I’ve experimented with monthly wrap-ups, but a mid-month update is better for me . . .
Looking Back
Eight reviews and a Sunday Short have gone up since my last update:
- Animal Farm by George Orwell (4.2)
- The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle (4.6)
- A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (4.0)
- Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk (4.6)
- “Ghosts and Empties” by Lauren Groff (Sunday short)
- The Girl in the Tower by Katherine Arden (4.5)
- The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie (5.0)
- On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (4.8)
- The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen by Hendrik Groen (4.8)
Looking Around
- Read more than in 2020. Still on track, but less obviously so.
I’ve started some longer books on my lists to get them out of the way, so I’m reading but not finishing anything. - Read more classic fiction. Sort of.
I read two classics, but only one (Animal Farm) was on the list. - Whittle down the TBR pile. +??
I started reading the H. Rider Haggard collection I picked up a while ago and realized I wouldn’t be able to tick anything off my blog’s TBR list because it doesn’t include books acquired from the “complete works of so-and-so” collections on my Kindle. The point of a list is to tick things off, so I’ve restructured my list. I have mixed feelings about adding all books by some authors, but as Kindle collections invite the reader to browse books in order, if I don’t read [random title], it’ll be because the opening chapters didn’t appeal to me, not because it wasn’t on my radar. Who knows, maybe there are hidden gems among the lesser-known books. - Commit and stick to a posting schedule. So far, so good!
Still trying to not jinx this one. - Continue reading (and posting) books in translation. Yep!
The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen was originally written in Dutch, and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead was originally written in Polish.
Looking Ahead
I’m not going to post reviews in the last two weeks of February to catch up / get ahead in my reading. Two reviews a week isn’t impossible, but it requires a lot of reading—especially since I don’t review everything.
On a related note, it may appear that my ratings are more generous this year (two five-star books??), but I whittled down my to-review list so it only contained books I had strong feelings about.