just finished: After a couple of really stressful weeks, things will be easing after another week or so, and I am looking forward to just putting my head down and getting a bunch of books read in April. But first, this week. I finally finished Just Eat, one man’s experience with the world of dieting for weight loss. He did so much research! But he found his way, and he wrote a really good book about it all. I also finally finished Too Good to Be True, which is such a crazy ride. I thought I knew where the story was going, and then it took a crazy turn. And another one. And another one. So much drama! But it was amazing, and I’ll be spilling more of the tea one day this week.

currently reading: I have just started All You Knead Is Love, about a spirited 12-year-old girl who is sent to Spain to live with her grandmother for a while, so her parents have some time to work on their issues. Alba is not excited about being sent halfway around the world to live with a grandmother she hadn’t seen in a decade, but once she arrives, she starts to make a home for herself and find new hobbies (if you can’t tell from the title, her grandmother has a bakery). I’m not very far into the book yet, but I think I’m going to love it. I’m also 10-50% through about a dozen other books. I have a habit of starting a book and setting it aside, so there are many I need to get back to. I’m hoping April will give me a chance to clean some of that up.

up next: April books! There are a lot of good books coming out in April, so get your TBRs ready! Jennifer McMahon’s The Drowning Kind. Jenny Lawson’s Broken (In the Best Possible Way). New cookbooks from Nigella Lawson and Eric Ripert. Leslie Jordan’s How Y’all Doing? Joshilyn Jackson’s Mother May I. And the one I have been waiting for the most, Alexander McCall Smith’s Your Inner Hedgehog, the fifth book about romance linguist Professor Dr. Dr. Moritz-Maria Von Igelfeld, who I fell in love with many, many years ago from the shelf of a Borders bookstore (so, clearly, a long time ago! #sadface). As prolific a writer as McCall Smith is, the Von Igelfeld books are a rarity and genuinely something to celebrate and cherish. I wasn’t able to score an early version of this one (I haven’t even seen an early copy offered), but my Amazon Kindle pre-order is set. I am ready and waiting for my inner hedgehog to show up April 6!

__________________

2021 reading goal check-in: I have set myself some reading goals for 2021. Some of those goals are about how many books I want to read (I set my Goodreads goal for 225), or listen to (60 audiobooks). But other goals are to finally read classics that I missed when I was younger (Little Women, Jane Eyre), to read a Shakespeare play (Othello or King Lear, because I am less familiar with those), and to read Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, because while I’ve read many of his books through the years, I have not ready any of his set in Botswana. I will try to check in quarterly and see how far I’ve gotten. Here’s my full list: