Marching off

The end of March, and a quarter of the way through the year after the year. Many readers have reported a slump in their reading (like many authors have noted lethargy where their writing is concerned) and I do understand that: the current global situation makes us all anxious and that hits us in different ways.

I find though that I can only really keep up my positivity through books; if I didn’t have access to books I’m not sure how I’d cope mentally because I’m an inveterate reader — social media, newspapers, food wrappers — and even my fallback, playing the piano, involves me doing a fair amount of sightreading scores.

Apologies, then, to those who are finding your literary mojo dampened: I do sympathise — even as I seek out the next thing to read, for my tottering TBR piles seem at the moment to be inexhaustible.

It turns out that all of the books I’ve read so far are books I already had on my shelves before the end of 2020, bar one — Gill Lewis’s Swan Song — which was a review copy I’d acquired from our local bookshop. And I also bought a copy of Ursula Le Guin’s The Complete Orsinia, which I’ll review separately even though I’ve already read and reviewed Orsinian Tales and Malafrena as individual works. Even so, my tally of 21 TBR Books in 2021 is already close to being completed.

I also semi-committed to various memes this month which I think I’ve managed to pull off: the Wales Readathon (two books), Reading Ireland Month (another two titles), March Magics (one novel by Terry Pratchett and two by Diana Wynne Jones), plus three countries for an ongoing European Reading Challenge — Ireland, Spain and Italy (though I’ve yet to review the last). I even reviewed a Jacobean masque for Reading the Theatre.

What will April bring? I think I will have just one prompt for this coming month — read what takes my fancy! (Though I rather suspect there will be one or two classics in there from my Classics Club challenge.) In fact I have a couple of reviews in hand to air soon, starting tomorrow. And, inspired by the annual Tolkien Reading Day, which takes place each March 25th to mark the defeat of Sauron, I’ve belatedly embarked on my sixth read of The Lord of the Rings, which I’ve read every decade or so since the late 60s — though of late the schedule seems to have somehow got out of synch.

And you? Do you feel you are on track with your plans for the year? Or have you, as I know some readers have discovered to their chagrin, lost your joy in reading? If so I do so commiserate, and hope it will return without too much delay.