#April Wrap Up

[literatureaesthetic]

i can't do an april wrap-up/monthly book recommendation post because i only finished one book in april, and it was a short story(🥴)

april was a month of travelling, of exploring, and of heartbreak (having to reject an offer from oxford because i can't afford relocating rn is going to haunt me for the rest of my life). reading, for the first time in a long time, hasn't been a priority for me, and that feels really good??

[tolive1000lives]

We’ve hit the halfway mark of the 2024 reading challenge! These are most of my 2024 reads and I’m excited to add to the stack!

[aliteraryprincess]

April 2024 Wrap Up

Not me posting my April wrap up over halfway through May...

Books Read: 13

Look at all these! I mean, to be fair, five are picture books. But still. My favorite was, of course, The Sunshine Court. I can't believe that the year of our lord 2024 gave us a new All for the Game book. It was amazing! My least favorite was The Biographer's Tale. A serious disappointment from the author of one of my favorite books. I was also unable to finish Apt Pupil, although I thought it was well-written. Almost too well-written. I was seriously disturbed. Books marked with ® are rereads.

Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King - 4 stars

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness - 4 stars

In the night I dream of home by Vagelis Iliopoulos, illustrated by Hariton Bekiaris - 4 stars

The Sleeping Beauty retold and illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman - 4 stars

The Idiot by Elif Batuman - 4 stars

Dragonsong by Anne McCaffrey - 4 stars

Molly by Joseph S. Bonsall, illustrated by Erin Marie Mauterer - 4 stars ®

Sea Tale by Gail E. Haley - 4 stars ®

An Ellis Island Christmas by Maxinne Rhea Leighton, illustrated by Dennis Nolan - 4 stars ®

Daniel Deronda by George Eliot - 5 stars ®

The Biographer's Tale by A. S. Byatt - 2 stars

The Sunshine Court by Nora Sakavic - 5 stars

The Ways of Life by Margaret Oliphant - 4.5 stars

Books DNFed: 1

Apt Pupil by Stephen King - due to violent animal death

On Tumblr:

There's not much here, but @thehobbitwithstickyuppyhair helped me find a childhood picture book that I've been trying to find for years, and I am so grateful!

March 2024 Wrap Up

Book Quotes: The Idiot by Elif Batuman

Book Quotes: Daniel Deronda by George Eliot

Help me find this picture book? - Solved!

More Victorian Novels Connections

On YouTube:

And a good mix here, including a Fairy Tale Friday.

March Wrap Up | 8 reads, 1 DNF

Fairy Tale Friday | The Night Dance by Suzanne Weyn

Quarter Year Crisis Book Tag 2024

Currently Reading 4/15/24

The George Eliot Project | Middlemarch

1st Book Haul of 2024 | January to March

May TBR | Mental Health May & more!

What I Read for Picture This 2024

[franticvampirereads]

April has been such a great reading month for me. I think I’ve read almost 12 books this month? Which doesn’t seem real but I guess it is. So here’s what I read in April:

Lazarus (AFTG 3.5) 5⭐️ {story link}

All Hail The Underdogs 5⭐️ {review}

Power Plays & Straight A’s 4⭐️ {review}

Foster In New York 4⭐️

Delinquent Daddy & Tender Teacher vol 1 4⭐️ {review}

The Foxhole Court 5⭐️ {review}

The Raven King 5⭐️ {review}

Mad Man 5⭐️ {review}

Mad Man bonus epilogue 5⭐️

Swamp Thing Twin Branches 4⭐️ {review}

The King’s Men -currently reading

Proficiency Bonus -currently reading

My favorite books this month were the All For The Game books. This reread was so good! It brought back so many memories and little things that I’d forgotten about them.

