale- it even has the CD!- and I could NOT be more excited about this. I enjoy listening to opera, but I don’t know much about it, so between this and my copy of 100 Great Operas and Their Stories (which has been on my shelf for a while), I’m ready to learn! The copy is pristine and only set me back fifty cents. 🙂

Bookish Things I Did in April 2019

My library takes part in the Reading Without Walls challenge every year. The challenge is to read a book about someone who doesn’t look like you or live like you, read a book about a topic you didn’t know much about, or read a book in a format you don’t normally read. I figured my reading of The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq by Dunya Mikhail counted for this, filled out the paper (which looked like a brick), and turned it in to the librarian at Adult Services. I’m eligible to win a raffle prize of some sort, but really, I’m just glad that my brick/paper will be displayed as another sign in the fight against ignorance. 🙂

Book discussion group this month covered Circling the Sun by Paula McLain, and as I predicted, we did have a great discussion. Overall, everyone seemed to like the book. One woman enjoyed the horse racing aspect of it, because it reminded her of visiting the racetracks with her father when she was younger, while others of us were more like, “Wow…that’s a lot of horses in there…” We were all surprised and fascinated to learn how Gatsby-esque colonial Kenyan society was during this era. I’m sad I’ll be missing next month’s meeting (my son has a choir concert scheduled that night); they’ll be reading The Last Castle: The Epic Story of Love, Loss, and American Royalty in the Nation’s Largest Home by Denise Kiernan. Whatever they’re reading in June hasn’t been announced yet, so I’m looking forward to that!

On April 23rd, @the_WriteReads featured my post on books I love about Mister Rogers as their review of the day. I’m really proud of this post and am happy that @the_WriteReads helped me to spread the Mister Rogers love a little. 🙂

I also logged my 2000th book on Goodreads!

Current Podcast Love

I’ve finished up listening to all the back episodes of All the Books! from Book Riot! This is such a great podcast, where Liberty Hardy, super reader extraordinaire, and her rotating cast of fellow Book Rioters choose several of the week’s new releases to gush over. I’ve read a bunch of books I learned about from this podcast and added plenty more to my TBR. If you’re looking for something book-related to listen to, you really can’t go wrong with All the Books!

I floundered for a few days before finally settling on my next bookish listen, and it’s:

I listened to my first episode of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books yesterday, and OMG WHERE HAS THIS BEEN ALL MY LIFE? *sobs with joy* I LOVE these women. They’re smart, funny, they talk about books in a way that speaks to my soul (swear words! Feminism! Ridiculous euphemisms for genitalia! Picking apart romance novels for the good and the laughable!). I am in LOVE and I totally want to ignore all the rest of my life and binge all 347 episodes that I have left.

Real Life Stuff

We started out the month recovering from my daughter getting a case of the pukes, only to have both of us throwing up mid-month. NOT my favorite thing. Wedged in around both of us looking like the little girl from the Exorcist, we attended my daughter’s kindergarten orientation. She’ll go to full-day kindergarten in the fall and we’re both pretty excited! (I’ll miss her, but she’s a tornado wrapped in a hurricane wrapped in an earthquake, so it’ll be nice to have some time when I’m NOT on damage control.) Her school is within walking distance, so when it’s warm out, we’ll be able to get some exercise, and her classroom is suuuuuuuuuuper cute. They even hatch chicks in the spring, and they have the best little reading corner with a TON of books. I kind of want to go back to kindergarten…

My daughter turned 5! Seems like just yesterday I was throwing up in the bathroom…and the kitchen…and the living room…and dry-heaving in Walmart (pregnancy and I are NOT friends), and now she’s half a decade old. For the third year in a row, her chosen birthday activity was to eat lunch at Ikea (what can I say? She’s both a creature of habit and a weird little kid :D). We got really lucky in regards to her party, because we had a bounce house scheduled for Sunday, but Saturday, it snowed the entire day because apparently we live in Siberia now? Oh, Midwestern spring, what the actual. Sunday turned out to be lovely, in the upper 50’s with full sun, so the snow was mostly melted by party time and all the kids bounced to their hearts’ content.

My son’s school put on stage performances of Romeo and Juliet, and it was incredible. I say this every time, but his school’s Fine Arts Department is phenomenal, and I’m blown away at every musical and stage performance we attend.

