TSS: April Reading Roundup

I have had such a good month in April, not because I read the most books for the year this month, because I didn't, but because for the most part I read my own books! I was particularly reminded that there was a reason why I go out of my way to buy the books that these particular authors write - because I really, really enjoy their work! Given that the month started with an emergency dash to the other side of the country I am pretty pleased with my reading month in most ways, including how many books I got through! The surprising thing was that reading my own books also was really beneficial for my library check outs as well - temporarily at least. I have already started rerequesting some of those books I had to return unread so we will see how that goes in the future!

Here is a list of the books that I read in April:

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins (4.5/5)
Tangled Webs by Anne Bishop (4/5)
When Twilight Burns by Colleen Gleason (4/5)**
The King's Favourite by Susan Holloway Scott (4/5)
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson (4.5/5)
The Duke of Shadows by Meredith Duran (4/5)
Tempt Me At Twilight by Lisa Kleypas (4/5)
The Endless Forest by Sara Donati (5/5)
Within the Hollow Crown by Margaret Campbell Barnes (3.5/5)

**Doesn't count for ROOB as I had started it before 1 April.

First things first, here is a recap of the rules of  the Reading Our Own Books Challenge that I was participating in. (You can read the full post here)

Each type of book you read will be assigned a value and the person with the lowest score wins.

The points values are:

• −5 points for reading a book from your TBR stack (owned before 15 March)
• −3 points for reading a review copy (review promised in April)
• −2 points for reading a library copy
• +6 points for reading a new book (owned or borrowed after 15 March)

So for this month I managed to read 7 books that I owned and 1 library copy, so my score was -38. In order to even out the variables like the fact that some of us read faster than others, or have more reading time, or like to read chunksters, in order to equalise the playing field, the score is divided by the number of books read, so my final score would be -4.5. Turns out that was enough for me to win, which I was very excited about! And my prize....more books! LOL!


I want to give a huge shout out to my fellow ROOB players. We had a lot of fun chatting through the month about how we were all going! So thanks to

• Vasilly (Natasha) from 1330v
• Carrie from Books and Movies
• Jennifer from The Literate Housewife Review
• Sarah from Puss Reboots
• Michelle from GalleySmith
• Beth from Beth Fish Reads

Honorary member: Jen from Devourer of Books

The good news is that we are talking about doing the challenge again in October, and we are currently talking about ways to include other people, and maybe a little tweaking of the rules to make it better for things like really old review books etc. Watch this space for more details!

So how did all this reading of my own books work out for all my ongoing challenges?

This month I watched the first couple of episodes of The Pacific, and so I made some progress on the Period Drama Challenge. I am looking forward to seeing more of the series and finding out what happens to the characters. I also have another Period Drama out from the library so I may even be able to complete this challenge. Actually, I might already have finished. Should check that out really!

I made no progress on a number of challenges. I don't actually expect to do any better on the Harry Potter Challenge before it finishes in July. I really should just declare challenge fail and be done with it on that one!

The book that I used for the Year of the Historical challenge for April was Colleen Gleason's book When Twilight Burns, which also counts towards the Vampire Series Challenge. This book and Tangled Webs by Anne Bishop both also counted as reads towards the Once Upon a Time IV challenge.

I made progress on the Romance Reading Challenge with the Meredith Duran book Duke of Shadows and Lisa Kleypas' Tempt Me at Midnight, and on the Chunkster challenge by reading The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest by Stieg Larsson and The Endless Forest by Sara Donati. The King's Favourite, The Endless Forest and Within the Hollow Crown all counted for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge with the latter two also counting for the Pub 2010 challenge.

I have passed halfway for the 100+ Reading Challenge, but the one downside of ROOB was that I didn't make much progress on the Support Your Local Library Challenge!

So there you have it. My April reading month in review. Did you have a good reading month in April?