My Bookish Month of April 2021

Hi and welcome to another monthly overview!

April was another manic month that just flew by! Some days I was so busy at work that I hardly realised another day or even another week had gone by. I was also feeling quite stressed out, and to avoid worrying and to escape that downward spiral my thoughts were taking, I listened to heaps of audiobooks. I started a two-month Scribd trial period and I’ve been making the most of it! For the record: Scribd is like Netflix for books: you have unlimited access to their digital and audio libraries at a fixed monthly rate but you don’t own the books.

Now I managed to listen to 8 audiobooks through Scribd (almost 9, but JD Barker’s She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be is looooong) but after listening to a few books, Scribd started to cut me off, denying me access to certain popular and/or newer books. So yes, it’s cheaper than Audible, but the library is less extensive, and the access is clearly not unlimited. Not sure yet if I will stick with Scribd after my trial period.

Overall I had a rather busy but really good bookish month, as a matter of fact: in numbers it was the best month so far this year, and I even read the most pages since I started keeping track in January 2020. (I have no idea what happened, I did the maths twice cos I was sure it wasn’t possible.) I got to cross off quite a few ARCs, and a few older owned books as well. I worked on my Spanish, FairyLoot, non-fiction, Stephen King and Classics challenges. I had a few duds but many more books I really enjoyed and these were my favourites:

In figures April looks like this:

April
Novels: 7109 pages across 22 novels
Audiobooks: 69 hours across 9 audiobooks

And here’s what I did in April, and some of what I’ll be posting in May:

What I read:

Fidelity, Marco Missiroli
Lore, Alexandra Bracken
Everything Happens for a Reason, Katie Allen
Easter Egg, Jason Acar
Love Like Bleeding Out with an Empty Gun in Your Hand, Stephen J. Golds
The Perfect Lie, Jo Spain (review to follow)
Dead Secret, Noelle Holten
The Beautiful Ones, Silvia Moreno-Garcia
The Dinner Guest, B.P. Walter
Pelea de Gallos, María Fernanda Ampuero
Vulture, Bex Hogan
Later, Stephen King
One Last Time, Helga Flatland
The Easton Falls Massacre: Bigfoot’s Revenge, Holly Rae Garcia & Ryan Prentice Garcia
Such Pretty Things, Lisa Heathfield (review to follow)
The Therapist, Helen Flood (review to follow)
Thirteen Storeys, Jonathan Sims
The Shadow of the Gods, John Gwynne (review to follow)
The Last Girl, Goldy Moldavsky
The Wahls Protocol, Dr Terry Wahls
Black Widows, Cate Quinn
The Midnight Bargain, C.L. Polk (review to follow)

What I listened to:

The Babysitter, Phoebe Morgan
A Stranger in Town, Kelley Armstrong
Road to Tara: The Life of Margaret Mitchell, Anne Edwards
The Island, C.L. Taylor
A Caller’s Game, J.D. Barker
Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen
The Drowning Kind, Jennifer McMahon
The Twisted Ones, T. Kingfisher
Untamed Shore, Silvia Moreno-Garcia

What I read earlier but reviewed in April:

Facets of Death, Michael Stanley
In the Company of Strangers, Awais Khan
This Is How We Are Human, Louise Beech
Abberton House, Debbie Ioanna

I also shared an extract from The Source by Sarah Sultoon and I had a look at my first bookish quarter of the year, in pie charts.

Let’s have a look at the books that landed on my lap in April:

Two fantastic new additions to the Orenda collection:

Gorgeous proofs from Orbit, Vintage and Trapeze:

Two FairyLoot hardcovers:

A list-minute NetGalley approval, a Spanish book whose translation had caught my eye and I decided to read the original, 3 anticipated releases, 3 99p bargains, and a spur of the moment purchase I have Emma @ Damppebbles to blame / thank for:

Six audiobooks from Audible. I took full advantage of various Audible sales, treating myself to some audiobooks on my wishlist. I also got myself a few Cherringham novellas (at about a pound each, who can resist!):

I hope you had a good month and that you are safe and well! Thanks for joining me today and happy reading xxx