April was a great month of reading for me, and I’m reading at an insane pace once again. I finished my 50th book within the first few days of May, which means I could maybe hit 150 books read this year. However, before you get too excited about that number, please remember that I read a lot of romance novels. Probably 60% of what I read is romance, so that’s important to bear in mind. Thanks to the Bookly app, I’ll be able to deduce how long it takes me to read a romance versus a non-romance, and I’m interested in how the numbers compare! As one friend put it, even if I am reading a lot of romance, reading time is reading time and it all counts.
Anywho, here’s my reading wrap-up for the month of April:
April Reading List
In April, I read 10 books and abandoned one. Here were my favorites from this month:
- Overall favorite: Dreamland Burning by Jennifer Latham (review)
- Favorite romance: An Extraordinary Union by Alyssa Cole
- Other 4 and 5-star reads:
- Book I was lukewarm about: The Wife by Alafair Burke
- Book I didn’t like: Everybody’s Son by Thrity Umrigar (review)
- Book I abandoned: Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson
Other Book Stats
- Number of pages read: 2,992
- Breakdown of formats: e-books (6), physical copies (2), audiobooks (2)
- Book that took me the longest time to read: Everybody’s Son (12 days)
- Book that took me the shortest time to read: Remedial Rocket Science (1 day)
- Breakdown of genres: romance (5), nonfiction (2), fiction (1), YA (1), thriller (1)
- Number of diverse reads: 6 (60%)
- Where I sourced my books: library/Overdrive (7), Audible (1), Thriftbooks (1), Amazon (1)
- How much I spent this month: $3.86
Favorite Book Quotes
“We spend so much time being afraid of failure, afraid of rejection. But regret is the thing we should fear most. Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to.” – Born a Crime
“What I did not understand then was that the same pressures were weighing on us all. My entire community suffered from a lack of trust: we didn’t trust society to provide the basics of a good education, safety, access to good jobs, fairness in the justice system. And even as we distrusted the society around us, the culture that cornered us and told us were perpetually less, we distrusted each other. We did not trust our fathers to raise us, to provide for us. Because we trusted nothing, we endeavored to protect ourselves, boys becoming misogynistic and violent, girls turning duplicitous, all of us hopeless.” – Men We Reaped
“I understand now that history only moves forward in a straight line when we learn from it. Otherwise it loops past the same mistakes over and over again.” – Dreamland Burning
What was the best book you read in April?
Wow, you are KILLING IT! And even though it’s romance, it still counts! Romance is great. I enjoy reading it when I can. Light and fluffy and happy… sometimes, that’s what we need.
Exactly! I love mixing them in with heavier reads. Makes it much easier to get through those more dense books when I have a fun romance by my side. 🙂
I agree that reading time is reading time; it doesn’t matter what genre or type of book you are reading! So go you! I still need to read Born a Crime. 🙂
-Lauren
Exactly! I know people who don’t count their romances toward their overall reading count and it doesn’t make sense to me. It’s still reading! Ah.
Born a Crime is definitely worth a read! Hope you give it a try. 🙂
My favorite book that I read in April was “Alternate Side” by Anna Quindlen. She’s one of my favorite authors so I knew I’d love that book. I abandoned a book in April, too – it was my book club book. I felt bad giving up as I try to always finish book club books but I just couldn’t do it. So I read the cliff notes summary so I’d at least know what happened and just stayed a bit quiet during the discussion. Only 5 of us went to the meeting and 2 finished the book while the other 2 were still in the process of reading it so it clearly wasn’t a page turner for many of us… The 2 who finished it liked it, though.
What a solid month of reading for you!
I need to read some Anna Quindlen! I don’t think I’ve ever read her before. What’s your favorite book of hers?
Very impressed with your reading prowess, lady! I’m on my 30th book of the year and since I only ready 30 books in all of 2017, I’m pretty pleased with my progress so far. I should really jump on the e-books from the library, but I’ve really been enjoying reading real books lately.
30 books in 5 months is crazy progress! Nice job! Typically, I use my Kindle for my romances because I hate holding mass market paperbacks when I’m reading. But I love real books for all my other reads. There’s just something nice about holding a book in your hand!