February Reading Wrap Up

February was a really weird month, wasn’t it? Usually it’s a great reading month for me, but I was a little bit slower this year; I’ve started a big new work project, I’m on a couple of writing deadlines, and I’ve basically just been super busy. I did want to say a big thank you to everyone reading this – there are 2000 of you now, which feels like a huge achievement. That’s a number that I’ve been hoping to see pop up for some time, and I feel very lucky that you’re all here.

So, let’s check out my February stats…

Books read:

I read 29 books in February – not bad at all, but not my best work, especially for a month with a halfterm break in it! I think part of the problem is that I had a lot of DNFs this month, which I don’t track in my numbers, which meant that I got a little bit slumpy in the middle and lost some good reading time. The first and last weeks accounted for most of my reading!

That takes me up to 65 books so far this year, and works out to just over 16% of my goal, with 16% of the year gone – so I’m bang on track.

My Owned TBR:

I don’t even know what happened this month – once again, it was a real struggle to get that TBR down! I squeaked it down to 270 yesterday, which is a reduction of just 9 books, but I’m pretty sure I’m missing a couple of things that I’ve forgotten to write down, so this might shoot up a bit in the beginning of the month as I remember… Still, that’s some minor progress, and my reading challenge for March is really focused on picking off backlist books that have sat there for a while, so hopefully that will be helpful. I brought in 21 new books in February, of which I’ve read 7 already, so there are 14 new titles on the TBR going into March.

In March I’d love to get my TBR down to 260 books. I can see 250 books on the horizon and I could stretch for it, but given how hard I’ve been struggling so far this year to get the number down, I’m sticking with a smaller goal again to give myself some breathing space. If I get further, that’s great, but I want to keep the pressure low!

Backlist/Frontlist balance:

In February I read 11 frontlist books and 18 backlist books, which means that across the year I’ve read almost exactly twice as many backlist books as frontlist ones. I still think at this point in the year, that’s pretty fair, but I might need to focus on March and April proofs in the next few weeks to balance this out a little.

Reading Challenges:

This month’s challenge was to tick off 13 witchy books for #Februwitchy, and if you read yesterday’s post, you’ll know that I managed to do it (even though I subbed one of the books out!). All of these came off my TBR, so this feels like good progress.

March’s challenge TBR will be announced tomorrow, but I’m hoping to do for trilogies what I did for duologies in January, and clear out a few older books again! I also want to put a dent in my review copy stack, so I’ll be aiming to read two of my oldest review copies.

Blog posts:

I posted pretty much every day in February, which feels great! In case you missed them, here are all the reviews I posted this month:

Lunar New Love by Ophelia Silk

Which Way? by Theodora Benson

The Bone Spindle by Leslie Vedder

The Mask of Mirrors by M A Carrick

Good Neighbors – The Full Collection by Stephanie Burgis

Diary of An Accidental Witch – Flying High by Perdita and Honor Cargill

The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal by KJ Charles

The Highlander’s Tactical Marriage by Jenni Fletcher

The Book of Fire Trilogy by Michelle Kenney

A Laird for the Governess by Catherine Tinley

Latchkey Ladies by Marjorie Grant

Luma and the Pet Dragon by Leah Mohammed

Post After Post-Mortem by ECR Lorac

Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree

I also had two Kitten Corner review posts, here and here, and wrote mini reviews of my Februwitchy reads here and here.

Here’s to a great reading March for all of us! If you have a wrap up post for February, I’d love to read it, so leave a link for me!