January 2022 Wrap-Up

Welcome to the first wrap up post of 2022! Each month Ariel and I share our reading progress. We would love for you to give us your little update as well. I personally spend a lot of time looking for interesting books to read so if you know some, tell me in the comments! I might feature it on my list next month! 🙂

Kriti’s Selection

January was a month of innovations for me. I worked a lot on the blog and set up boundaries for myself and authors. I also got back into audiobooks and knitting has been quite relaxing. Here’s what I was upto while I was not planning out my wedding:

Total books read this month: 10
Number of personal picks: 3
Review copies: 7
Buddy Reads/ Book Club: 1
Indie Books: 4

Books:

• Time after time by Lisa Grunwald was my romance pick for the time-travel prompt. I loved this book so much! Learning about what life was like for women after the first world war and it’s contrast with later years, all set against the backdrop of Grand Central terminal… I was mesmerized by the characters and settings! You can find my full review on Goodreads and our romance wrap up post!
• I first mentioned Timekeeper by Tara Sim in our buddy reading list for this year! I enjoyed this Victorian historical Fantasy and look forward to reading the following two books. Ariel and my discussion will be up on Feb 12! Check out this book on Goodreads.
• The Thirteenth Hour by Trudie Skies stole my heart. See my gushing review here and be sure to add this book on your Goodreads TBR. It is brilliant! This is one of my favorite reviews.
• Where I can’t follow by Ashley Blooms had an interesting premise about being able to take a door and start a brand new life. Full review will be on the blog on Feb 15th! You can learn more about this book on Goodreads. Others have liked it a lot more than I did.
• Soundtracks: The Surprising Solution to Overthinking by Jon Acuff was what got me back into audiobooks! Recommended by my step mom, this is a powerful book about living and life and I have since recommended it to many other people. Varun is currently reading it and I hope you bring you our discussion later in February. Check out this on Goodreads. The audiobook is fantastic!
• Alice and Antius by Kit Ingram was my first book of the year. This illustrated poetry  is a feast for the eyes while offering a thought-provoking landscape to the mind. I loved how Kit approached this commentary on climate change and life through the lens of two Greek characters. Read my full review on Goodreads and stay tuned for the upcoming interview with Kit!
• Dio in the Dark by Riz Asad was an enjoyable novella where Greek gods are modern day characters! I liked Dio as the protagonist. So many times it’s the more powerful gods with physical strength and mental capabilities that are chosen as the main characters and that’s what makes this book unique – Dionysus is the god of wine, pleasure and fertility. He is immersed in partying and having fun but that does not mean he can’t come out of it and play a bigger role. Check out this book and my full review on Goodreads.
• Once I started, I could not stop reading The Dolphin House by Audrey Schulman. It is a hard read about experiments on dolphins during the 1960s as well as the treatment of women in that time. The main character is a deaf young woman who ends up befriending dolphins and in her care for them, agrees to teach one to speak English. This is a powerful read and I will have my full review on the blog in March but you can read my short review on Goodreads already! There was so much to learn from this one!
• With the paperback out soon, I was on the tour about Legends of the North Cascades by Jonathan Evison. I enjoyed this book about living in the mountains, parental relationships and much more! My full review is here. You can also find a shorter one on Goodreads.
• Author of Station Eleven, Emily St John Mandel is out with Sea of Tranquility in April and I got the review copy for it! 😀 😀 😀 I didn’t think I would read it by the end of January but it was brilliant and I could not put it down. Time travel is one of my favorite subgenres to read! Often, I find myself wanting to know its intricacies and how it came to be, but Sea of Tranquility is written so beautifully that the mystery at hand about the anomaly that the time traveler is investigating is way more important than how he time travels and how it affects him. The main idea is how he affects the timeline. Check out the shorter version of my review on Goodreads. I will post a longer one closer to publication date!

Total TBR: 205 (Jan 1) -> 217 (Feb 1)
I found so many amazing books this month (11 for my personal TBR and 14 for commitment) that it was impossible to practice constraint. 😀 Here are some noteworthy additions:

Commitment

• I have read about the Anishinabe in fictions like Crow Winter and more recently, The Moon of the Crusted Snow. Di-bayn-di-zi-win: An Ojibway-Anishinabe Pedagogy is a non-fiction that I received from Dundurn Press. I am excited to learn about the culture through an academic lens.
• Ariel recommended a horror to me which was fortunately still available for a review request. We will be sharing our collaborative review of All the White Spaces in the coming months! 
• I had only found The Dolphin House this month and was called to me so I decided to read it this month too. 
• After Blue Skinned Gods, I wanted to dive again into Indian mythology and am looking forward to reading Kaikeyi by Vaishnavi Patel. Kaikeyi was the third wife of Ram’s father and had a role to play in his exile from his kingdom. I am interested to learn her perspective, even if it does not touch on Ram. Let’s see!
• The Last Gifts of the Universe by Rory August is my latest addition from the author-review side of ARCs. Scifi and literary fiction together can be hard to come by and I am glad Rory brought her book to my attention!

Personal

• I had the honor to interview Marie Benedict this month and she mentioned The Mists of Avalon as one of her first memorable reads. That is why it is now on my TBR! In her words: “it was Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon with its ground-breaking, female-centric telling of the famed Arthurian legends — in which the focus was on Arthur’s wife Guinevere and his sister Morgan le Fay — that really opened my eyes to the hidden world of women’s stories. I began asking myself how “history” is really fashioned, and I wondered why these women’s stories not part of the history I’d been told. I became fascinated with unearthing the unknown stories of women from the past.”
• Vivek Shraya is an author my friend Heather follows and she recommended her latest, People Change. I await my borrowed copy from Heather in the mail!
• I added the two following books to Timekeeper to my TBR and hope to get back into that Victorian world as soon as I can: Chainbreaker and Firekeeper. Learn more about the series here.

See anything you want to read too? 

I am basking in the drive to read and share books and looking forward to writing about the worlds I visit. As much as I organize each month with its shortlist of books, I am realizing to take each book as a suggestion and when it is time to start a new book, go with what I truly feel like. In most cases it is one of  my shortlisted one anyways. 🙂

Ariel’s Selection for January

Notes and Summary: 

This year I decided I would be more active about my reading on Storygraph, to better track my statistics! I did a big overhaul of my TBR and deleted a lot of books that I don’t think I’ll be getting around to, so I’m excited to see where this new year brings between Kriti any my’s Romance reading challenge each month, Netgalley arcs, book tours, library backlists, and more!

Top Three Genres: Fantasy, LGBTQIA+, Sci-Fi
Top three book moods: Adventurous, emotional, & reflective
Top book plot pace: medium
Most common book size: 300-499 pages
Percentage of fiction books (vs. nonfiction): 85%

Number of Books: 13
Number of Pages: 3,617

Bookish Highlights of the Month:

• First Buddy Read of the Year: Timekeeper
• Five-Star of the Month: Light from Uncommon Stars
• Notable Netgalley: All the Horses of Iceland

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What was your favorite read for January? 

Thanks for reading! Have a wonderful reading month in February. 🙂