January Reading Update

The first month of the year has come to a close and I've made good progress in my reading list and reading challenges!

I knocked another book off The Well-Educated Mind novel list - The Portrait of a Lady.  I'm still not sure how I feel about this book - it was slow to start but really picked up towards the end. But it wasn't a happy ending (and I do enjoy a happy ending!). I'll update later in the week on my progress through the stages of inquiry and start the next book on the list - The Adventures on Huckleberry Finn.

I also entered a few challenges this year:

The first is the A-Z Reading Challenge. Instead of choosing my books ahead of time, I've just read through my stack and plugged the titles in wherever they fit. I imagine that towards the end of the year I will need to look for specific titles to fill the empty alphabet slots but, for now, I can just fit the titles in wherever. I finished four books for this challenge:

P - The Portrait of a Lady
D - Divergent
E - Eve & Adam
V - Vanished

Two of the books I finished would fit under the dystopian society genre (young adult novels). Eve & Adam by Michael Grant was okay. The premise was interesting - human cloning, and the story was interesting, but it was just okay. On the other hand, I really enjoyed Divergent by Veronica Roth. I finished it in about a day (I didn't do much else that day!) and my husband finished it just as quickly. I grabbed book two before him and he is impatiently waiting for me to finish!

The last book on the list, Vanished by Irene Hannon, was a book I received for review. I like the occasional murder mystery (as long as it's not too dark or disturbing) and this one fit the bill. Irene Hannon has written a ton of books and I was happy to find a bunch of them at the library.

The second  challenge of the year - Literary Exploration Reading Challenge. The goal is to read across a variety of genres through the year with three levels of challenge. I chose to read 12 different genres - the "Hard" level. I finished 3 books this month (with crossover from the other challenges):

Pulp: Heat Wave (Nick and I like watching Castle so I decided to give the Nikki Heat series a try. It was pretty good. Reads like the characters on the show.)
Victorian: The Portrait of a Lady
Young Adult: Eve & Adam

Besides the challenges listed above I also read a few other books this month:
The Tutor's Daughter (review book)
The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise (good book! I really enjoyed this one and highly recommend it.)
A Rush of Wings (a bit long but very good)
The Blessed Life (very good book!)

Here's what's coming up for February:
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
I am Half-Sick of Shadows
Insurgent
I've Got Your Number
Thursday Next in the Woman who Died a lot
The Way of the Wise
Picture Perfect
and a big stack of library books beside the recliner!