Monthly Wrap-Up: March 2018 + An Announcement

Welcome to the end of March! It’s time to wrap up what’s been going on the blog and what I’ve found in my blog hopping travels. I also have an announcement to share at the end of this post, so stay tuned until the end.

Book Reviews

• Take Your Medicine by Hannah Carmack | eARC Review: 2/5 Stars
• Zen for Beginners by Judith Blackstone & Zoran Josipovic: 2/5 Stars
• Girl Mans Up by M-E Girard | Audiobook Review: 5/5 Stars

Girl Mans Up was a 2017 read, but it took me a while to collect my thoughts and write them clearly for a review. It still stands that it’s one of the best audiobooks I have ever listened to.

Currently Reading

I’m sorta-kinda reading The Green Mile right now. I think I’ll end up DNFing it because I have a lot of other things distracting me.

Book Tags

• Wonder Woman vs. Narnia Book Tag
• Kiss Marry Cliff Tag

Discussion Posts

• 3 Types of Bookish Easter Egg Hunts
• A Guide to Twitter Hashtags for Book Bloggers

These posts put me up to 4 of my goal of 14 discussion posts for the year.

Reading Challenges

Fanfiction Reading Challenge: 71/300 chapters

Again, there has been no time for me to read more fanfiction this month. Even during Spring Break.

How are you guys doing on this challenge? Remember that you can also participate in a link-up where you share the stories you’ve been reading. You can follow click here to find the quarterly link-up, which closes April 8th.

Goodreads Reading Challenge: 12/30

I read Comus by Margaret Hodges, Paradise Lost by Pablo Auladell, Fetch: How a Bad Dog Brought Me Home by Nicole J. Georges, Paradise Regain’d by John Milton, and Songy of Paradise by Gary Panter.

Graphic Novel & Manga Reading Challenge: 4/12

Zen for Beginners counts for this. I’ll get around to writing the reviews for the three graphic novels above at some point because that will boost this to 7.

Library Love Challenge: /24

All of the Milton adaptations (Hodges’, Auladell’s, and Panter’s books) were library books. Fetch was the fourth library book I read this month.

Platypire Diversity Challenge: 3/11

Take Your Medicine features a couple lesbian characters and one who is definitely a person of color and who has a disability.

Fetch‘s human protagonist is bisexual.

Note: Girl Mans Up, a book full of diverse characters, doesn’t count for this because I only read it last year.

YA Reading Challenge: 2/10

Take Your Medicine is a YA book.

Les Misérables Chapter-a-Day Read-Along: 65/365

Sixty-five chapters puts me at the start of Fantine Book 8. This means I’m still in the first volume.

I’m having trouble catching up to this challenge, and I don’t think I can get fully caught up until May. But I love following the discussion on Twitter.

Language Learning Reading Challenge: 1/4

In February, we were to read about the history of the region, culture, or our target language. I read Zen for Beginners to try to learn something about one aspect of Japanese culture, and I didn’t care for the book.

Interesting Finds

For several months now, I’ve read a lot of blog posts complaining about characters who do bad things. I have also read a couple that aren’t sure how anyone can love these characters. This brings us to Kristen at Metaphors and Moonlight. She answers why readers love characters who do awful things.

One awful thing that a character can do is rape another character, which brings us to the rape narrative. Heather from Based on a True Story wrote about rape narratives in books. She also dives into what factors can make the narrative more uncomfortable.

Moving to lighter topics, I haven’t had a chance to check out a new movie in a while, so I was glad to see a book-vs-movie comparison of A Wrinkle in Time. Nicole from Feed Your Fiction Addiction wrote this comparison. This post covered changes that I worried about and changes that I didn’t expect.

Dani at Perspective of a Writer has been writing about K-Dramas on her blog lately. I love her post about Korean food that she wants to try after seeing them in K-Dramas. Are there dishes from books you’ve read or movies you’ve watched that you want to try?

Catriona from Little Book Owl made an interesting video where she prescribes books for your Bibliotherapy. This fun video was inspired by Children of Blood and Bone.

Sophia Lin from Bookwyrming Thoughts asks why we create content and why we continue creating it. It’s important to remember why we blog and remember our passions. This is a good segue to my announcement.

I am going on a one week hiatus from blogging.

This is for a couple of reasons. First, I’ve successfully blogged at least twice per week for more than a year. I’m proud of this, but it also means that I haven’t taken a real mental break from blogging. Second, I’m in the last weeks of the last semester of my undergraduate career, and I need to devote more energy to school right now. I need this short break, but I promise to be back on April 9th.

This means that there will be no new posts here for that week. However, I will still be active on Twitter (@MissCarrieLA) and Instagram (@catonthebookshelf), so you can still find out what I’m up to there.

See you all again on Monday, April 9th!