So January was a busy month. World news and craziness aside, I did a lot of reading and managed to either finish or begin reading four out of the five books I’d selected to read for the month.

1. Rejected Princesses by Jason Porath- I’m still working on this one, but I’ll finish it one of these days
2. The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien- I have a little less than 100 pages to go in this one. I’m going to try to finish it up tonight.
3. The Táin- translated by Ciaran Carson- It only took a couple of days to finish this one off. It helped that I had read a different translation before, and I was familiar with the large cast of characters.
4. Dewey by Vicki Myron – This was the first book I read in 2017.
5. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante – I only got through the first few pages, and while they were intriguing, I didn’t continue on. I have no idea why. I’ll try to return to it another time.

All in all, I finished eleven books in January. Not too bad for the first month:

1. Dewey by Vicki Myron
2. A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnot
3. Tolstoy and the Purple Chair by Nina Sankovitch
4. Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit
5. Traveing with Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor
6. Fifty-One Tales by Lord Dunsany
7. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
8. The Táin translated by Ciaran Carson
9. Think Like a Freak by Stephen D. Levitt and Steven Dubner
10. Browsings by Michael Dirda
11. All Roads Lead to Austen by Amy Elizabeth Smith

My reading was helped by the fact that I uninstalled Facebook from my phone, and read a few pages of an eBook instead of checking (and getting stressed out by) endless status updates. I keep up with the news just fine with my news apps, so I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything. And I’m getting a lot of reading done in the process. My attempts to wake up even twenty minutes earlier to do some reading have not worked out so well. I am not a morning person. Not at all. But I’ll keep trying.

My to-read list for February looks pretty exciting:

1.  The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Martian Chronicles by Isaac Asimov
3. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
4. Norse Tales by Neil Gaiman
5. Bellefleur by Joyce Carol Oates

I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to Norse Tales. Gaiman is re-telling the old myths in his own wonderfully weird storytelling style. It’s going to be great!