Hard to believe it is April and a quarter of the year is finished. Flowers and trees are budding and blooming. People with allergies are sneezing and wheezing. Vampires like me squint and spit at the sun while sun lovers dance happily outside. Yes, the world is waking up from winter.
I did a fair bit of reading in the first three months. A lot of it was research for my WIP so I was learning about orchids and 19th century garden design. Big, heavy books filled with beautiful color pictures of places from all over the world that I am using to figure out how to create a fictional garden or two. Even with telling myself to only focus on only what is specifically relevant to the story, I still went overboard on the research.
When I wasn’t researching, I read for fun. My for fun reading consisted of a mixture of sci-fi/fantasy, historical fiction, and random genres.
My sci-fi/fantasy reads consisted of books from my book club. My favorite was The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison. I won’t go into too much detail as I’m saving my full thoughts for the end of the year when it’ll appear on my favorite reads list. I just wanted to quickly say that I loved this book because the main character, Maia, is easy to root for. I also read for the first time Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time and felt it was a book I might have enjoyed had I read it as a child. Reading as an adult I found it lacking a lot of what I look for in a book.
My historical fiction reading was light these first three months, although I am currently reading a charming early medieval times murder mystery. I did read Deanna Raybourn’s latest Veronica Speedwell book, A Treacherous Curse, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Definitely looking forward to Raybourn continuing the series since I love her style and her witty and smart main characters.
For the other bits of random reading, I turned to a list of books I wanted to read this year. I managed to check three of them off the list. The first was a re-read of 1984 by George Orwell. The first time I read it was back in high school and I understand it a lot better reading it as an adult. I also read Artemis by Andy Weir and enjoyed his sarcastic main character and reading about a set of colonies on the moon. My favorite out of the three was Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Not to be confused with the 1933 sci-fi movie called The Invisible Man nor the H.G. Wells novel of the same name. Ellison’s Invisible Man came out in 1952 and tells the story of the struggle of a nameless main character, a black man from the South who finds himself exiled to Harlem, as he tries to figure out his place in America. In reading a book that came out over sixty years ago, one sees how times have changed, but, unfortunately, how so many of the themes and expectations explored in the book are still the relevant today.
What have you read so far this year? What are you looking forward to reading? For me, I look forward to crossing more books off my ambitious to read list as well as the surprises awaiting me in book club.
DH Hanni 