[princessofbookaholics]

April was a productive reading month. And I liked everything that I read so that was great. Also got a 5 star read FINALLY! The Reappearance of Rachel Price was amazing and I'm happy that I got a perfect read after so long! I read the full Defy the Night series which put a good dent in my TBR. Here's the wrap up:

Mexican Gothic ⭐⭐⭐

Four Aunties and a Wedding ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Expiration Dates ⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Reappearance of Rachel Price ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Loveless (reread) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Rule Book ⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Party ⭐⭐⭐

Everything I Know About Love ⭐⭐⭐

Defy the Night ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Teach Me ⭐⭐⭐

Long Time Gone (ARC) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Defend the Dawn ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Bethrotal or Breakaway ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Tomb Sweeping ⭐⭐⭐

Only and Forever ⭐⭐⭐

Destroy the Day ⭐⭐⭐

[bookcub]

april wrap up

planning perfect by haley neil- a contemporary ya with an ace mc and i was incredibly disappointed. incredibly frustrating to read and made my anxiety rise.

overall grade: D

stamped: racism, anti racism, and you by jason reynolds and ibram x kendi- a nonfiction book, adapted from the adult novel. it was incredibly informative and very easy to follow. the audio was tons of fun. if the adult version seems intimidating, try this version!

overall grade: A

the golem and the jinni by helene wecker- this was a gorgeous novel. lately i have been not been able to focus on long books as much as i used to, but the audio of this was captivating. i loved the characters and the themes and the writing. absolutely worth your time.

overall grade: A

growing up trans: in our own words- a fantastic nonfiction book, centering on trans children and teens. a quick read too. i enjoyed how poems were combined with essays. it felt like a safe space for trans youth to express themselves and i think that we need more of those spaces.

overall grade: A

legends and lattes by travis baldree- overhyped for me rip. i thought the characters were underdeveloped and it was very meh for me.

overall grade: C

take a hint dani brown by talia hibbert- a reread and its such a fun one!! i love romance novels and talia hibbert isone of my faves.

overall grade: A

frizzy by claribel a ortega- the graphic novel curly girls need!! it addressed misogynoir and how it affects young Black girls and their perception of themselves. i wish i had this as a kid.

overall grade: A

[m0chigang]

April Wrap Up ✨

I have my iPad back, I can get back to books I really really really wanted to read, but I had a hard time picking up some books bc I was too focused on fanfics (I blame Ben Barnes). As always, spoiler alert just in case.

1. Circe - 5/5

LISTEN I AM A CHANGED WOMAN. I HAVE NEVER FELT THE FEELINGS I FELT IN THIS BOOK. My heart broke and restored at the same time, I was sadly happy, happily sad. Like... I felt my heart physically rip with the last chapter. Madeline Miller is already the owner of my wallet, I will pre-order everything she writes and I will cry when the time is right. I think I liked this more than The Song of Achilles...

2. As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow - 5/5

I was halfway through the book and I cried 4 times... FOUR TIMES AND THE BOOK WASN'T OVER. The plottwist made it a 5 star immediately. I remember thinking "this better not happen" and BAM! my world changed. The romance was just so innocent and beautiful, and then you had the most terrible things happen 2 lines later and you came back to reality. It makes you think of the world and what really matters. And the book is so hopeful. I love it.

3. The Six Deaths of the Saint - 4/5

The only reason it is not a 5 star is because I NEEDED MORE. Bro this was so beautifully written. I usually can't stand 2nd person POVs, but in this book it had a purpose that left me SHOOK. The way the violence and war was written here was beautiful. I need more.

4. The Year of the Witching - 4/5

A friend told me to read it. I loved it. I was shooketh by it, and I want more. Bring Lilith to ANY book and I will read it. Ezra is literally the bestest man I have ever read?? Let me marry him?? I was kind of expecting a non-happy ending, but then we wouldn't have a sequel. ALSO *spoiler* I would have let everyone die and join the witches with the condition that Ezra stayed alive.

5. The Midnight Library - 3.5/5

Ngl, I read this because of BTS, but last time I did that I found one of my favourite books so I had to read it. It made me understand the song Zero O'clock better. As for the book itself, it has an interesting concept, but it made me have mini existential crisis? Which I didn't like?? It did feel like a help book but I was not the target audience for it, it was good, but it is not the way I see life.

