#february reading wrap up

[theinquisitxor]

February 2023 Reading Wrap-Up

I read eight (8) books in February, which I am happy about, since Feb. is such a short month. I enjoyed most of the books I read, with genres that include fantasy, mythology, historical fiction, and others.

1.The Queen of Nothing by Holly Black (The Folk of the Air #3) 4/5 stars. I reread this on audio, and as with the first two books, I really enjoyed my reread of this series. I think these books are so much fun, and they were perfect to listen on audio. YA fantasy, audiobook

2.The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller 5/5 stars. I can't believe it's taken me this long to finally read this book. I deeply enjoyed this book, the writing, and the story. It broke my heart, even thought I knew what was going to happen. Mythology retelling, lgbt.

3.Elementals: Stories of Ice and Fire by AS Byatt. 3/5 stars. This is another one of Byatt's short story collections, which each story having some sort of fire/ice theme. I enjoyed some stories better than others. Literary Fiction/Speculative Fiction

4.Mysteries of Thorn Manor by Margaret Rogerson. 4.5/5 stars. This is the Sorcery of Thorns novella that recently came out. This was so cute and so much fun, and was a nice to visit the characters again from Sorcery of Thorns.

5.Kaikeyi by Vaishnavi Patel. 4/5 stars. This is a retelling of the Hindu epic, The Ramayana. I read The Ramayana for a class in college, so I was a little familiar with the story already. I enjoyed this book a lot more than I thought it would, and it had a lot of stuff that I really like in books. Ace main character, Court politics, character driven story, characters trying to make the world a better place. However, it seems like Hindu community is rather split on this book. Mythology Retelling.

6.The Stolen Heir by Holly Black. 4/5 stars. This was such a good continuation of a beloved series. It played into the strengths of what made tfota so good, but also delivered fresh new settings, characters, and plots. Holly Black knows how to stick an ending, and I can’t wait for book 2! YA fantasy.

7.A Column of Fire by Ken Follett (Kingsbridge 3) 3/5 stars. Not quite as good/enjoyable as the other Kingsbridge novels, but still very entertaining. This one takes place in the late 1500s, surrounding Queen Elizabeth and the French court. Lots of politics and the major historical events of this time period. Definitely a little different in scope/approach than the first two books. Historical Fiction.

8.Life in Medieval Europe: Fact and Fiction by Daniele Cybulskie 4/5 stars. I've been listening to Daniele Cybulskie's podcast- The Medieval Podcast- for several years, and I've been meaning to pick up some of her books. I thought this was a great little book debunking common stereotypes about the middle ages. This did a good job of introducing topics clarifying common misconceptions. Non-fiction.

3 fantasy, 2 mythology retellings, 1 lit fiction, 1 historical fiction, 1 nonfiction.

March reading goals:

A Day of Fallen Night by Samatha Shannon

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty

Expanse #7 by James SA Corty

The Evening and the Morning by Ken Follett

The Last Tale of the Flower Bride (if I can get the audiobook)

Velvet was the Night by Silvia Moreno Garcia

Legendborn by Tracy Deon (?)

A nonfiction

[tolive1000lives]

My 2024 reading wrap up through March! Only missing the last two books of the Witcher series, which were library books.

[nerdynatreads]

 ☆☆YouTube | Tumblr | Instagram | Storygraph ☆☆

february wrap up || I Don't Know if That's a Good Thing -- February Wrap Up || 10 books!

a great february reading month, even though I had a few letdowns! apart from the books I read specifically for videos, my breakdown was:

Reaper of Souls by Rena Barron ⭐⭐⭐

A Hard Day for a Hangover by Darynda Jones ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Harley Quinn & Power Girl by Amanda Conner ⭐⭐⭐

Well Traveled by Jen DeLuca ⭐⭐⭐

What if You & Me by Roni Loren ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Count Your Lucky Stars by Alexandria Bellefleur ⭐⭐⭐

Head Over Heels by Hannah Orenstein DNF

The Deep by Rivers Solomon ⭐⭐⭐⭐

[thefireflowermoonchild]

February Reading Wrap Up

⭐⭐⭐⭐ I set my reading goal for February to a grand total of 3 books solely because House of Flame and Shadow was 838 pages and I knew it was take the majority of the month to finish it. I already shared my thoughts about my first book of the month, The Silent Patient (⭐⭐⭐.75 rounded up), in my last post so I will link that here. I personally loved the third installment of the Crescent City…

[godzilla-reads]

Happy Last 🐸 Day of February 🥳

This month I read 17 books, bringing my yearly total to 31 books so far! My Top 3 Books were hard to choose because I had so many 5-star reads this month, but I did indeed choose three which are starred below in the official list:

