Total Books Read: 21
Fiction: 20
Non-Fiction: 1
Library Books: 4
Books On My TBR List: 4
Books in a Series: 10
Authors I’d Never Read Before: 9
Male/Female Authors: 1/20
Kindle Books: 4
Books I Owned or Bought: 6
Favourite Book(s): Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
Least Favourite Books: Nothing rated below a 3 this month
Books That Qualify For Challenges: 8
I feel as though January brought back my reading mojo after a pretty quiet November and December. There’s something about January that just feels like reading time. Last January I had a good reading month too, something about kids being on holidays, lazy warm summer days, I don’t know. I always feel like January is a good ‘reset’.
First month of the year also resulted in the first 10/10 rating for 2019 – Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. If you haven’t read this one yet, I highly recommend it. It’s such an amazing book in ways I cannot describe properly without ruining things but go ahead and check it out. Also I didn’t rate anything below a 3/5 on Goodreads and for such a high total of books, that’s a pretty damn good month. I’m using this spreadsheet to track my reading and it’s working out really well. I like being able to see at a glance via the pie charts what my percentages of ARCS/bought/library books are or how many books by POC I’ve read. It also helps keep my Reading Women Challenge organised as well, as I can see immediately which prompts I’ve ticked off, as there’s a tab for that.
Challenge update – I’m currently doing 2 challenges for this year: the Reading Women Challenge and the Australian Women Writers Challenge. In January I finished 8 books that counted towards a challenge and I think it was an even split. 4 for the RWC and 4 for the AWWC. I’m going to have to pick the pace up for the AWWC because I think I signed up to read/review 80 books for it this year and so far, that is not the sort of pace that is going to get me there!
Moving onto February. Here’s my TBR pile and it’s a bit of a whopper:
So there are 12 books on this pile but I’ve actually already read 2 of them (the reviews will be posted this month). I am more excited (and scared) than I can say about Vardaesia by Lynette Noni. I’m so ready to find out how this ends but I know there’s probably likely that everyone I love will not make it to the end alive. Also What I Like About Me by Jenna Guillaume! Jenna is so amazing and this is her debut novel and I can’t wait to get to know Maisie and learn her story. Also The Scholar by Dervla McTiernan takes us back to Cormac Reilly and I am totally here for it. The rest look like a good mix to keep things from getting too similar as well.
I also have a few other books I have an interest in reading this February – some for my RWC of course and I also bought 2 books today actually. One is the 2x winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards: No Friend But The Mountains by Behrouz Boochani, which won both the non-fiction title and the overall literary award. The amazing thing is that Boochani has been on Manus Island since 2013 and wrote the book basically by text message in Farsi. He was given special dispensation to enter the awards as he’s not an Australian citizen or permanent resident, which is a requirement. I have actually been curious about this for a while (I follow him, or whoever tweets for him on Twitter) and the announcement of these awards was enough for me to head out and pick myself up a copy. I also picked up Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi which I have seen lots of people praising highly.
Hopefully February is as successful a reading month as January.
All The Books I Can Read 
Love your stats breakdown!