[lovebooksforeversblog]

April Wrap Up.. I loved this books

[the---hermit]

April 2023 wrap up

I just realized I forgot to post this at the beginning of the month. It's certainly a shorter list than usual, but I'm happy with it. I feel like represents very well my reading year so far a lot of highs and lows. the book reviews are linked in the book titles below as usual.

The Room In The Tower by E. F. Benson

Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman

The Priory Of The Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

What Lies In The Woods by Kate Alice Marshall

[brandileigh2003]

April fic/reading wrap up:

2,230,651 words.

Total full fics: 25

Total one shots (or others below 15k) 61

[magicalyaku]

You probably can't tell from the amount of books in the picture (six books plus one I ditched), but I didn’t read that much in April. Mostly because after the first week I picked up writing again. The silly story my friend and I built back in January. It took three and a half weeks and the first draft is finished, yay! Will it be good? How should I know? 8-D But I’m having fun, even if the real work is only starting now. On to what I read in April!

Daresh - Im Herz des Weißen Waldes (Daresh, at the Heart of the White Woods or something) (Katja Brandis): This is one of the worst books I read in a while. I read this at my artist alley table at a convention and I cannot keep a nice face when I read bullshit and I didn’t want to scare customers away with my scowling face the second day, so I just stopped reading after the first half. I was so frustrated with the book. If you're interested in the full tale, refer to the end of the post. :)

The Merceneries of the Stolen Moon (Tales of the High Court 4) (Megan Derr): I knew from the moment Charlaine was introduced in volume 3 that he would be important just by the way his presence is on the pages. I think, the author likes him. :'D Jac and Myra have been around since volume 1 and never gave off so heavy protagonist vibes. Anyway, here's another book trying to break out of the mold, introducing a polycule and all. Personally, with my aro brain the thought of two people finding each other and fitting together so perfectly is beyond me, so three people feeling that way towards each other seems like a even more of a miracle. Good for them, I guess! I read this right after Daresh and damn, what a blessing to my soul. The difference in writing and worldbuilding. One might argue, yeah, one was written for kids, the other for adults, but there's plenty of good books for kids and plenty of bad for adults, so that's not it. One book in the series left!

Lord of Silver Ashes (Rowan Blood 2) (Kellen Graves): Of god, I naively thought, this would end with volume 2. It DOES NOT. I learned halfway through and lost my will to read for a while. xD It does make sense from all the stuff that is happening. Because there is a lot and it builds up and builds up and builds up. But still. If I had known what I got myself into ... It is a good story though. It just took me so much longer to read than I'm used to, because of all the descriptions and pretty words. I have respect for how it is written, as in the style and the plot building. It's not just some easy, smutty lovestory with fairy princes. Behind the veil masking the beantighe's face is a whole complex person. And so is this series. (But it took soo long to read! I don’t get it!)

Spellbound (F.T. Lukens): This one was just cute. So warm and fluffy. There are some serious things going on and all and there characters have issues not to be taken too lightly. But overall, it was a total comfort read for me. Settle back into your cozy sofa and let your heart be healed. (Also there’s a magical cat.)

The Last Sun (The Tarot Sequence 1) (K.D. Edwards): This was kind of a culture shock. Took my brain a while to adjust. Adult men, modern setting, but still some sort of (wild) magic, so much action. But it’s interesting. And how to say it ... not sappy? While there’s a lot of danger to the protagonists’s life, it’s still not overly emotional and I like that once in a while. Also, Brand is great.

