Hello!

Coming off the high of February where I finished my monthly TBR and managed to read 10 books in the shortest month of the year, it was destined that March was never going to be able to follow that.

It definitely wasn’t as good a reading month for me – I only finished 3 books, I didn’t finish my monthly TBR and whilst my sleep schedule is looking much more ‘normal’ now (that’s to our newly adopted cat friend), the change is catching up with me and I am knackered and that’s really contributed to my limited reading! I just can’t read more than 2-3 chapters before I fall asleep and whilst it means I’m reading at a more ‘normal’ speed for someone who isn’t reading as their job (a reminder to myself to stop comparing my numbers with those who make book content for a living), I miss reading more!

I feel I also have to acknowledge that the books I was reading may have had an impact – I finished a non-fiction book I didn’t really want to read, a reread I was very excited about and then a really long new release and another new release that I was only moderately excited for.

Let’s jump right in and we can evaluate more at the end!

The Churchill Factor – Boris Johnson [audiobook] – unrated

This is a book about Winston Churchill written by a very biased politician that I only read because it was a wedding gift and I committed to reading every single book we were given at our wedding. That’s about all I really want to say without getting too political.

Though what I will say, is I learnt that I really liked listening to non-fiction via audio and I want to try and listen to more educational, historical type books in this format. This book in particular is odd because it’s not something you can describe as a biography (though it has biographical features), it’s not educational history or politics (it attempts to feature these, though I was incredibly aware of the bias throughout) and all round it felt like more of a fanboy homage to someone who has become more of a historical character than figure.

I didn’t rate it for the previous reasons of bias, though I’m reassured that my GCSE level History has stuck somewhere about considering the validity of sources!

Fangirl – Rainbow Rowell [paperback] – 5 stars ⭐️ (reread)

My sibling and I both wanted to reread this book from our teenage years so we decided to choose it for our monthly sibling book club and I was astounded by how firmly it has re-cemented itself as my favourite book of all time. To think I was nervous that it wouldn’t live up to the adoration I had when I read it the first time.

This book is about an introverted 18 year old, Cath, who has socially leant on her twin sister, Wren, for their entire lives and now that Wren has decided she wants to start her college career as an individual and not one half of a pair, Cath feels lost and leans into the shared interest they had in writing fanfiction about a popular book series called Simon Snow, about a Chosen One wizard boy as he goes through magic school.

I am Cath, Cath is me when I was 18 and I even think my husband is a little bit like male protagonist Levi – that one’s a bit more tenuous, as my comparison to Cath is both literal and physical (leaning on a fanfiction community to survive when the real world gets too much, almost certainly undiagnosed autistic, curly hair, glasses, little bit wider than the ‘standard’ of her peers), Levi and my husband is more personality and vibes – they’re not interested in/studying anything similar, but he’s light-hearted and relaxed, he’s obsessed with Cath from the off, he falls first, they don’t live together but he spends a lot of time in her dorm room, he will talk obsessively about the things he’s interested in regardless of how interested anyone else is and he has a heart of gold.

If my husband is reading this, his ego might become unbearable, but it’s proof I’m nice about him sometimes!

Rereading Fangirl allowed me to officially solidify my top 3 favourite books of all time (Fangirl, The Innocent’s Story and The Heart Principle) and I am so pleased about it.

Oathbound – Tracy Deonn [audiobook + ebook] – 4 stars ⭐️

So it turns out, listening to a nearly 25 hour audiobook will slow down your reading for the month! But I really did try – I listened to the audiobook in the car, I was co-reading before I went to sleep and I was reading and/or listening to this book at every opportunity.

Slightly whiny bit first – this audiobook was so damn slow. I don’t know if it was the reading pace of the narrators or the general pace of the writing but the amount of time I spent listening to this book did not equate to the number of pages read. Maybe it was the Southern drawl, maybe it was the fact I had to listen at 1.65x for it to sound even vaguely like normal speech, maybe I just don’t think this series needs to have 600 page books but the 12 days it took for me to finish this book felt like it should have gone a lot quicker.

Then onto the better bit – the first two instalments in this series were 3 stars for me, I found the characters not particularly likeable, there were (are) way too many of them with specific titles, powers and connections to each other that I have since learnt I don’t have the comprehension capability to remember, and I thought the whole system was a bit convoluted with all the titles and ranks and different types of magic users and variations within them all. To be honest, I stand by that in this book, but due to the events of book 2 the cast in book 3 was quite intensely diminished – it was a typical middle-of-a-series book where none of the characters really go home at any point throughout the novel and are firmly in the ‘middle bit of the adventure’, but in this one, it clicked for me.

There’s not too much I can say without spoiling it, but what I will say without context is that I loved the chapters from Will’s point of view (and his narrator was superb), I allowed the intricacies of the magic system to go over my head and whilst I probably missed some of the nuances, I haven’t got the brain power (or the inclination) to make notes while I’m reading a YA fantasy book and I’m not going to, and lastly I liked the vague gestures to romance. There’s been an undertone of romance throughout the whole of the Legendborn Cycle series but it’s never felt quite realised, in this book it was both more subtle and more present in a way that someone who literally shares her opinions with words should be able to better describe, but I can’t explain why I really liked it. I liked the use of different perspectives, I liked the use of labelling the chapters in the first half of the story and I loved being able to piece it all together (from what I actually could comprehend!).

I’m really pleased that this series has elevated itself to a 4 star rating for me!

And those were the three books I finished.

I also started reading Tea You At The Altar by Rebecca Thorne, the third book in the Tomes and Tea series, and started listening to The Hating Game by Sally Thorne, because I’m nearly a decade late to the hype on that one! I did find it mildly entertaining that I had two authors with the surname ‘Thorne’ on my March TBR (and a book called ‘Prince of Thorns’, but I DNFed that one).

April is already off to a more promising start, but if you have any tips for making more time for reading as a sleepy girl who’s cat is making me go to bed earlier, please do let me know!

Thank you for reading,

Sophie xx