Aaaaaaaaaaaand my cat brought me a mouse. A live one, small, only about two inches long. (Which I prefer over the one she killed in the basement and left for me to find via its overpowering odor who-knows-how-many days later.) It lives somewhere outside now, far away from the house. Here’s a picture of the mouse after I caught it in the plastic container that lives next to my chair in the living room. This plastic container is known as ‘the mouse bucket,’ which lets you know that this is not my first mouse gift rodeo. Thanks, cat…

And that was my April! Summer reading starts at my library on May 1st and you know I’ll be there to sign up. 🙂 I’m going to finish off these two challenges in May and I’m looking forward to that. My daughter will finish up preschool, my son will wind up his junior year of high school (NO! GET BACK ON THE COUCH AND WATCH BLUE’S CLUES WITH ME, THIS IS NOT ALLOWED), and I have a book sale to go to this upcoming weekend. And maybe, MAYBE it will finally stop snowing, but who knows around here. 😀

Happy reading in May! How was your April?

Monthly roundup

Monthly Roundup: March 2019

Stephanie25 Comments

Whew! I really didn’t think I could possibly outdo last month’s reading, but my Amazing Reading Streak of Amazingness (yeah, I’m going there) continued this past month. It didn’t hurt my reading binge that it’s still been ridiculously cold here and all I’ve wanted to do was huddle under a pile of seventy-three blankets and read while shivering away. (Don’t get me wrong; when it’s hot, all I’m going to want to do is sweat half to death and read, but I just don’t want to move at ALL when I’m so chilly! Doing anything that involves getting out of my cozy chair is an exercise in fortitude, I’m telling you.)

So let’s get this party started, with a recap of everything I’ve read this past month!

Books I Read in March 2019

1. Ghosted by Rosie Walsh

2. Bread Is Gold by Massimo Bottura and Friends

3. When Dimple Met Rishi- Sandhya Menon

4. Call Numbers by Syntell Smith

5. Welcome to Halcyon (Dead Mawl #1) by S.G. Tasz

6. Every Breath by Nicholas Sparks

7. Daughter of Gloriavale: My Life in a Religious Cult by Lilia Tarawa

8. Duped: Double Lives, False Identities, and the Con Man I Almost Married by Abby Ellin

9. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

10. Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay

11. The Truth Book: Escaping a Childhood of Abuse Among Jehovah’s Witnesses by Joy Castro

12. I Hear the Sunspot by Yuki Fumino

13. An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace by Tamar Adler

14. Quiver by Julia Watts

15. Apocalypse Chow: How to Eat Well When the Power Goes Out- Jon Robertson and Robin Robertson

16. Make Do and Mend: Keeping Family and Home Afloat on War Rations (foreword by Jill Norman)

17. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl (no review for this one, I read it out loud to my daughter at bedtime, and we watched the movie with Johnny Depp this past weekend, when she had a stomach virus)

18. The Cider House Rules by John Irving

19. On the Come Up by Angie Thomas

20. Lessons in Letting Go by Allison Janda

21. Bell-Bottom Gypsy: A Jessie Morgan Novel by Maggie Plummer

Phew! That was a lot of reading! And so. many. great. books!!!

Book Challenges Update

I haven’t made any progress with the Modern Mrs. Darcy 2019 Reading Challenge this month, so it still looks the same as last month.

But I’ve done pretty well when it comes to Book Riot’s 2019 Read Harder Challenge, ticking off six categories. Here’s what my challenge looks like now.

Books I Acquired in March 2019

Aren’t they lovely? *wipes away a tear*

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley came from a thrift shop and is my pick for Book Riot’s 2019 Read Harder Challenge: Cozy Mystery. Once again, something that’s totally outside my normal reading genres, so this should be interesting.

And speaking of Book Riot, How to Make Friends With the Dark by Kathleen Glasgow came from a Book Riot giveaway! Totally made my day when I got the email letting me know I won. Thank you, Book Riot!!!

And the other book…see below.

Bookish Things I Did in March 2019

One of the libraries around here has a book sale every few months, and of course I had to stop by! It was there that I acquired Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlanksky. Two of my friends on Goodreads have given this five stars, so I’m expecting to enjoy this as well. I also grabbed a copy of Where’s Mom Now That I Need Her?: Surviving Away From Home by Kent P. Frandsen, to give my son for his birthday. He’ll be 17 and (sniff!) it’s time to start thinking of the days in the future when he’ll be off on his own.

