Bookends: January 2016

Did you all know it’s February?

Turns out it is, and it has been for nearly five days now. And I totally missed posting my Bookends post for January on February 1!

Part of this is simply losing track of time in the midst of all of the other things I’m doing, but part of it is related specifically to my being consumed with trying to organize my books and tags to make LibraryThing more usable for me. Although I find Goodreads more intuitive to use and more visually attractive than LibraryThing, I’m not keen on the Amazon/Goodreads connection (why must everything I do become a means for promoting someone else’s wealth?). I have a sense that Goodreads is better as a social network for readers while LibraryThing is better for cataloging books, but many people happily use LibraryThing for both. Knowing there are so many people who love LibraryThing, I’m trying to really dig in and see what I can do with it myself.

This digging into my library is rather distracting and is another part of why I lost track of where I was in the calendar and didn’t post my Bookends according to the schedule I devised for myself.

Oh, well. Late > Never. Or so they say.

Here’s what I read during the first month of 2016:

Grown-ups’ Books:

The Turner House by Angela Flournoy

Welcome to Braggsville by T. Geronimo Johnson

The Makioka Sisters by Junichuro Tanizaki (the SBC Selection for January)

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers by Yiyun Li

The Bassoon King by Rainn Wilson (stopped reading)

Kids’ Books:

Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick (read-aloud for our homeschool book club)

The Persian Cinderella by Shirley Climo (read-aloud picture book)

Matilda by Roald Dahl (audiobook, re-read)

Currently Reading

• The Histories by Herodotus (for my Cavalcade of Classics, as a never-ending read-aloud with my daughter)
• The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout (the SBC selection for February—there’s still time to read along with us!)
• Clementine by Sara Pennypacker (read-aloud with my kids)
• The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien (audiobook, re-re-read)

My To-Read List for February

• The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery (recommended by my daughter)

My Long-Shot To-Read List for February:

• Villette by Charlotte Brontë (Cavalcade of Classics)
• The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides (Cavalcade of Classics)
• Her by Harriet Lane (the last review copy I’ve been ignoring)

What have you enjoyed reading in the past month? What’s on your to-read list for February? If you blog your answer, please post a link in the comments (and/or link back to this post, if you’re so inclined).

Related articles

• 2015: My Year in Books
• 2014: My Year in Books
• 2013: My Year in Books
• 2012: My Year in Books
• 2011: My Year in Books