⭐️ Earth Keeper: Reflections on the American Land by N. Scott Momaday

🎨 The Art of Faery by David Riché

🧧 Lunar New Year Love Story by Gene Luen Yang and LeUyen Pham

🧡 Blood Orange by Yaffa As

🔭 Saga Vol. 1 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples

🍄 The Mushroom Garden by Adam Oehlers

⭐️ Dealing With Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede

🍃 Leaf Litter by Jarod K. Anderson

🏔️ Think Like a Mountain by Aldo Leopold

⭐️ What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher

🌏 All Art is Ecological by Timothy Morton

🎲 The Last Session Vol. 1: Roll for Initiative by Jasmine Walls, Dozerdraws, and Micha Myers

🧚 The Door in the Hedge by Robin McKinley

🐸 Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher

💤 The Gargoyle by Garry Kilworth and Dan Williams

☀️ Little Witch Hazel: A Year in the Forest by Phoebe Wahl

💟 The Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems by N. Scott Momaday

[bigdreamsandwildthings]

February Wrap-Up

House of Flame and Shadow (Sarah J. Maas) ★★★★

The Heiress (Rachel Hawkins) (audio) ★★★★

Emily Wilde's Map of the Otherlands (Heather Fawcett) ★★★★

The Invocations (Krystal Sutherland) ★★★★★

One of Us is Dead (Jeneva Rose) (audio) ★★★1/2

Faebound (Saara El-Arifi) ★★

Flawless (Elsie Silver) ★★★★

The Fortune Seller (Rachel Kapelke-Dale) (audio) ★★★★1/2

Her Little Flowers (Shannon Morgan) ★★★★1/2

Let's be friends over on Goodreads (link)! I'd love to see what you're all reading.

[thecozybimbo]

january and february reads journal spread

[bookaddict24-7]

✨ I read 39 books in February ✨

• I own 24 of those books

• Favourite book of the month: You & Me by Tal Bauer

• Least favourite: The Block Shot by Kennedy Ryan

• I DNFed: 7 books

• I Unhauled: 5 books

[franticvampirereads]

February has been such a good reading month! I read so many romance books and that makes me so happy. Here’s what I read this month:

Omega’s Pretend Mate 4⭐️ {review}

Fake Dates and Mooncakes 5⭐️ {review}

Omega’s Midlife Love 4⭐️ {review}

F*ck and Fall In Love DNF @ 20%

Omega’s Tempting Fate 4⭐️ {review}

Magic Steps 4.5⭐️ {review}

Omega’s Secret Baby 3.75⭐️ {review}

Glass Syndrome 3⭐️ {review}

Squire 5⭐️ {review}

Omega’s Reluctant Mate 4⭐️ {review}

Take A Hint Dani Brown -currently reading

Headcase -currently reading

My favorite books this month were Squire and Fake Dates and Mooncakes! 😊

[moplayspoke]

18 books for February 💀

Insane.

Favorites (4.5->5⭐️) were, in no order:

- Belladonna

- Heartless Hunter

- One Dark Window

- Divine Rivals

- Ruthless Vows

- Peaches & Honey

The ones I liked but didn’t *love* (4-4.25⭐️) :

- Crowns of Nyaxia series

- When the Moon Hatched

- Two Twisted Crowns

- Foxglove

They were alright (3-3.75⭐️) :

- Daughter of No Worlds

- Mayluna

- Ever King

- The Road of Bones

- A River Enchanted

- Shadow Wolf

DNF or did not like (1-2⭐️):

- What Lies Beyond the Veil

- Gaill

I am actually planning on getting a special edition set of the Divine Rivals series. I loved the romance so much.

[thereadingchallengechallenge]

Read in February 2024

February started rough with me in the middle of a reading slump but I managed to get through 9 books in the end ^.^ most of them were fun, easy romances but I squeezed a few horror novels in there too. looking forward to having more downtime in March to try to tackle some meatier stories though

Series read: Marry Me Juliet trilogy by Jodi McAlister

Not Here to Make Friends - 3/5 (audio)

Backlog books:

The Lucky List by Rachael Lippincott - 4/5 (audio)

The Love Song of Ivy K Harlowe by Hannah Moskowitz - 5/5

Hani & Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating by Adiba Jaigirdar - 3/5

Hani & Ishu’s Guide to Real Roadtrips by Adiba Jaigirdar - 2/5

Other reads:

All This Time by Mikki Daughtry & Rachael Lippincott - 4/5 (audio)

Such Sharp Teeth by Rachel Harrison - 5/5 (audio)

She Drives Me Crazy by Kelly Quindlen - 4/5 (audio)

The River Has Teeth by Erica Waters - 3/5 (audio)

[bookishlyvintage]

everything I read in february [& thoughts]

[jasper-book-stash]

February 2024 Reading Wrap Up

I finished off my reading challenge with time to spare! So let's talk about the books I've read this month. I'm making this up before the end of the month, because I don't foresee myself finishing up my current book in the next few days.

