Books read: 8
This month has been a good reading month. I’ve managed to get through 8 books in total, including some that I was really looking forward to. Some I liked more than others – I loved Hold Back the Stars for example, but Caraval was a massive disappointment (more coming soon in a full review).

• Hold Back the Stars – Katie Khan
• The Shadow Queen – C. J. Redwine
• Uprooted – Naomi Novik
• Caraval – Stephanie Garber
• The King’s Traitor – Jeff Wheeler
• Glass Sword – Victoria Aveyard
• The Hangman’s Daughter – Gavin G. Smith
• The Storm Sister – Lucinda Riley

Books acquired: 9
The first four on this list were all on sale on Amazon and hard to resist. A couple were charity shop buys and the others are ARCs from Netgalley.

• The Girl from Everywhere – Heidi Heiig
• The Power – Naomi Alderman
• Outlander – Diana Gabaldon
• The Storm Sister – Lucinda Riley
• On Chesil Beach – Ian McEwan
• Six Four – Hideo Yokoyama
• House of Names – Colm Tobin
• The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley – Hannah Tinti
• The Ice – Laline Paull

Blog posts published: 5
Given that I’ve only recently started regularly blogging again, this was a successful month for me in terms of reviews published. Posts with the most views were reviews of Let the Dead Speak and Red Rising.

• Top 5: A literary tour of Amsterdam
• Hold Back the Stars – Katie Khan
• Let the Dead Speak – Jane Casey
• Red Rising – Pierce Brown
• I’m Travelling Alone – Samuel Bjork

TBR for April:
This is slightly ambitious. Apart from The Magpie Murders and The Wise Man’s Fear, all of these are either library books or ARCs – so come with time pressures! I’m away for a couple of weekends this month as well, but hopefully the extra travel time will be a bonus for reading.

• House of Names – Colm Tobin
• The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley – Hannah Tinti
• The Ice – Laline Paull
• The Wise Man’s Fear – Patrick Rothfuss
• The Magpie Murders – Anthony Horowitz
• Vinegar Girl – Anne Tyler
• J – Howard Jacobson

Challenge progress:
Goodreads Challenge: My Goodreads reading goal is to read 50 books this year, which I’m easily going to meet, so I’m thinking about booking this up to 60. I’ve now completed 21 books – meaning that I’m currently ahead of schedule by 9 books. (21/50)

Beat the Backlist Challenge: I have a tonne of books on my shelf or on my Kindle that I haven’t read and that constantly get passed over in favour of ARCs or recent releases, so I’m joining Novel Knight’s Beat the Backlist challenge, which is all about knocking off titles that have been on your TBR for a while. The only rule is that books need to be published prior to 2017. I’m also only including books that I actually bought before the start of this year and have been sitting around waiting for me to read them – so no new purchases or library reads.

So far, only two of the books I’ve read in 2017 qualify, and none of them were in March. I’m doing terribly at this one, so I’m setting myself a relatively simple goal of 12 books for this challenge this year – one a month. Some of the books on my TBR list for this challenge include:

• The Essex Serpent – Sarah Perry
• The Vagrant – Peter Newman
• Rebel of the Sands – Alwyn Hamliton
• Ruby – Cynthia Bond
• All the Light We Cannot See – Anthony Doerr

How was your March? What was your favourite read?