Rearview Mirror // March 2020

Look at this!!  I’m actually getting caught up!!  I finally finished March’s reviews, so now it’s time to look at the reading month… and maybe someday I’ll be caught up enough to get back to discussing books more in-depth!

Favorite March Read

So pretty much any time there’s an Arthur Ransome book in the month, that ends up being the favorite, and March was no exception!  I absolutely adored Coot Club!

Most Disappointing March Read

Honestly, this was overall not a bad reading month. I think I’m going with Mystery in the Pirate Oak.  It was pretty choppy, even for a children’s book.

Other March Reads

• 3.5*
  • Fallen Into the Pit by Ellis Peters
  • The Happy Camper by Melody Carlson
  • Hot Ice by Nora Roberts
  • In Bitter Chill by Sarah Ward
  • The Last Waltz by Dorothy Mack
  • Mosquitoland by David Arnold
• 4*
  • Black-Eyed Susans by Julia Heaberlin
  • Pumpkinheads by Rainbow Rowell
  • Wild Horse Running by Sam Savitt
• 4.5*
  • Watership Down by Richard Adams
  • White Stallion of Lipizza by Marguerite Henry
• 5*
  • Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
  • The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

March Stats

• Total Number of Books Read:  20 (17 physical; 3 Kindle)
• Total Pages Read:  5098 (lowest month of the year so far)
• Average Star Rating for January:  3.87 (highest month of the year so far)
• Longest Book:  Watership Down  (474 pages)
• Shortest Book:  Mystery in the Pirate Oak (114 pages)
• Oldest Book:  Anne of Green Gables (published 1908)
• Newest Book:  The Happy Camper (published 2020)
• Number of New-to-Me Authors:  5

March DNFs

Three of them in March, which is part of the reason my page count is lower – I don’t include partial books, and I read almost halfway through two different Kindle books before bailing on them.

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

This one has been on my list for a while, but I didn’t realize it was almost 1000 pages long when I added it.  I tried to read this one but honestly just didn’t have the headspace for it.  Murakami’s writing is vague and rambly, with random spurts of violence or explicit sex, and I just could not get into the rhythm of it.  I always wonder how much of that is because of the translation, too.  For now, I left it on the TBR because I may try to return to it someday.  The concept is still really interesting to me, but if I’m honest, I know I’m never going to pick this one up again.

Deep Blue Secret by Christie Anderson

I’m on a quest to read through some of the oldest unread Kindle books that I own.  Back when I first got my first Kindle in 2016 I got a little excited about the concept of free ebooks and consequently have a huge backlog of them, half of which I’m not even convinced that I bothered to read the description!  So far I have started and bailed on four, and this was one of them.  This one was just sooooo slow and the majority of the book was Sadie having all these feelings about this boy that she literally doesn’t even know, and I was just finally over it.  It was also the first book in a trilogy, and there was no way I was going to be able to stick with Sadie to the end, so I bailed around 40%.

The Last Girl by Joe Hart

Another old Kindle book, this one at least started interesting, but then didn’t really go anywhere.  When it finally did start to go somewhere, it went somewhere violent, and I really can’t handle that kind of thing.  So this one also got abandoned around 40%, especially since it was also the first book in a trilogy.  Ah well.

TBR Update

This I keep updated as I go, so it’s current as of today, rather than as of the end of March.  I’m sure it’s off-kilter, though, because I get most of my TBR additions from reading book reviews on all of your lovely blogs, and I still have over 400 (!!!) unread book blogging emails!

For those of you who don’t know, I’m weirdly obsessive with organizing the TBR, and have it on a spreadsheet divided into five different tabs:

• Standalones:  481 (up one)
• Nonfiction:  117 (holding steady)
• Personal (which includes all books I own (fiction and nonfiction), but lists any series I own as only one entry…):  670 (down two)
• Series (each series counted separately, not each book within a series):  242 (holding steady)
• Mystery Series (each series counted separately, not each book within a series): 114 (holding steady)

Reading Challenge Updates

• #ReadingEurope2020 – visited one country – Austria (total 3/46 complete)
• #ReadtheUSA2020 – visited five states: Mississippi, Montana, New York, Oregon, and Texas (total 16/50 complete)
• #SeparatedbyaPondTour – visited the five states above, plus one Canadian province (Prince Edward Island), plus four English counties (Derbyshire, Hampshire, Norfolk, and Shropshire). (Total 30/159 complete.)
• #LitsyAtoZ – 0 books (18/26 complete)
• #BackwardsAtoZ – 10 books (No T – No Z complete, then No A – No C on my second list – I’m trying to do this one in order and to see how many times I can get through the alphabet!)

Current Reads

My sister and I are buddy-reading Little Women one chapter a day, which I’m actually really enjoying.  I’m also rereading Fangirl, which I had kind of forgotten how much I loved!!

Up Next

My probable next five(ish) reads…

• Nation of Enemies by H.A. Raynes – the next of my ancient Kindle books that I will probably bail on haha
• The Red Address Book by Sofia Lundberg – this is an #LMPBC book so I really have to read it before the end of the month. I was going to read it next, but ended up picking up Fangirl instead, so here we are!
• A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan – so there is a website called Tailored Book Recommendations that you can join for a small fee and you fill out a big long survey and they send you three recommended books each month (you can also pay a significantly higher fee and have them actually send you a book, but I just couldn’t quite justify that one).  This one has been on my list for a while anyway, so I splurged and bought it (the libraries are still closed and I just didn’t want to wait!).  I also bought another book they recommended – Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh, which I had never heard of, since I could get both books for less than $15.  The Tesh book hasn’t come yet, but it sounds intriguing as well.
• An Episode of Sparrows by Godden Rumer – this is a book I added years ago via a book blog recommendation, but it may be too heavy for me right now.  We’ll see.
• The Hundred Names of Darkness by Nilanjana Roy – the sequel to The Wildings, I’m interested to see if I like this one as well.