I also made it to my library’s book discussion group again! This month, we discussed The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware. I seemed to enjoy it more than everyone else did, but as I said in my review, I don’t often read in this genre, so it may be that their more experienced tastes found flaws that I didn’t. (I do have to say, though, some of the criticisms of Lo stung a little bit, since I was able to identify with her anxiety so strongly! Those of us with anxiety aren’t trying to be annoying, we promise…)

Current Podcast Love

I’m still adoring All the Books! from Book Riot (lot of Book Riot love in this post, huh? I seriously adore them). I’m somewhere around the 130’s (out of 200), so I still have a ways to go before I can catch up their episodes about the newest releases. Liberty’s enthusiasm for reading is so infectious, and Rebecca has such an informative manner about her when she’s talking about the books she loves (she and I have really similar tastes, so I really look forward to hearing about her picks and have added several to my TBR list). I’ll be sad when I’m done with all the back episodes! (Image borrowed from Book Riot’s website for the express purpose of being eye-catching and advertising the fact that they have a bahzillion awesome podcasts. Go check them out!!!)

Real Life Stuff

Busy month ’round these parts! We registered my daughter for kindergarten; we’ll go for orientation in early April. Seems like just yesterday I was miserable and pregnant with her (pregnancy and I are NOT friends). My cat scared the crap out of me with her constant vomiting, which required a vet trip (she’s fine and is currently covering my pillow with fur during her day-long nap, and I let her because I love her that much). I attended a play with my son, and attended one of my son’s choir concerts- seriously, his school is AMAZING when it comes to their Fine Arts program. Every production is practically professional (they did Cats a few years ago and you wouldn’t have any idea that this wasn’t some big name theater. They’re THAT good). Still cold here, so nothing has been planted yet in our Lazy Backyard Garden, nor have I been able to attack the jungle of weeds and overgrowth that is my backyard, but that’s also in part thanks to the flare-up of dyshidrotic eczema I’ve been experiencing on my feet. It’s slowing down now, but at one point we counted and I had 45 blisters on my feet (which made wearing shoes very, very painful- but not wearing shoes hurt as well). We ended the month with my daughter puking on pretty much every surface of the house, which resulted in so. much. laundry (which in turn killed my lower back). Bodies are so fun, aren’t they?

In good news, we did have a resolution of a major problem that has been causing a LOT of stress for the past year. I don’t want to go into details, because it’s a seriously long story, but it involved bank card fraud with the account where my son’s college money is stored. YEAH. That was about as fun as you’d might expect (especially since the company wasn’t exactly helpful about it), but everything was resolved in our favor mid-month, FINALLY, and I am so, SO thankful for it, because it was for a LOT of money (like, so much that it could potentially cover all of my son’s community college costs. THAT much money). So hurray! 🙂

Looking forward to April, I’ve got a stack of library books to get to (four more books for that Read Harder Challenge!), and several review books that sound pretty awesome. I still haven’t started the book for my library book discussion group either, and the meeting is on the 18th, so I need to get on that! My daughter will turn five, my son’s school is putting on a performance of Romeo and Juliet, and hopefully the weather will start to warm up so I can stop shivering!

How was your March??? What are you looking forward to in April?

Book Riot 2019 Read Harder Challenge · mmd challenge 2019 · Monthly roundup

Monthly roundup: February 2019

Stephanie13 Comments

I swear, the last time I looked up, it was January. And now February’s gone. Whaaaaaaaaat???

Actually, I know what happened. I spent the entire month with my face shoved in various books.

Which isn’t a bad thing, lemme tell you.

It’s been another great month of reading around these parts, and a good month for all things bookish in general. I finished listening to all the back episodes of the What Should I Read Next podcast, and in my search for what I should listen to next, I stumbled upon All the Books, a weekly podcast from BookRiot about new book releases, hosted by the always funny Liberty and Rebecca. I’m super in love with this podcast and have been listening when I try to fall asleep, and when I’m in the kitchen getting dinner together. Be warned, though, your TBR list will explode like a fire hydrant that’s been knocked over by a Mack truck. (And for more TBR-ruining fun, BookRiot has a TON of podcasts with hours upon hours of back episodes. Enjoy!)