Religious Text

None applicable.

1/10 - Why Did They Publish This?

A Book of Pagan Prayer | Ceisiwr Serith

This book sucked ass. Fucking Robert Graves in the bibliography, treating any "non-Abrahamic" (meaning not Christian, Catholic, or Jewish in this context) as Pagan-with-a-capital-P, a baffling usage of Zoroastrianism, using "Indian" instead of "Indigenous"/"Native American", misusing "shaman", the baffling choice to have a prayer that you need to use to prepare yourself to pray, sloppy editing, self-contradiction without realizing the author did that, and, dare I say, an overly-Wiccan syncretic approach.

I genuinely have no idea how it got published.

Hands-On Chaos Magic: Reality Manipulation through the Ovayki Current | Andrieh Vitimus

I damn near threw this one across the room within the first nine pages. Why are you citing a WHITE WOMAN when talking about hoodoo? Why is J K Rowling's Harry Potter book in the bibliography? Why does the bibliography suck overall?

2/10 - Trash

None applicable.

3/10 - Meh

None applicable.

4 to 6/10 - Mid-Tier

Witchcraft For Everyone: A No-Nonstense Guide to Creating Your Own Magical Practice | Sam Wise

I wrote my thoughts on this one in a separate post.

7 to 8/10 - Good With Caveats

From Sanctity to Sorcery: An Author’s Guide to Building Belief Structures and Magic Systems | Angeline Trevena

This is a perfectly passable book talking about religion and magic systems. But I still prefer Timothy Hickson's "On Writing and Worldbuilding" books and YouTube series (under the YouTuber name Hello Future Me).

Zendikar: In The Teeth Of Akoum | Robert Wintermute [reading challenge]

I'll admit, this one was a dredge to get through. I much prefer the short-and-sweet version of the story found through the WOTC website (or, even better, MTGLore.com). But hey, Nissa at least gets time to shine! She deserves something nice.

Memories & Memoirs: Essays, Poems, Stories, Letters by Contemporary Missouri Authors | Sharon Kinney-Hanson

This wasn't for a reading challenge, but rather, it was my book club book for this month (our theme was "biography"). I chose memoirs instead of an actual biography because I genuinely don't care about a lot of people who have biographies written about them.

But there was something...nice about this. It was nice, reading stuff by people like you in the place you live (admittedly 24 years ago). It's an experience I don't often get - not a lot of people set their stories in Missouri, and even less are from Missouri themselves. The best we usually get is traveling characters stopping to appreciate the St Louis Arch. So it was nice to be...seen.

Diadem: Worlds of Magic: Book of Names | John Peel [reading challenge]

This book has been on my TBR list for ten years, and I've finally read it. And it's pretty good! You can definitely tell that it's made for a particularly young audience (probably preteen at most, as the main protagonists are 12-ish) and is a product of its time (the mid-1990s). Baby (cough, preteen) Jasper would have gone hogwild over this, if they had bothered actually reading it when they got it. But to Current Jasper, it doesn't hit how they would have liked.

9/10 - Very Very Good

Snow White with the Red Hair, volumes 13-20 | Sorata Akiduki

Volumes 13 to 19 were 9/10, and volume 20 hit 10/10, but I'll just bundle them all together here. Snow White with the Red Hair is an ongoing manga series about a romance in a fantasy world (though notably, one that doesn't seem to actually have magic, merely fantastical creatures and plants). The main romance is a woman on the run from her home kingdom after her prince became obsessed with her due to her red hair, and the second prince of the neighboring kingdom, though neither really know each other when they meet. At this point in the story, they're fairly dedicated to seeing each other despite the woman working hard to be a proper royal herbalist (following her dreams) and the prince dealing with the politics of his older brother (who recently became king) and his land along with a dedicated loyalty to the woman.

It's surprisingly sappy and adorable, despite the fact that I don't typically read romance. These two characters and their friends have wormed their way into my heart.

Hide | Kiersten White [reading challenge]

Kiersten White is an author I recently started reading, and I absolutely adore her writing. In Hide, she captures the exact feeling of being a broke queer person in a conservative small-town and the danger that comes with it. Along with a more supernatural danger.

