Skip to main content

Month in Review: April 2011

We've had a beautiful April here in North Carolina, aside from all the tornado warnings and the damage that occurred a couple weeks ago just a few miles from here. In general, we've had a nice spring with warm weather and low humidity. And I've had a great month of reading!

Books Read in April: 10
I read a total of 10 books in April! Four were adult fiction:
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Serena by Ron Rash
Hotel Angeline: A Novel in 36 Voices
In the Lap of the Gods by Li Miao Lovett

Two were memoirs:
The Girl’s Guide to Homelessness by Brianna Karp
Moonwalking with Einstein by Josh Foer

Two were nonfiction/resource books: 
Amazing Crayon Drawing with Lee Hammond
Complete Guide to Walt Disney World by Julie and Mike Neal

And two were middle grade fiction books:
Aliens on Vacation by Clete Smith
The Mis-Adventures of Phillip Isaac Penn by Donna Peterson

Reviews Written: 6
This month, I wrote six reviews. You can click on the links above to read them.
Amazing Crayon Drawing with Lee Hammond
The Girl’s Guide to Homelessness by Brianna Karp
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Complete Guide to Disney by Julie and Mike Neal
Serena by Ron Rash
Moonwalking with Einstein by Josh Foer

Spring Reading Thing Challenge
I've read five of the nine books I committed to read during the spring, so I'm doing pretty well on this one.

This month, I read 7 e-books on my Nook. That brings me to a total of 15 for the year, which means I completed this challenge! I only needed to read a total of 12 e-books in 2011. I'll try to update my challenge page this week.

I read one book for this challenge, Serena by Ron Rash, so I finally have one book competed for this challenge!

This month, I read books that took place in four different states, Washington DC and China. I also had a few that didn't really fit into a specific state or country. Here's where the books I read in April took place:
California
North Carolina
Washington state (2)
FloridaWashington DC
China
Unknown (3)
That brings me to 11 out of 50 states covered, plus 4 additional countries. Here's my updated map:

View My Book Retreat in a larger map

NetGalley Month
At the beginning of the month, Red House Books declared April as NetGalley Month, so I decided to participate and read and review as many NetGalley books as I could in April. I ended up reading five NetGalley books in April, which was pretty good. They were Hotel Angeline: A Novel in 36 Voices, The Girl's Guide to Homelessness by Brianna Karp, The Complete Guide to Walt Disney World by Julie and Mike Neal, Aliens on Vacation by Clete Smith and The Mis-Adventures of Phillip Isaac Penn by Donna Peterson. I only reviewed The Girl's Guide and Aliens on Vacation so far.

Of course, as I focused on NetGalley, I ended up finding more books to read! So I still have two more to read and review: Made to Play! by Joel Henriques and The Keeper of Lost Causes by Jussi Adler-Olsen.
Labels:

Comments

  1. fredamansMay 2, 2011 at 11:23 AM

    Good month for reading!
    Happy May Reading!

    http://fredasvoice.blogspot.com/2011/04/april-monthly-news.html

    ReplyDelete
  2. EmilyMay 2, 2011 at 6:56 PM

    Thanks again for participating in NetGalley April :) You read some pretty cool books!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Her Royal OrangenessMay 3, 2011 at 6:33 PM

    Good work on the Where Are You Reading challenge! :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Thanks for stopping by! I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Popular posts from this blog

Getting back to blogging

It seems that blogging has dropped to the bottom of my list for the past year, and was pretty low for the year or two prior to that. I love to read, and am continuing to do so, but as my regular readers know I haven't been around much. My last blog post was almost a year ago!!

There are many things that have taken me away from blogging. Work has been much more challenging and interesting these past few years, but that means I really don't want to get back on the computer when I get home at night - or on the weekends.

Family life has been more busy with kids having multiple activities in the evenings, leaving little time to just hang out and write about the books that I read.

I will admit to a bit of a Facebook addiction, which means way too much time spent scrolling through my newsfeed instead of doing something more productive. This is one of the things I'm working on and hoping that this will free up some time for getting back to the blog.

Overall, life is good. Work is …
Post a Comment
Read more

Banned Books Week: Junie B. Jones by Barbara Park

This is the end of Banned Books Week and unfortunately, I haven't had a lot of time to write about banned books this year. But I did want to include at least one post about it, so today I wanted to share one of the book series that it seems most people are surprised to find on the list: Junie B. Jones by Barbara Park.

According to Wikipedia:
The Junie B. Jones series came in at #71 on the American Library Association's list of the Top 100 Banned or Challenged Books from 2000-2009. Reasons cited are poor social values taught by the books and Junie B. Jones not being considered a good role model due to her mouthiness and bad spelling/grammar. This is an interesting example of a banned book. Many times there are serious, controversial topics featured in books that are challenged. Things like homosexuality, drugs, vulgar language, etc. You can actually understand why people may not want their children to read those books, and why they may challenge their inclusion in school libra…
10 comments
Read more

April Reading Review

Where exactly did April go? I swear it was just the middle of March and now it's May. Once again, I'm going to provide a quick review of each of the books I read last month. For the last two weeks of the month, I participated in the Spring Into Horror Readathon hosted by Michelle at Seasons of Reading. The only rule was that you had to read at least one book that was horror, thriller, etc. I read one book that qualified. With the exception of the first book in my list, the books I mention below were read during the readathon


My book club's May selection was Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. I had started reading this nonfiction book about the author's work representing men, women and children who were on death row in March but finished the book in April. This is an eye-opening story that everyone at my book club discussion agreed should be required reading for law schools and police officers and even legislators who are making the laws related to judgements. I learned to…
3 comments
Read more