This has become one of my favourite traditions. Tracking and writing about the books I’ve read every quarter. In these summary posts, I usually include a note about my favourite title from the quarter, write about my book goals and how those are going, and note which books I’ve currently got on the go. I love chatting about books, thinking about books, writing about books, but I don’t think that has an audience here. And then I read back through my last book summary post and I realized that I am the audience for these posts. That’s a good enough reason to keep going.
This is a 1st quarter write up, and covers January through March 2021. I read 20 books this quarter (two more than Q4 2020), and am still successfully tracking them on a Google Sheet. I not only track titles here, I also use it to track my “mini” reading goals. To note: I am doing a crap job on those mini goals.
LIKE CHOOSING A FAVOURITE CHILD
Choosing a favourite book is like choosing a favourite child…I assume. I only have the one kid, and he is my favourite. I tend to think in relative terms of “favourite books” and divide them further into categories like: recommended, hated, meh, loved. Keeping that in mind…
I read a lot of delicious cozy romances this quarter, and one terrifying horror book. The horror won out. This is very on brand for me. It was sneaky and gory and I loved every minute of it. Even (especially?) considering it caused me to be afraid of the spaces underneath my couch and bed. I’ve also now gathered a lot of great romance titles to recommend to people when they ask, which is to say, never.
I always start the year with a non-fiction book that I later realize has more significance than I first attributed to it. My first of 2021 smacked me upside the face with how much I have grown in the past few years. It is not my favourite of the quarter, not by a long shot. Instead I have chosen a book recommended to me during our first Accountability Club meet up for 2021 by my best friend and SIL. It really changed how I look at cleaning my home, keeping it clean, and other tasks I put off until they really stress me out. I have been recommending it to neurodiverse folks, or folks who otherwise have a hard time cleaning their homes for whatever reason.
ON DECK
I have approximately forty bajillion non-fiction books on the go at the moment, and the libraries have opened back up, and I finally got to visit our city’s brand new “flagship” library. I’m calling it the flagship library partly because it’s the biggest one in the city and partly because it actually looks like a ship. Second quarter is looking splendid, but I really have to find some Canadian & Indigenous authors to dig into!
FURTHER READING & RESOURCES
I haven’t been using Goodreads as much lately, especially considering (Amazon?) bought it up, but it’s still the best all-in-one-place resource I have found for book info. Someone please prove me wrong because it’s not great.
Read more about how I set “Numbers Goals” here.
Native American Romance Novels by Native Authors. (Book Riot) Unfortunately, none of the books recommended in that post are available at my library, but Book Riot is always helping me learn stuff and grow as a reader.
2020 New Releases by Indigenous Authors (Raven Reads)
Not Ladylike Community 
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