Overview: March Reading

The blog's been pretty quiet this last month, because I've been drowning in uni work. I've come up now for a quick breath of air, but I suspect I'll be pulled back down in a week or two. Apologies in advance for that.

My uni commitments also meant this wasn't a very prolific reading month for me. Reading in English also seems to interfere with my ability to slip back into German when I step out my front door or put away my book at the end of a bus trip. Nonetheless, here is my reading for the month, in all its underwhelming glory:

Reading Overview & Genre Breakdown

Books read in March: 14
Books read YTD: 49

Fiction Titles: 13

• 13 Romance (4 historical romance, 7 contemporary romance, 1 fantasy & 1 mixed anthology)

Non-Fiction Titles: 1

• 1 Social History/Theology

Since I started this feature in January, I've been playing around with what I want it to look like. The previous months have focused heavily on setting, but I'm not sure that interests anyone as much as it interests me, so I've come up with something new and different this month that I think has better long-term potential (and is less time-consuming so maybe I'll actually get these posts up on time, even if I am busy). Also, if you have any opinions about what you would like to see in these posts, feel free to give me a shout.

Noteworthy Novels

• An Extraordinary Union by Alyssa Cole
• Peter Darling by Austin Chant

Noteworthy Non-Fiction

• N/A  - I only read one NF book all month, although I suppose that means that Geering and God 1965 - 1971: The Heresy Trial that divided New Zealand wins by default!

Noteworthy Settings

• Neverland - Peter Darling by Austin Chant
• Antarctica - Heating it Up by Elizabeth Harmon
• Civil War-era American South - An Extraordinary Union by Alyssa Cole
• 1890s Boston - Against the Tide by Elizabeth Camden (review here)
• Sydney, Australia - Spiritbound by Dani Kristoff

Kick-ass Characters

• Elle from An Extraordinary Union by Alyssa Cole - Elle is a free woman with an eidetic memory, who goes undercover as a slave to pass information to the Union during the Civil War
• James Hook from Peter Darling by Austin Chant - not all anti-heroes wear capes, but James probably would if you gave him the chance

From the Internet this Month

• The Trauma of Facing Deportation by Rachel Aviv for the New Yorker - In January I reviewed A Time to Dance, A Time to Die by John Waller, in which Waller contends that the 1518 Dancing Plague of Strasbourg was a case of the subconscious mind physically manifesting psychological distress in cultural determined ways. In this long-form journalism piece that is both heartbreaking and enlightening, Aviv explores something potentially: children - largely from Roma and Uyghur families from the ex-Soviet and Yugoslav states - who fall into a coma-like state after their families are denied permanent asylum in Sweden, despite having nothing medically wrong with them.
• Danielle Steel Loves the Weather and Elmore Leonard Hates Exclamation Points: Literature by the Numbers by Ben Blatt at Publisher's Weekly - Particularly interesting to me is the way this data tells a story about the genre fiction/literary fiction divide
• The Diversity Gap in Children's Book Publishing, 2017 by Hannah Ehrlich at Lee & Low Books
• Why My "Read Across America Day" Was Different by Katie at Blavity - on Dr Seuss' racism
• How Not to Suppress Women's Criticism: On Neil Gaiman, Shirley Jackson, and the importance of not erasing women's writing by Carmen Maria Machado at Electric Lit
• Diversity, the Stella Count and the whiteness of Australian publishing by Natalie Kon-yu at the Conversation
• How Romance Novels 'Imagine a World in Which Women Can Win' by Eleanor J. Bader at Rewire