I am starting very late this evening, so how’s about an easy topic?

As in: the reading recap of my first month working towards my 2021 reading challenge!

As a reminder: I’m focusing on categories for the Around the Year challenge, choosing titles as they are randomly drawn from my “jar of prompts.”

I also have a fair percentage of titles chosen for the PopSugar and Book Riot challenges—a fact which became pertinent quicker than I planned it to.

And anyone who desires can see the full list of categories & planned titles on this spreadsheet.*

So without further ado, here’s the Around the Year categories I collected during the first month of the year.

• (#1) Related to “In the beginning…”—The Beginning of Everything by Robyn Schneider
• (#15) Features siblings as the main characters—The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
• (#17) With a Muslim character or author—Ayesha at Last by Uzma Jalaluddin
• (#22) Posted in one of the ATY Best Book of the Month threads—I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
• (#32) Cover shows more than 2 people—Hard Times Require Furious Dancing by Alice Walker
• (#36) Six or more words in the title—We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• (#39) Involving an immigrant—I am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika L. Sanchez
• (#44) Title contains a negative—I’m not Dying with You Tonight by Kimberly Jones & Gilly Segal

And then, because I was a little bit obsessively focused on earning all the badges in Amazon’s utterly-meaningless Kindle Challenge…

…I also collected a couple of PopSugar titles. (I read those on Kindle alongside of the ATY ink-and-paper books offered up by the jar of prompts.)

• (#20) Do-over or fresh starts—Black Panther: a Nation Under our Feet, v. 1 by Ta-Nehisi Coates & Brian Stelfreeze
• (#28) Set in a restaurant—Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl

So: 10 books for the month, all counting towards one of my challenge lists.

Now, 10 books sounds like a lot, but allow me to puncture the mythos here, at least a bit.

• 4 of these books were YA/youth titles.
• 1 was a slim book of poetry.
• 1 was a straight-up comic book.

No wonder I was able to finish some of these so quickly.

I expect the pace to slow down significantly this month. If I don’t start working on my grad school applications, I will be sunk, so that will cover my weekends and evenings for the next several weeks!

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*Once a stage manager, always a stage manager.

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Image credits:

• Mary Roberts Rinehart: Picryl, public domain.
• Kindle badges and January collage: by the author, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.