My Bookish Month of March 2023

Hi and welcome to another monthly overview!

I can’t believe it’s April, can you?! The weeks have flown by and just like in February, I hardly know what I was doing. We had way too much rain, I know that, and only a few days of spring weather. Fortunately for me, I was at home during that brief spring spell, since I had a couple of days left to take up before the end of March. I took advantage of the balmy weather to get out in the garden with my audiobook to do some much needed weeding. I never thought I’d be the type of person to actually kinda enjoy that, but here we are 😄

My bookish month was great! I decided to give Kindle Unlimited another whirl since a couple of books on my list were not available on Scribd, but they were on KU and I figured it would be cheaper to take out a KU subscription for a month than to buy them all. (Look at me being all conscientious about my bookish spending 😂) And then Amazon offered me a discount for two months, so who was I to decline?! I really don’t want to renew my KU subscription after this period, since I already have Scribd, which is indispensable for my audiobooks (ah, first world problems 🙈), and it’s given me a real boost to read as many KU books as I can! (Although it doesn’t help that I keep adding books 😬)

Honourable mentions to The Acapulco, Thirty Days of Darkness, Horses, The Six Deaths of the Saint, The War Pianist, Unchartered Waters, Don’t Look Back and Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, but these were my favourite reads of the month:

In figures March looks like this:

March
Novels: 6434 pages across 21 books and 10 short stories
Audiobooks: 69 hours across 10 audiobooks

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

What I read:

The Acapulco, Simone Buchholz (review to follow)
Theme Music, T. Marie Vandelly
The Skeleton Key, Erin Kelly
Lonely Castle in the Mirror, Mizuki Tsujimura
The Wild, Claudia Martin (review to follow)
Thirty Days of Darkness, Jenny Lund Madsen
Horses, Paula Hammond (review to follow)
Poster Girl, Veronica Roth
Sacrificios humanos, María Fernanda Ampuero
The Lazarus Solution, Kjell Ola Dahl (review to follow)
The Six Deaths of the Saint, Alix E. Harrow
A Fatal Encounter in Tuscany, Vivian Conroy
What the Dead Know, Nghi Vo
Gone Again, Minka Kent
STOP!! Waking Up Tired … The Beginners Guide to Sleep, Ralph Montague (review to follow)
Out of the Mirror, Darkness, Garth Nix
The Candles Are Burning, Veronica Henry
Stockholm, Catherine Steadman
The Space Between Us, Doug Johnstone
Camp Slaughter, Sergio Gomez
The War Pianist, Mandy Robotham
Eighteen Seconds, Louise Beech (review to follow)
His Happy Place, Zakiya Dalila Harris
Uncharted Waters, Sally Hepworth
Shell Game, Rumaan Alam
Persephone, Lev Grossman
Nocturne, Alyssa Wees
Death at Paradise Palms, Steph Broadribb
After the Burning: Dystopian Stories, N.S. Ford
Catch Her in a Lie, Jess Lourey
Don’t Look Back, Jo Spain (review to follow)

What I listened to:

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Caitlin Doughty
The Sandman, Lars Kepler
The Art of Dying, Ambrose Parry
The Only Suspect, Louise Candlish
What Have We Done, Alex Finlay
The School for Good Mothers, Jessamine Chan
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Tennessee Williams
Cold People, Tom Rob Smith
The Blackhouse, Carole Johnstone
White Fox, Chen Jiatong

What I read earlier but reviewed in March:

End of Story, Louise Swanson
The Company, J.M. Varese

I also shared an excerpt from Beautiful Shining People and The Space Between Us, I had a look at what I’ve learnt from reading fiction and I revealed the cover of You Can’t See Me by Eva Björg Ægisdóttir.

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

Two paperbacks I decided to treat myself to (I read Bullet Train on Scribd last year but I really wanted to have a copy of my own), two for the Orenda collection (both of which I highly recommend you add to your collection as well), a signed finished copy of a fantastic police procedural (with much thanks to Laurence Westwood) and a proof courtesy of Orbit:

A Kindle freebie, two 99p deals, five NetGalley eARCs and a blog tour book:

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