And with that, here’s a recap of all the amazing books I plowed through during the bitter cold of February 2019.

1. Humming Whispers- Angela Johnson

2. Assimilate or Go Home: Notes from a Failed Missionary- D.L. Mayfield

3. My Favorite Half-Night Stand- Christina Lauren

4. Josh and Hazel’s Guide to Not Dating- Christina Lauren

5. Heretics Anonymous- Katie Henry

6. The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story- Hyeonseo Lee with David John

7. Bear Town- Fredrik Backman

8. Hamartia- Raquel Rich

9. Ration Book Cookery- Gill Corbishley

10. Dear Fahrenheit 451: Love and Heartbreak in the Stacks- Annie Spence

11. Called to Be Amish: My Journey from Head Majorette to the Old Order- Marlene C. Miller

12. Paperback Crush: The Totally Radical History of ’80s and ’90s Teen Fiction- Gabrielle Moss

13. All We Ever Wanted- Emily Giffin

14. Lucy and Linh- Alice Pung

15. Destiny’s Embrace- Beverly Jenkins

16. Hidden Figures: The Untold True Story of Four African-American Women Who Helped Launch Our Nation Into Space- Margot Lee Shetterly

17. Time Zero- Carolyn Cohagan

18. We’ll Fly Away- Bryan Bliss

19. The Woman in Cabin 10- Ruth Ware

We also had a discussion on all the strange and interesting places we’ve read!

I may be a tad bit obsessive about reading lately, eh? But hey, it’s been cold out. All the better to huddle under my heated throw and turn page after page after page.

My February reading felt amazing. Compared with last month, I have a more diverse group of authors, which is definitely something I’m aiming for. And I’ve got a good mix of fiction and nonfiction, which is awesome. Only three of these books came from my Goodreads TBR list, which is fine by me; one was a review copy; several were books I’d been meaning to read for a while; quite a few were new-to-me authors.

I also attended my first library book discussion group meeting! I was a nervous wreck (my anxiety knows no bounds and absolutely extends to social situations. Part of going to this group is my attempt to get more social interaction outside of the people I’ve married and/or have given birth to, which has seriously been like 99.99999999% of my social interaction for, oh, about the last twenty years or so. Not exactly healthy, even for an introvert), but it was AWESOME. I engaged in so much book banter and impressed them with the binder in which I take copious notes on everything I read (which prompted the librarian to jokingly offer me a job!). I’m so happy that I pushed my boundaries and joined the group; I already can’t wait for next month and am lamenting the fact that I’ll miss May’s meeting, since my son has a choir concert that night.

So how’d I do for challenges?

As far as the Modern Mrs. Darcy 2019 Reading Challenge, I’m two-thirds of the way through ‘Three books by the same author;’ one more Christina Lauren and I’ll be able to cross that one off fully. And I managed to tackle ‘A book in translation,’ which I expected to be a lot more difficult (having had some weird experiences with books in translation in the past); Bear Town was amazing. So here’s where I’m at with this list:

I’ve already managed to cross five items off the list of Book Riot’s 2019 Read Harder Challenge, which is pretty huge for me! #12, a book in which an animal or inanimate object is a point-of-view character, has been covered by reading The Adventures of a South Pole Pig by Chris Kurtz last month, and #9, a book published prior to January 1, 2019 with fewer than 100 reviews on Goodreads, was covered by reading Hamartia by Raquel Rich. #6, a book by an author of color set in or about space, was fulfilled by finally reading Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly, and #16, an historical romance by an author of color, was fulfilled by reading Destiny’s Embrace by Beverly Jenkins. We’ll Fly Away by Bryan Bliss, which absolutely gutted me, counts as #1, an epistolary novel or collection of letters. Not bad for a challenge I only decided to take up on February 21st. And here’s my Book Riot list:

Onward to great reading in March!

How was your February???

mmd challenge 2019 · Monthly roundup

Monthly roundup: January 2019

Stephanie10 Comments

January is almost always a good month for reading for me. It’s cold, we’re stuck in the house, and my Goodreads yearly reading challenge tally has been set back to zero (nooooooooooooooooooo!). This year is no different- I breezed through thirteen books this month (although two years ago, I managed to tackle twenty or twenty-one. Yay, stress-reading!), but something feels different. Reading feels really exciting these days.

