March was not a good reading month...

I did so good in February too. 9 books read in the shortest month of the year, but nothing in March. To be fair, it's my birthday month and I had a major project at work that I was tasked with, so I think I can be forgiven.

I used my March Audible credit on Black Out by Lisa Unger, a book that a coworker suggested I might like after she found out I like thrillers. Unfortunately my monthly credit renewal hits in the middle of the month so I really need to figure out my timing better. While I do see where my colleague is coming from regarding what I would like about it, I am barely 35% into it and am struggling really badly to get through it. I suppose for a lot of people the book wouldn't be a problem, but this summary did not tell me nearly enough to prepare me.

"On the surface, Annie’s life in a wealthy Florida suburb is happy. Her husband, Gray, loves her fiercely; together, they dote on their beautiful young daughter, Victory. But the bubble surrounding Annie is pricked when the demons of her past resurface. These are demons she can’t fully recall because of a highly dissociative state that allowed her to forget the violence of her earlier life as Ophelia March and to start over, under Gray’s protection, as Annie Powers. Disturbing events—the appearance of a familiar dark figure on the beach, the mysterious murder of her psychologist—trigger confusing memories for Annie, who realizes she must quickly piece them together before her past comes to claim her future and her daughter."

Now I ask of you. What about that includes any kind of decent trigger warnings? I suppose at the very base core, 'violence of her earlier life' implies something of course, but I sincerely do not believe it was encompassing enough. 

There are two key points that I believe make it difficult for me to enjoy this book. The aforementioned triggering response is one. Unger's writing of the events put me in the MC's shoes a little too clearly and that is truly frightening to me. The other is the flow of the story. I am going through the audiobook, which is perhaps the problem. It jumps so swiftly between the event timelines that I cannot tell where I am in time. When I mentioned this to my teammate, she mentioned that the written book makes it much clearer between sections. I already gave her back the physical copy as I didn't want anything to happen to it while it's taking me forever to read it.

I also started Lord of Shadows, the next installment in my Shadowhunters Chronicles journey. Book 2 in The Dark Artifices subseries, we are following the Blackthorne children and their friend and fellow ward Emma Carstairs as they moved back to the Los Angeles Institute, now under the direction of Uncle Arthur Blackthorne. It's been 5 years since the Dark War ended and the eldest two Blackthorne children, Helen and Mark, the half-faerie children of Andrew and his captor/love Nerissa have spent that time exiled, Helen and her wife Aline to Wrangel Island to study the wards, and Mark kidnapped and held hostage within the Wild Hunt.

Quite a bit of what I did get through prompted some additional research. Wrangel Island is a real place. The Wild Hunt is Odin's Wild Hunt. (This search was prompted by my recognition of the terminology from my Yule research as well as my rabbit holing after seeing season 6 of MTV's Teen Wolf.

I made a little more headway in my Stephen Fry narrated Sherlock Holmes, but I just wasn't feeling it much. I've also had a very difficult time finding a free to read/borrow copy of Carole Nelson Douglas' Good Night, Mr. Holmes and found one from archive.org, but it's difficult to efficiently read it from a mobile browser. Old challenge book choices were supposed to be The Lost Vintage by Ann Mah and The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, but I never felt like it.

I spent quite a bit of time watching television too. I worked through seasons 1 & 2 and half of 3 of Frankie Drake Mysteries. I really do so like the fictionalized 1920s. I also enjoy Canadian television much more than American, so there is that. I also broke down for my birthday and watched the entire series The Last Kingdom on Netflix from March 20th through March 28th. Can't wait for Seven Kings Must Die.

I also spent quite a bit of time fleshing out my reading planner more. I had way too many open browser tabs with book theme lists and anticipated releases for the year, so I spent some time getting those copied down. In researching a better reading spreadsheet because I am struggling to modify G's in a way that works for me, I found the Ultimate Reading Tracker by Renee at AddictedtoRomance. Renee managed to combine everything I loved about G's CAWPILE spreadsheet with the Excel sheet I was trying to create with predetermined lists of genres and subgenres and various other categories in a way that was customizable without a learning curve. I love it, I love it, I love it.

So April has already been a little more successful. I've got two books down for the month and feel confident that I will be able to get a couple more old challenge books done before the end of it. Or at least the two challenge books for this year at least. I'd like to actually finish more challenge months on time this year than I did last year.