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April Wrap-Up and May TBR

Greetings travelers!

Another month has passed us by and I hope everyone is doing well in these trying times.

I will be the first to admit that I did not get through all of the books that I had wanted to this past month. Thanks to the new schedules at work and doing Camp NaNoWriMo in April, i didn't have as much time to read as I thought I would have.

In April, I started and finished:

  • Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis
  • Martin the Warrior by Brian Jacques
  • In the House in the Dark of the Woods by Laird Hunt
  • The Life-changing Manga of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo
  • Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
I ended up DNF'ing Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. I'll admit it may have been because I was listening to the audiobook and the accents were very strong for the characters but I also felt a bit uncomfortable with how one of the characters was treated in the opening pages. It just rubbed me wrong at the time and I'm not sure I want to go back and try it again.

I also started The Raven Boys by Maggie Steifvater but have not yet finished it.

As you may have noticed, this means I didn't finish the OWL's readathon in April but I have decided to give myself a little extension into May since I didn't actually start the readathon until about halfway through April. I only have three more books to read for this challenge, so it shouldn't take me too long.

With my Read through the Decades challenge, May is the 1940s. My options at the moment are:
  • Native Son by Richard Wright
  • The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
  • The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupery
  • The Stranger by Albert Camus
  • 1984 by George Orwell
  • A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
  • For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
  • A Street in Bronzeville by Gwendolyn Brooks
  • Hiroshima by John Hersey
As always, I want to read things I haven't read before, so I think I'm going to skip Wright, De Saint-Exupery, and Orwell. The actual reading selections will be determined by what is available at my library or through the Libby App (out of curiosity, would anyone be interested in a post about the Libby app? I'm not sponsored by them but I like this ebook and audiobook option more than I like audible and I'm a little annoyed not as many people know about it). Unfortunately, I'm not really drawn to any of the options here, so I might do some more research and find something else instead. I might try The Stranger or For Whom the Bell Tolls.

The rest of my TBR includes Queen of Hearts by Colleen Oaks, The Fork, the Witch, and the Worm by Christopher Paolini, The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater, The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, Gods Grave and Dark Dawn by Jay Kristoff, and maybe Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

A lot of potential but also a lot that I might not get through.

Part of me hopes May will give me the time to get through all this reading but at the same time, I hope things are able to get back to normal soon.

Please stay safe, everyone.

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