Can't Spell Treason Without Tea | Rebecca Thorne [reading challenge]

This is a damn fine story with damn fine characters, a loving and already-established relationship (where there's no "will they break up" drama), and a fascinating set of magic systems. My only real complaint here is that the stakes are much higher than what I expected from something marketed as "cozy fantasy". The settings and vibes often were more cozy, but there were higher stakes than what I expected, what with the dragons and the queen and- Well, it was a good book. It was inspired by Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree, but don't expect the two to be the same.

10/10 - Unironically Recommend To Everyone

Well, everyone who's into the genre these fall under, at least.

Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe | John Boswell

This is an incredibly in-depth look at exactly what it says it is - same-sex unions in premodern Europe (stretching back to ancient Greece and Rome) with comparisons to opposite-sex unions of the times. If you're interested in one or both sides of those, pick it up. Just be ready for the long haul; this book is 464 pages long and has multiple appendices.

[mildoctober]

FEBRUARY 2024

Watched:

The world is a rose | on rose symbolism

Riding Japan’s Fastest Moving Train

The First Minutes The Dinosaurs Went Extinct

Pas de Quatre Brooklyn Ballet

Read:

Standing on the shoulders of complex female characters

How to rewild yourself

For Jung, architecture was a tool to represent the psyche

Where the Little Helicopter on Mars Fits in the History of Aviation

Letters to a young poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

Fairytale scene’s nestle between the covers of Isobelle Ouzman’s Altered Books

Listened to:

Nick Cave - Loss, Yearning, Transcendence

Loving and Leaving

How to reclaim your artistic brain

[millennialgrandma]

February 2023 - Retroactive Words Recap

February was another lemon zesty month, characterized by minimal reading, absolutely no writing (except what was required for work), and negative fun.

Things I Read

Fiction:

Nonfiction:

Fanfiction:

Complete: (approx. 122.5k)

Where You Belong by ecaworks and @raven-m-3 (dramione, E, 3.5k)

Reread: The Vanishing Drawer by @sodamnradd (dramione, E, 3.9k)

That's Another Story by @magicaltraveler3 (theomione, E, 1.9k)

a cure for headaches by @whimsymanaged (dramione, E, 1.4k)

Reread: Wanted Man by @kittenshift-17 (hermione/thorfinn, E, 9.5k)

Boiling Point by rockthecasbah18 (dramione, E, 2.9k)

Reluctant by @ivmaruva and rockthecasbah18 (dramione, E, 2k)

Collected by rockthecasbah18 (various, E, 2.1k)

A Very Happy Accident by rockthecasbah18 (dramione, E, 2.5k)

Innuendo by rockthecasbah18 (dramione, E, 3.4k)

A Little Help from My Friend by rockthecasbah18 (dramione, E, 2k)

A Diverting Distraction by Oftendisenchanted (dramione, E, 5.1k)

Traditions by @raven-m-3 (dramione, E, 68.8k)

An Equal Exchange by @izzofiction (tomione, E, 7.4k)

Good Girls Get to Sit on Santa's Lap by @whimsymanaged (dramione, E, 3.3k)

No Regrets for the New Year by @whimsymanaged (dramione, E, 2.8k)

WIPs: (approx. 19k)

Kingdome Come by @inadaze22 and @jaxxartbox - Chapter 13-14 (dramione, E, 12.2k)

Good by @lovesbitca8 - Chapter 7 (dramione, E, 6.8k)

[godzilla-reads]

And with this final day I contemplate the end to February and celebrate the entrance into March (and hopefully Spring).

In February 2023 I read 16 books, bringing my yearly total to 36! My top three reads of Feb. have golden stars beside them.

Here’s the wrap-up!

⭐️ Ironside by Holly Black

💙 The Happy Prince and Other Tales by Oscar Wilde

💕 Lore Olympus Vol. 1 by Rachel Smythe

🐊 My Buddy, Killer Croc by Sara Farizan and Nicoletta Baldari

💛 The Legend of Auntie Po by Shing Yin Khor

🦜 Eric by Terry Pratchett

🦋 Monotone Blue by Nagabe

🕊️ Pulling the Wings Off Angels by K.J. Parker

⭐️ A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

🐉 The Book of the Dragon by Ciruelo Cabral

🍓 Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market by Omar Rayyan

⭐️ Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi

🎼 Dragonsong by Anne McCaffrey

⚔️ Once Upon a Time There Was a Very… Slack Wyrm: His First Book by Joshua Wright

🌊 Little Lost Dragon by Wayne Anderson

❤️ How to be a Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals by Sy Montgomery