March was a mixed bag – I started with all the enthusiasm and romped through three books… and then sort of lost steam and ended up in a slump where I started three different books and just abandoned them after a couple of chapters. Hey ho. Such is life.

I also didn’t listen to any Audiobooks this month – it’s hard to find the time when the kids are home and I need to be two teachers at once.

The five books I finished take my total up to 21 books finished in 2021 so far, which is still 5 books ahead of where GoodReads says I need to be to hit my reading target for the year.

What I Read

• A Life On Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future by Sir David Attenborough: 5* – Ugh, this book. Starting with an autobiography of everything Sir David Attenborough has seen and done, full of wonder and delights, but always with a simmering undercurrent of unease as the man vs nature balance tipped more and more the wrong way. Then came Part 2. His logical, scientifically and environmentally based predictions for the next 100 years if we all carry on as we are. Ouch. Just, wow. It’s bleak, folks, really bleak. Parts 3 and 4 outlined his ideas and solutions about how we can maybe not send our planet into a spiral of destruction at our own greedy hands – they are practical and achievable and just require EVERYONE changing their attitudes and lifestyles a little bit, and working together to address the broken balance. I finished up feeling desperately hopeful, but also a little glum and despairing because my current faith in humanity to do the right thing is… low.
• Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey: 3.5*– This was a pretty quick read, once I got used to the style which was a little pretentious at times. A good old dragon adventure with time travel and a healthy dose of romance – it was enjoyable enough, but I’m not rushing out to read the other 30+ books in the series.
• Phyllis and the Fossil Finders by Twinkl: 4* – Arthur and I read this together (taking it in turns to read a page each) as part of his home-schooling. It was sent by Twinkl and had various activities and exercises related to it that Arthur completed after reading a few chapters each day. A simple but exciting adventure where a group of friends living on the Jurassic Coast find a fossil struck by lightning which magically comes to life. Which is incredible… but what do you do with a living fossil?! What does it eat?! The friends work together to try and do the best thing for Phyllis, learning some important lessons about friendship along the way. You could tell this was written to be an educational book – you could pull out sections and spot all the bits and pieces of grammar that KS2 focuses on, but that didn’t take away from the story and actually made it even easier to engage with for Arthur.
• Liberty & Justice For All: A Marvel; Xavier’s Institute Novel by Carrie Harris: 5*– I won this as part of a bundle on instagram and it was surprisingly good. Tie-in and spin-off novels can sometimes be a bit one-dimensional, or rely very heavily on you already knowing characters and their backstories, but this was neither of those. The characters all had development arcs, there was a meaningful plot, it didn’t matter that my recall of details about the X-Men were sketchy at best, and it was genuinely exciting. The next generation of X-Men are being trained up by Cyclops and some other familiar old faces, but Tempus and Triage find themselves on their own when a simple training mission is interrupted by a genuine call for help from a fellow Mutant.
• Ruin & Rising by Leigh Bardugo: 5* – I was pleasantly surprised by the ending of this trilogy. I feel like all the characters got the ending they ultimately deserved and I am very excited to see how the TV series shapes up in April.

Something has begun…

Many things began, but due to no faults of their own, none of them are going to be finished just now. I will start them again when I’m in the right frame of mind!