Shade & Revenant (Oracle of Senders 1+2) (Mere Joyce): After The Last Sun I found that I didn’t have anything in my book pile that felt right to read, so I had a look in my potential reads and chose this. And it was perfect, exactly what I needed. Simple, not too dramatic, but still engaging, nice characters, quite short. Pure 14-year-olds in the first volume, the cutest little romance in the second volume. I read both volumes back to back and only stopped because I wanted a little more time to enjoy. :D

And now, my full thoughts on a bad German fantasy book that I didn’t even finish! Daresh by Katja Brandis:

The Story: The world of Daresh is split into 4 territories for 4 guilds: Earth, wind, fire and water. And they hate each other. There are also half-humans (different animal races that can talk) who are mainly kept as slaves. Heroine Rena, 16 years, touches some important stone in the castle of the Queen and gets the ability to understand the half-humans’s language and is also hunted because touching is prohibited! She runs away, meets a woman from the fire guild, there’s some secret stuff going on and they decide to go unite the guilds.

The Worldbuilding: I hate it. For a long time I wondered why it bothered me so much, until I realized, it’s probably because I couldn’t figure out the intended audience. The heroine is 16, her love interest and other allies are even older, so I thought, it’s a story for 15- or 16-year-olds. But. The way the world is built is very black and white which I don’t find acceptable for readers that age. Teenagers are smarter than this. Where’s the nuance? The guilds all hate each other, they have a lot of prejudices and are not willing at all to rethink. And this is going on for many many years (100 maybe, I have no idea), but the heroine is apparently the very first person ever to think differently. And sorry, that is not believable. Even if people don’t speak up or actively do something there will always be some who do not share those beliefs. Not in this book. Maybe I just want to believe that people a generally good. In any case it was super annoying.

The Love Story: Is shit. 1) Why is it there in the first place? 2) The way it is written kinda grossed me out. (I can’t even say why. I read smut involving three people the day after and it was fine, but the way this girl swoons over her guy was so icky to me.) 3) The guy is so bland. I didn’t like the heroine as a character very much, but the guy was so nondescript. Also, he had an anger problem? And I’m not sure if it was intended to make him seem dangerous and therefore hot? If so, it didn’t work well. So, there’s the girl and she has a crush on some neighbor’s boy who doesn’t even notice her in the beginning. All good. While on the run already, she meets him by chance out in the woods (totally believable), he is mean to her, because she ruined his important day (the reason everyone went to the castle blabla), and she realized “oh, now I don’t like him anymore”. Alright. Then, like 5 pages later, literally the next male she meets who is around her age (a few years older), she falls for. Hmmm. They exchange like three words. She meets him again half the world later. He saves her life. They run away together and maybe talk more, but we hardly get any of that. They spent the night sleeping 200feet apart and the next day both are madly in love and after a fight with some thugs they kiss. Errr.... Another few days later they reach the next town, vanish into a room to do stuff that is not written (thankfully in this case because I would have vomited all over my table) and then they fight about something silly. I think they reconciled before I stopped reading but I don’t even care. A review for volume 3 of the series told me she gets another guy there, so ...

The Writing: Was fine for the most part, but. There’s no metric system instead every unit is something from nature like breath and person and ... I forgot. The breaths, though, were so annoying? They’re like seconds and come up every other page. There’s no “after a short while” or “it took a long time”, it’s “it didn’t take just 300 breaths, but 3 times 300″ and “after 4 times 11 breaths”. For real. It was so stupid. Who sits there to count till 300? Or starts calculating? I hated it so much after a while. 8D

I do regret a little that I didn’t finish because now I always have to say “maybe it got better after the first half”. But at the same time I don’t really care. I’m not wasting more of my life with these books. (The way the first half frustrated me I would probably be blind to anything good in the second half anyway.)

That’s it!

[thereadingchallengechallenge]

Read in April 2023

I was too busy this month to get much reading done (by my standards). and when I wasn’t busy, I was too worn out 😅 but I enjoyed every book I read in April so hopefully I can carry that vibe through into May!

