Rating system!
1/5 – ♡
2/5 – ♡♡
3/5 – ♡♡♡
4/5 – ♡♡♡♡
5/5 – ♡♡♡♡♡
(In order of first read to last read)
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February
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe – Fanny Flagg – 416 pages
Rating: ♡♡♡♡♡ 5/5
Night – Elie Wiesel – 120 pages
Rating: ♡♡♡♡ 4/5
Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury – 174 pages
Rating: ♡♡♡ 3/5
The Red Tent – Anita Diamant
(41 pages read)
Total Pages read: 751 pages
Daily reading rate: 27 pages
Overall, I’d have to say that I am please with my current reading rate, as I am only just getting back into the swing of reading. Thanks to an insanely packed schedule last semester, I was unable to read as often as I would have liked to and to get a reading rate of 27 pages is incredible for me.
I think that my goal for March is to read a wider variety of novels. I think I did fairly well this month in reading things that normally I wouldn’t, such as Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café, which actually ended up becoming one of my new favourite novels. One of my goals for the month of March is to finish reading The Red Tent and to also read Memoirs of a Geisha as I have heard from several people that it is an excellent novel. Another goal of mine is to read more poetry, as I rarely do, and I think that I will start by reading Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur.
–
March
The Red Tent – Anita Diamant (280/321 pages)
Rating: ♡♡♡ 3/5
Assassination Classroom #1 – Yūsei Matsui (184 pages)
Rating: ♡♡♡♡♡ 5/5
Assassination Classroom #2 – Yūsei Matsui (200 pages)
Rating: ♡♡♡♡♡ 5/5
Macbeth – William Shakespeare (219 pages)
Rating: ♡♡♡♡ 4/5
Total pages read: 883 pages
Daily reading rate: 28.5 pages
I’m extremely pleased with my reading rate for this month, as it is a page higher. However, I feel as if it was possible for it to be higher this month due to me reading two manga which are candy books. I tried to balance it out by re-reading Macbeth by William Shakespeare (which is my favourite out of all of his writing). While I’m pleased with the numbers in general, I would’ve liked to have gotten them through reading more challenging books.
This month frankly wasn’t the greatest for achieving last months goal, as I neither read (or even started) Memoirs of a Geisha nor a poetry book of any kind. I did finish The Red Tent (finally), so at least I did something that I had planned on lol. I was extremely busy this month, and was unable to get Memoirs of a Geisha from the library as I had planned. I still would like to read this, as it has been recommended to me by several family members. Despite this, I have an entirely different book in all aspects that I would like to read for the month of April, which would be Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, as well as reading a poetry book such as Milk and Honey.
Reviews
Assassination Classroom
Who doesn’t love the classic Japanese high school drama, with likeable characters, quirky teachers and the destruction of the Earth hanging over your head? Yep! That’s exactly what you get in this series. While the title may make it sound especially ominous, it is a truly lighthearted series with jokes upon jokes. This isn’t a difficult read in the slightest, but seeing the countless (failed) attempts upon the teacher’s life, who just so happens to be a weird….gooey tentacle character named Kuro-Sensei, it just has to bring a smile to your face. It sounds confusing, but it honestly is a really well written series.
Macbeth
Macbeth is by FAR my favourite out of all of Shakespeares pieces. With an interesting plot line and almost insane characters plus the added bonus of frequent murder, I mean I just had to fall in love with it. As this was my second time reading through the play, I was able to find more details throughout that I was previously oblivious to….thanks in part to the ‘No Fear’ copy that I had used 🙂
The Red Tent
A Christmas gift from my aunt, I had nothing else to read which resulted in me picking up this novel. I will say that I had.. mixed feelings about it throughout. My overall feeling was more of a word than a feeling: What? This piece that was set in biblical times ended up holding several twists and turns that I wasn’t expecting. The reason why I had rated it so low was due to my constant struggle between continuing reading and stopping. I am glad that my overall stubborn personality forced me to finish, however I do still have mixed feelings about it.
May/June
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Douglas Adams
200 pages
♡♡♡♡♡
Life, the Universe, and Everything
Douglas Adams
224 pages
♡♡♡♡♡
The Merchant of Venice
William Shakespeare
160 pages
♡♡♡
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
288 pages
♡♡♡♡
Daredevil: The Man without Fear
Frank Miller and John Romita Jr.
224 pages
♡♡♡♡♡
total pages read: 1096 pages
pages per week: 156.6 pages per week
pages per day: 22.3 pages per day
ahh I’m still not overly happy with my reading rate, despite finishing five things. Personally, I wish that the numbers were higher, but I’m still somewhat happy with what I did end up reading. After all, I achieve my goal of increasing my pages per day, with the added bonus of finishing everything that I read!
Honestly, this past bit I’ve been awful when it’s come to reading. I’m not going to sugar-coat it or blame it on homework (since I’m a procrastinator, I completely screwed myself out of reading time.. sigh). I’m actually kind of disappointed with myself because I didn’t make extra time to read thanks to me either cramming all of my homework in at the last second or wasting time watching kpop videos (which I don’t 100% regret, I just wished that I was better with my time so I could’ve read AND watched the loves of my life, but moving on from that). My goal for this summer is to complete the AP summer reading, despite not going into AP next year. I think that if I treat it the same way that I did last summer, I’ll be able to improve my reading greatly and establish a good habit for next year.
reviews!
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series
This honestly is one of my favourite series now, so rather than splitting them up, I decided to just put them together. I’ve wanted to read this for YEARS. Knowing it to be full of eccentric humour and endless confusion, I was ready to pick it up. Now when I say that I was ‘ready’, I don’t think that I knew exactly what that word meant when talking about this novel. Frankly, it’s confusing, contradictory yet cohesive, and above all, odd. I LOVED IT. This was just my style, using humour that you don’t typically find in everyday writing. It makes you think about things that you don’t normally think about, such as: mice, space, and the concept of freeways. If you are a literal person, I recommend it. If you are a poetry person, I recommend it. Even if your half dead from the stress of school and you just want the world to be destroyed before exam season starts up again, I got the thing to help you: THIS BOOK.
Daredevil: The Man Without Fear
Admittedly, I’m a massive sucker when it comes to superheroes/anti-heroes in red. Weird, but I honestly love both Daredevil and Deadpool, so that’s the only connection to the two seemingly opposite characters that I love. I first bought a copy of Daredevil after I had watched all of the episodes on Netflix, but I always seem to pick it back up when I’m stressed out over something, this time being exams and the amount of assignments I still have left to finish. Anyways, this edition is a collection of the first five issues of Daredevil and details his origin story and how he came to be Matt Murdock, the blind attorney and superhero. There are details in it that you can only find in the comics that were excluded from the TV show, such as why he refuses to break his moral code and goes into greater depth as to his connection with his religion. I honestly recommend both the comics and TV show for anyone who wants to find a bit of humour in Foggy or just wants to watch Matt Murdock beat some bad guys up.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Admittedly, I really really didn’t like this novel when I first read it. It was too flowery for my liking and there was nothing that I could hold onto or connect with that I typically search for in a story, but thanks to a writers seminar on Oscar Wilde, I decided to give it another shot. I feel like after learning more about Oscar Wilde and somewhat accepting that his writing wasn’t entirely my style, I was able to appreciate it more. Rather than searching for something or someone to latch onto, I tried to see things more from Dorian’s perspective, especially later on in the novel and I think that it did work. Overall, I’m happier with it the second time around than I was the first.