March Madness

Much as I love to read, I often struggle to find the kind of time (i.e. hours and hours upon end) that I would like to have to spend reading. As an English teacher, reading is a large part of my job, and I spend lots of time reading student essays, test questions, and journals. Most of the time, this reading cannot compare to the reading that I would rather be doing. I do read every night before I go to sleep, and I find myself reading during at least one meal each day; I get snippets and tastes, but extended periods of reading times are generally confined to weekends and breaks from school. I become a reading monster during these precious hours of extra reading time, and so it is pretty easy to tell what time of the year it was on my list of books read!

As I've already mentioned, January and February were pretty dismal reading months for me. I got sick several times, I was slogging my way through East of Eden, and I was behind on my grading before the quarter even began (those of you who teach English know how this is possible; those of you who don't teach English should be thankful for your blissful ignorance). I usually have no trouble reading multiple books at once (a phenomenon that continues to stun and amaze my roommate, a strictly one-book-at-a-time reader), but I knew if I gave in and read something other than East of Eden, I would never go back and finish East of Eden. And I WANTED to finish East of Eden (that, Kari, is dedication!).

Thus it was that I was pleasantly surprised to find myself at the end of March with a quite respectable number of books under my belt. This is the first time I have been specific about the month in which I completed a book, and I am proud to say that I finished more than triple the number of books in March than I did in either January or February.

I may not know the first thing about college basketball (ask my friends; they will confirm this fact), but I got lots of reading done! Who needs basketball when you can read a book about a mysterious glass disease, a cursed girl who must complete three crazy tasks, and the backstory of the mysterious Weird Sisters. Here is the list of books I read in March:

Small Island
Lady Macbeth's Daughter
The Eyre Affair (audio)
A Homemade Life
Becoming Jane Eyre
Impossible
Firefly Lane (audio)
The Girl With the Glass Feet

My top three of the month were A Homemade Life, The Girl With the Glass Feet, and Impossible.