February 2014 Reads

Well, this certainly took a while. March is threatening to bludgeon me, and it’s very nearly defeated me eight days on. On top of everything, my Currently Reading stack is growing in heft, and I’ve only finished reading one book since this dratted month began—a reread, Slightly Dangerous by Mary Balogh, which I’ve realized to be one of the more influential books that set me down this path of historical romance glomming. Yes, I’m still making my way through the stack of books from the end of February—am steadily making progress with the Bryson, but have fallen behind on both Catton and Saunders duty. Shrug. And it’s not like I’m itching to get back on those two, haha: Once I get this post outta the way, I’m going to reread the stories from Lorrie Moore‘s Bark that need rereading. And, also: I’m pretty sure I’ll be sticking with Andy Weir‘s fascinating debut, The Martian, which is a very nice complementary read to the Bryson.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I? Right. Here are the books I read in February, which seems to me now to be very long ago. Also: That it seems to have lasted a curiously long time, judging from what I recall with the reading of these books. And it’s not even a goddamned leap year.

I was gathering the books above for this post, and wondered at each of them. I read the Michael Chabon just four weeks ago? Didn’t I give up (with differing degrees of frustrated glee) on Herman Koch and Dava Sobel and Susan Choi earlier than just this month? Why does my reading of those Batman stories seem, too firmly, already a memory? That I suffered S. seems to me very, very long ago. And, honestly: I’ve completely forgotten the Julia Quinn now. There’s that.

An as-curious counterpoint, though, to last month’s wrap-up: It was my first day of what would be an unintentional book ban. Yes, since it followed the January Sales of Ruination, it also meant that it was a ban on not eating well for about two weeks. I bought no books at all in February. None, at all. And though I seem to have made up for lost time the very first day of March, I can rationalize that, hey, I had to buy those books—my order for the New 52 Wonder Woman titles came in, and also hot damn I never expected to see the new Siri Hustvedt novel and the new Lorrie Moore so soon. Fine. Is this awe-inspiring self-control going to hold steady when the next paycheck trickles in? We’ll see.

While we’re on the subject of massive To-Be-Read piles, this February I wrote up the first of what I expect to be a lengthy series: The Annotated TBR. It is, on the surface, a short rundown of selected books from the TBR pile, with gentle reminders to myself re why I wanted these books so much in the first place. But we all know that it’s a guilt-tripping consolation.

PS — I know that there’s a lot of me online as it is, haha, but I recently-ish opened an Ask.fm account. There has been skeeviness, and there was one Anon who kept asking me about my shoes, but people have been asking me questions about books, so, well, there.