March. March March March. You’re a funny one. March is always a bitter-sweet month, as it’s the month I left my home and my job and my friends and ran (or flew) as fast as I could to the other side of the planet. Even after three years (!!!) it does tend to leave me a little melancholy… though I definitely wouldn’t have it any other way!
So in celebration of 21 year old me going off on her own, and also to commemorate International Woman’s Day which was earlier in the month, I decided to dedicate March to reading feminist fiction. What could go wrong?!
I set a goal for myself that during the month of February I’d read books written by diverse authors. Being a white, anglophone reader means it’s very easy for my reading habits to become so “me centred” that I end up reading in a little bubble, a bubble that only reflects my own experiences and problems and joys. This month I wasn’t having any of it.
This month has been characterised by angry political marches and books that made me cry. What a great start to 2017! These are the titles that helped distract me (and ruin me emotionally) when global news became too much:
Here’s a book I read last year. It was was in my end of year wrap-up and was super bomb. And since it was so bomb, it gets its own separate review so that you can read it and think it’s bomb too. What a wonderful thing for all of us!
It doesn’t feel that long ago that I was living in the first city in the world to see the sun, being woken by my sister’s toy Pikachu so we could run out to the dawn concert before what ever Y2K was could destroy us all. That was 17 years ago, imagine!
“Aren’t you afraid of dying?” he asked Lila now.
She looked at him as if it were a strange question. And then she shook her head. “Death comes for everyone,” she said simply. “I’m not afraid of dying. But I am afraid of dying here.” She swept her hand over the room, the tavern, the city. “I’d rather die on an adventure than live standing still.”
Fireworks are gong off right now outside my window and they’re so sparkly and beautiful! Nov 5th is so great… though not if you’re Guy Fawkes going through three days of torture to buy your pals time to escape, only to find out the fools didn’t even leave the city. Seriously, people are ridic.
Another thing that’s ridic are some of the amazing books I read this month. There weren’t so many this time round, but there was some serious quality!
Six of Crows was one of those books that was on my list FOREVER. It kept getting shunted around my TBR and taking a backseat to books I had to read for work. But then Crooked Kingdom came out and I couldn’t put it off anymore. The hype got to me, ok guys?? yeesh.