February Monthly Recap

It’s time for our February monthly recap. Find out which books were favorites and which were duds for the month of January. We’ll end our wrap up with a glimpse of what’s coming out in March. 

Jen: February was a much slower month for me in terms of literary fiction in part due to my reading of To the Lighthouse which moved at a glacial pace for me. I managed to read 10 books which sounds impressive but three were novellas, 3 were YA (which I usually breeze through in less than 2 days), and most of the rest were pretty short. Six books were written by women, 5 were written by African American authors, two featured LGBTQ+ protagonists, and two were a translated work.

Favorite book read in February: I had a tie for favorite book between The Bastard of Istanbul and Giovanni’s Room. Reviews of both of those books will be posted here soon.

Least favorite book read in February: Mask of Shadows by Linsey Miller. It is a YA book that I received as an ARC last book expo. I liked that it had a gender fluid character but other than that, it was pretty formulaic and not my usual read.

Future Goals: I have high expectations for March. I plan to read my first Pynchon novel and a whole host of recently published books for review here.

Book Worm: Like Jen I managed 9 books this month with a page count of 2998. I managed to clear 3 books from my TBR pile and keep up with our Read Around the World challenge so I am feeling pretty impressed with myself. In terms of gender balance I read 4 books by male authors and 5 by female authors so I am pretty much trending at 50/50.

Favorite book read in February: The Toymakers by Robert Dinsdale review can be found here. Honourable mentions go to To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, Memed My Hawk by Yasar Kemel and Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto.

Least Favorite book read in February: I don’t actually have a least favourite book this month. All the books I read were solid 3 stars.

Future Goals: For March I plan to finish Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates, to read The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys, my read around the world Peru book and any other challenge books that happen to come my way.

Upcoming March Releases:

The House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urrea. Mexican-American immigrant story.
The Parking Lot Attendant by Nafkote Tamirat. Coming of age story set in Boston’s Ethiopian community. I’m reading this one now.
The Gunners by Rebecca Kauffman

What can you look forward to on our blog in March? We’ll be hosting our March Madness reading challenge so make sure you check it out. You can read about it here. We’ll also continue with our Read Around the World challenge. March we will be “traveling” to Peru and we hope you join us. Time permitting we’ll be featuring Jeannette Winterson as our March author since we weren’t able to get to that this month. Finally we’ll be posting lots of book reviews and book-related posts.

We want to hear from you. So what are your plans for March? How was your February? Which books were your favorites and least favorites read this month?