Series reads: 1. All Our Hidden Gifts trilogy by Caroline O’Donoghue    1. All Our Hidden Gifts - 4/5    2. The Gifts That Bind Us - 4/5    3. Every Gift a Curse - 3/5

Familiar authors: 1. Mossflower by Brian Jacques - DNF

Backlog books: 1. Final Girls by Riley Sager - DNF

Other reads:

The Weight of Blood by Tiffany D Jackson - 5/5

Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko - 4/5

[tolive1000lives]

2023 reading wrap up through April!

[aliteraryprincess]

April 2023 Wrap Up

Butters insisted that he must be in the this month's wrap up pic! 😆 April went by way too quickly. Time's just flying by!

Books Read: 15

Look at all these books! I mean, sure, a lot of them are rereads or picture books, but that's fine! My favorite of the month was Little Thieves, which is just a new favorite in general. My least favorite was The Ingenue, but it was still an enjoyable read. Starred titles are audiobooks and ones marked with ® are rereads.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins - 5 stars ®

"The Lifted Veil" by George Eliot - 3 stars

The Ingenue by Rachel Kapelke-Dale - 3 stars

Snow White by the Brothers Grimm, retold by Paul Heins, illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman - 5 stars ®

Baba Yaga and Vasilisa the Brave retold by Marinna Mayer, illustrated by Kinuko Y. Craft - 4 stars

The Goose Girl by the Brothers Grimm, retold by Anthea Bell, illustrated by Sabine Bruntjen - 3 stars

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf - 4.5 stars ®

Little Thieves by Margaret Owen - 5 stars

The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - 4 stars

Many Furs by the Brothers Grimm, retold and illustrated by Jacquelyn Ilya Sage - 3 stars

Snow White & Rose Red by the Brothers Grimm, retold by Kallie George, illustrated by Kelly Vivanco - 4 stars

The Secrets of Hartwood Hall by Katie Lumsden - 5 stars

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter - 4.5 stars ®

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys - 4.5 stars ®

Arcadia by Tom Stoppard - 5 stars ®

On Tumblr:

It's just all polls. I'm having way too much fun with them.

March Wrap Up

Fairy Tale Retelling Authors Poll

Elizabeth Gaskell Book Poll

Jane Austen Book Poll

Charles Dickens Book Poll

Hyperspecific Poll

Shakespeare Tragedy Poll

Shakespeare Comedy Poll

Shakespeare History Poll

On the Blog:

There's one thing here! Yay! But it's still not the Fairy Tale Friday post for Snow & Rose...oops...

Review: The Ingenue by Rachel Kapelke-Dale

On YouTube:

But hey, there's a Fairy Tale Friday post here at least!

April TBR

The George Eliot Project: Adam Bede

March Wrap Up - 7 books!

The George Eliot Project: "The Lifted Veil"

Currently Reading 4/18/23

The Quarter Year Crisis Book Tag 2023

May TBR

Fairy Tale Friday: The Seventh Bride by T. Kingfisher

[princessofmanyfaces]

April Wrap-Up

🗓️ I've read 7 books in April 2023, 2 of them I DNF'd, 5 finished

⭐ My average rating this month was 4.5 stars, amazing!

📝 Most prominent author was Carissa Broadbent

📚 Books read in 2023: 39/52 - 75%

[books-coffee-and-the-woods]

Extremely Belated April Reading Wrap-Up

This post is a bit late as the past couple weeks have been hectic, what with the comic expo and then uhhh inadvisably rearranging my living room 😅 I read 9 books in April, which sounds good, but only 4 of those were actually off my TBR list 😬 Here's hoping I'm a bit more productive in May...

Read:

Blackfish City - Sam J. Miller (started in March)

The Night Eaters vol 1: She Eats the Night - Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda

Bubble - Sarah Morgan & Jordan Morris

Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall - Alexandra Lange

An Accident of Stars - Foz Meadows

Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries - Heather Fawcett

Even Greater Mistakes: Stories - Charlie Jane Anders

Winter Rose - Patricia McKillip

Princess Jellyfish vol 1 - Akiko Higashimura

Currently Reading (as of the end of April):

The Secret Country - Pamela Dean