March Reading Wrap-up and my April plans . . .

Sorry for the radio silence; my stomach bug relapsed on me and I was out of commission for a while.

Here today is the summary of my reading month in March, as well as a look forward to April. I prefer to do these big discussions with lots of books on YouTube: so much easier! The videos are below, but here's a summary:

I read 22 books in March.

6 were murder mysteries, three of them re-reads.
6 were works of non-fiction, encompassing journalistic work as well as memoir.
4 were books of poetry.
4 were speculative fiction (sci-fi and fantasy)
and only 2 (sad!) were literary fiction.

I think the reason I read so much was that I read so little literary fiction! Those naturally take me a bit longer to get through.

So far as format goes, I read 8 ebooks; the rest were physical copies (though I did read 2 ebooks of books I own in physical form).

Re: diversity, I decided to stop aiming for 30% authors of color across the board; I decided instead to just try and read at least 50 books by authors of color in 2015. If I read more than 150 books this year that will work out to less than 30%, but if I read more than 150 books this year . . . God help me.

This is to avoid book guilt. I have had the problem two months in a row where I plan to read (say) 12 books in a month, 4 by authors of color. Then, towards the end of the month, I have finished the planned list, am at my 30%, and want to do some re-reading of old favorites, often by a white author. Then I am in an upsetting situation where I feel like I'm Not Allowed to read whoever it is because it will mess up my percentages. So . . .that isn't going to work for me. 50 books it is.

Anyway, I read four books by authors of color this month so that will keep me on track for the 50 in a year goal, so yay!

As far as gender diversity, I read 11 books by women and 10 by men. One book was co-authored by a mixed-gender team. I know I read one book by someone who identified as LGBTQ but I didn't go looking up bios, either.

I list all 22 books in my video below, but I will say here that the three books I most enjoyed reading this month were (not in order):
Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf (this was a re-read for me and it was so much better the second time around!)
Transformations, by Anne Sexton
and
The Painted Veil, by W. Somerset Maugham.

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What I'm Reading for BookRiot's #readharder challenge

I'm a fan of BookRiot, so back in December or January or whenever-it-was when they devised a 2015 reading challenge, I thought it sounded like a lot of fun.

Here's a link, but the basic idea is to read your way through 24 categories of book:

A book written by someone when they were under the age of 25
A book written by someone when they were over the age of 65
A collection of short stories
A book published by an indie press
A book by or about someone that identifies as LGBTQ
A book by a person whose gender is different from your own
A book that takes place in Asia
A book by an author from Africa
A book that is by or about someone from an indigenous culture
A microhistory
A YA novel
A sci-fi novel
A romance novel
A National Book Award, Man Booker Prize or Pulitzer Prize winner from the last decade
A book that is a retelling of a classic story
An audiobook
A collection of poetry
A book that someone else has recommended to you
A book that was originally published in another language
A graphic novel, a graphic memoir or a collection of comics of any kind
A book that you would consider a guilty pleasure
A book published before 1850
A book published this year
A self-improvement book

I made up my list in January and have been chipping away at it since. Seemed like the sort of thing to share on my blog! So here you go: 24 books in 20 minutes.

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Wherein Rosemary Starts BookTubing

Amazing what a $40 webcam from BestBuy can do for ya.

I am going to continue to blog here for sure and I will keep content separate but related. Individual book reviews will go here; wrap-ups, summaries, TBR lists, really anything in which I want to discuss multiple books at a time — all that will go on BookTube. It's more fun and I think will take me less time overall . . . once I get the hang of it (I spent three painful hours trying to sync audio and video before I realized I had used the wrong software . . . yeah.)

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