And that excitement stems from the amazing What Should I Read Next podcast. I’m new to podcasts, only having really recently started listening to them. What Should I Read Next is my second podcast; first was Let’s Talk About Sects, which is great if you like weirdo cults and extremist groups. I listen sometimes when I’m making dinner, but more often, I turn the podcast on when I get into bed. I used to listen to BBC radio as I was falling asleep; there’s something very calming and soothing about the British accent and the hushed vocal tones that made it easy for me to pass right out (and coming from someone who has struggled with insomnia on and off her whole life, this is huge). But after the 2016 elections, the news just got so awful that I could no longer relax enough to fall asleep. I loved the idea of podcasts, but the podcast apps I tried would stop playing after one podcast, and so I just gave up, until I discovered Podbean. Podbean plays the podcasts from newer to older or older to newer, without stopping, which was just what I was looking for.

What Should I Read Next has revamped my reading life entirely. Reading is such a solitary activity that it sometimes feels we’re the only ones doing it. But Anne Bogel’s podcast has helped me to feel not so alone in my constant reading. Other people are just as obsessed with turning pages and cramming the world into their head via the latest bestseller as I am, and that alone has sparked some serious joy for me. If you’ve never listened to this podcast, I can’t recommend it enough. I often fall asleep long before the end, but I do go back and listen to what I’ve missed!

So I’ve had a great reading month. I’ve spent the last two years trying to read down my skyscraper-high Want To Read list on Goodreads, which has meant that I’ve plowed through a metric book-ton of nonfiction (I started at 332 books; with a crapload of reading under my belt, cleaning up the list to remove a few things that no longer interested me, and putting a few other items not available to me via the library into my Bookmarks for later, it’s down to 97 books!). I’m now totally jazzed about reading more fiction and even trying some books in new-to-me genres. This is going to be a great year for reading!

Here’s a list of all the things I read this past month.

1. Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity- Emily Matchar

2. The Newcomers: Finding Refuge, Friendship, and Hope in an American Classroom- Helen Thorpe

3. Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea- Barbara Demick

4. This Dark World: A Memoir of Salvation Found and Lost- Carolyn S. Briggs

5. The Cult Files: True Stories from the Extreme Edges of Religious Belief- Chris Mikul

6. The Magdalen Girls- V.S. Alexander

7. Movie Star by Lizzie Pepper- Hilary Liftin

8. Simplicity Parenting: Using the Extraordinary Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier, and More Secure Kids- Kim John Payne with Lisa M. Ross

9. Switch and Bait- Ricki Schultz

10. A Crazy Kind of Love- Mary Ann Marlowe

11. The Adventures of a South Pole Pig: A Novel of Snow and Courage- Chris Kurtz

12. How Does It Feel to Be Unwanted?: Stories of Resistance and Resilience from Mexicans Living in the United States- Eileen Truax

13. I’ll Be There For You: The One about Friends– Kelsey Miller

So how did I do for the Modern Mrs. Darcy 2019 Reading Challenge this month?

A book I’ve been meaning to read: The Cult Files came from my Goodreads list, so I can cross that one off!

I’m always fascinated by why people leave religious groups, so Carolyn S. Briggs’s This Dark World fits that category.

Mary Ann Marlowe was a new-to-me author; I’m glad I stumbled upon her at the library.

And you know, I’ve put some thought into it, and I’m going to count The Adventures of a South Pole Pig for the genre outside my comfort zone. I still really don’t care much for animal stories, but this really was adorable and I’m glad I took the chance. I’m still planning on challenging myself in other genres this year. Probably no more animal stories, though. 😉

Four categories crossed off in a month isn’t half bad. We’ll see how long it takes me to get to the rest!

I don’t think I could even pick a favorite out of these if I tried. Reading was such a joy for me this month, both thanks to Anne Bogel’s podcast and the authors who wrote these amazing books. I can only hope the rest of the year goes as swimmingly (begone with you, evil lurking reading slumps!).

How did your reading month go? Do you find January to be a great month of reading, or do you get hit with a nasty case of the winter blahs? What have you read and loved this month?