April Reading Wrap Up

Well, May is here and that means it’s time to look at April’s reading! I feel like this was a long month – the first two weeks were the Easter break for us, but for various reasons I didn’t get as much done as I was hoping in terms of work or reading, so it feels like it was a bit of a dud month for productivity… The most exciting thing that happened was my birthday – I turned 30 on the 30th!

Books read:

This was not my best month! I managed to read 27 books in April, which brings me up to a total of 139 for the year so far (and I’m wishing I’d tucked in one last book for a nice round number!). We’ve had exactly 33.3% of the year so far, so I’m still a little bit ahead of schedule but I’ve lost a bit of March’s lead.

Part of the difficulty is that I spent most of my free time in April writing or editing, and it’s difficult to get really immersed in reading a book when your mind wants to pick apart the sentences. But I read some fabulous books – to mention my favourites, Hedgewitch by Skye McKenna was a wonderful middle grade read, and Nettle and Bone by T Kingfisher was fantastic, dark-but-warm adult fantasy.

My Owned TBR:

Uh oh, another month where the TBR went up instead of down. I’m going to lay the blame for this solidly at the door of my birthday, because I did manage to keep this around 280 books pretty much all month – then I was completely spoiled with books and the TBR shot up to 294 books! I’m going to need to work hard in May to get things back on track if I want to be under 200 by the end of the year. I’d suggest a book buying ban, but I just got a lovely book token…

49 books came in during April (fourteen of them birthday presents), and I managed to read 10 of them (plus one so far in May), so 38 have been added to the TBR. That’s… a lot higher than I thought it would be! I’m not going to set a numerical goal for May, because it feels like tempting fate at this point. I’m just going to aim for downwards movement – I need to get motivated any way I can to chop those numbers down!

Backlist/Frontlist balance:

11 of the books I read in April were or will be published this year, and 16 were backlist reads. I suspected this would be a month tilted more towards backlist because of my spring cleaning, so that’s about where I thought it would be!

Reading Challenges:

Despite the state of my TBR, my Spring Cleaning challenge was a great success! I shot myself in the foot a little bit by adding three extra books halfway through, but I did end up reading twelve of the fifteen books I’d earmarked for the challenge, and I decided not to keep more than half of them. I’m most proud of finally tackling Gideon the Ninth after putting it off since publication – I really enjoyed it in the end.

May’s challenge TBR is going to be posted tomorrow, but it’s a little bit different this month – rather than focusing on a theme, I’m just going to give myself free choice from my whole TBR and choose some things I’m really in the mood for!

Blog posts:

This was actually one of my best months for posting consistently! Here are the reviews I added this month, in case you missed any:

The Knight’s Tempting Ally by Ella Matthews

Winning Back His Duchess by Amanda McCabe

The Good Girl’s Guide to Rakes by Eva Leigh

Hedgewitch by Skye McKenna

Strange Journey by Maud Cairnes

Someone in Time edited by Jonathan Strahan

The Language of Roses by Heather Rose Jones

The Outcast and The Rite by Helen de Guerry Simpson

The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner

Keeping Up Appearances by Rose Macauley

The Earl She Should Never Desire by Lara Temple

I also posted four Kitten Corner posts, here, here, here and here, and two check-ins on my TBR challenge, with mini reviews of the challenge books read, here and here, plus a fun bonus post for the Hedgewitch blog tour!

How was your April? If you’ve written a wrap up post, I’d love to see it – link it in the comments for me to check out!