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I think I can safely say that April was an extremely good reading month for me. That was, admittedly, mostly due to the fact that April was O.W.L.s month, meaning that the community spirit and extra challenge through the readathon made me prioritise reading more than I usually do.

Not that I don’t usually read, I do, just slower and with more Youtube and series thrown in. This month, I barely watched anything. I was rather productive with regards to my research, though, so maybe the overall spirit of the month just was ‘getting things done away from my laptop’. I’m happy to say that I succeeded.

Two things stand out for me in my April reading:

  1. Apparently I was really in the mood for non-fiction and
  2. I’m still very bad at predicting what I might want to read.

Oh, and I managed to finish eight O.W.L.s even though I only aimed for three. (My April TBR & the explanation of the readathon are here.)

Rating-wise, April was a bit of a mixed bag, though: I read a couple of duds, some solid and entertaining reads, and a couple of new favourites. Here are all the books I finished this month in the order in which I finished them:

Nan Shepherd – The Living Mountain ★★★★☆.5

When I made my – tentative – O.W.L.s TBR at the beginning of the month, this book didn’t even feature on the horizon – because I didn’t own it yet. It was actually my first (though not only) ‘quarantine buy’ (thank you, local bookshop, who deliver by bike courier!). I flew through this short but lucid account of Nan Shepherd’s love for and walking excursions in the Scottish Cairngorm mountains in almost no time. It also gave me an O.W.L. in Charms (A book with a white cover), one of the O.W.L.s I was (almost) convinced I wouldn’t be doing because I couldn’t think of a book I might want to read.

J.K. Rowling – Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire ★★★☆☆.5 (audio)

I tend to pick up at least one audiobook per readathon, and usually it’s a Harry Potter one. (I’ve read the previous three on various similar occasions, as evidenced here, here, and here.) I still enjoy these books and they’re definitely comfort reads – and easy to listen to because the characters have distinct ways of speaking and I already know what is going on – but I’ve found that I tend to lower my rating over time, and Goblet of Fire was never my favourite to begin with. Got me an O.W.L. in Transfiguration (A book/series that contains shape-shifting), though it’s another one I didn’t plan on getting.

Robert Galbraith (JK Rowling) – The Cuckoo’s Calling ★☆☆☆☆.5 (audio)

Yet another J.K. Rowling book, this time published under a pseudonym. Now that I think of it, the rating is perhaps a bit harsh, but I really did not enjoy the ending and that has marred the whole experience. Up to the last few chapters or so, I thought this was a solid but not overly brilliant crime novel. Most of the characters were a little flat (this annoyed me about the detective’s sidekick, Robin, in particular), but the general progression of the plot, including the various hints and red herrings, was done well, if a bit dialoue-heavy. However, ultimately the book failed to convince me, and that has everything to do with who eventually turned out the killer, and their motivation.

Walt Whitman – Leaves of Grass ★★☆☆☆.5

This was an experimental pick in sofar as I know next to nothing about 19th century poetry (other than Poe), or Whitman. I can safely say that Leaves of Grass was an educating read, and I don’t actually regret picking up the collection. I can also see why this is an important, ground-breaking collection in 19th century American poetry, and I can appreciate Whitman’s craft. However, in the end I did not love Leaves of Grass – I found Whitman a clear-eyed observer, but an overly repetitive one (both in individual poems and in the collection as a whole), while I at the same time sometimes had trouble following the jumpy, otherworldly thoughts the poems present. This was my Potions O.W.L. pick (A book under 150 pages), and for such a short book it actually took me an awfully long time to finish this.

JRR Tolkien – The Two Towers ★★★★☆.5

This is, of course, a reread for me, even though I haven’t read The Two Towers nearly as often as Fellowship of the Ring. I think the last time I picked up this volume was in about 2010, so naturally I found – and greatly enjoyed! – a lot of details that I’d forgotten about. And, fitting well with my other reads this month, I was able to enjoy Tolkien’s landscape descriptions in a completely new way. [Sidenote: I’m also always amazed by how short these books are; they don’t feel short, in the best possible way.] This one gave me an O.W.L. in History of Magic (A book that contains witches/wizards).

J.D. Vance – Hillbilly Elegy ★★★★☆ (partly audio)

An insightful memoir that chronicles Vance’s own childhood experience as the descendant of Appalachian ‘hillbillies’, and how those experiences relate to the wider experiences of poor, rural, white Americans. I can’t actually properly evaluate Vance’s conclusions – I don’t know nearly enough about the topic to do so – but I found the book personal, well-structured, and well written, and thus definitely an enlightening and even enjoyable read. My O.W.L.s pick for Muggle Studies (A book from the perspective of a muggle/contemporary), even if J.D. Vance himself calls Yale ‘Hogwarts Law School’.

Archie Carr – So Excellent a Fishe: A Natural History of Sea Turtles ★★★☆☆

I originally picked this up as background reading for a research side-project and was happy to find that it fit one of the readathon prompts. A readable – if now slightly outdated – account of the conservation and study of sea turtles from one of the pioneers in sea turtle conservation. This gave me an O.W.L. in Care of Magical Creatures (A book with a creature with a beak on the cover), which is quite apt because tortoises are definitely magical creatures. 😉

Robert Macfarlane – Mountains of the Mind ★★★★★

I’ve only started reading Robert Macfarlane this year, but he has already managed to become a new favourite. I really enjoyed Landmarks in March, and I like Mountains of the Mind even better. There is just something in the way that Macfarlane combines literature, personal anecdotes, and history (of ideas, but also of actual mountaineering expeditions) that appeals to me a lot. I haven’t been this emotionally compromised by non-fiction in a long time, and even though it was probably to be expected (Macfarlane discusses some of my favourite things, after all), I was more than a bit surprised by just how much I enjoyed this book. This was my Herbology pick (Mimbulus Mimbletonia: A book title that starts with M).

And yes, I absolutely did skip the D.A.D.A. prompt (A book that takes place at sea/at the coast) even though I had half a million options for it. In the end I just didn’t feel like any of them, or at least not like any that I’d actually manage in the time I had left. Much as I like to challenge myself, I do not enjoy speeding through a 400 page book in a day or two, and even with the O.W.L.s I did manage to finish, I have at least six possible career options, which is ample to choose from. (I’m still planning to go for Herbologist, mostly because I still don’t know what I will be doing in August.)

Of the eight books I finished this month, only two were from my physical TBR (and not rereads) – Mountains of the Mind and Leaves of Grass – and both are books I only bought this year. Suffice it to say that I didn’t actually achieve anything with regards to the TBR clearout readathon, but at least I’m sticking with my habit of reading new books almost immediately.

[I did also finish a non-fiction introduction to global history for my PhD research/future teaching, but I won’t review that one here. Leave me a note if you’re really interested – it was in German, though.]