Where did April go?! 3 books finished and 2 more collected volumes of X-Men!
There seems to have been a theme of red and black covers for April, and two of these were mysteries, and two of them are supernatural! The month went back so fast I can’t remember what happened, but I’m on a good run of 4 star books at the moment, and especially audiobooks!
3 books read: 2 audiobooks and an ebook!
Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix ⭐⭐⭐⭐
🎧 I enjoyed this one a lot and it had more depth and sensitivity than I expected. A love a book about witches that actually has some witchcraft in it, although it has some harrowing childbirth scenes!
A Man With One Of Those Faces by Caimh McDonnell ⭐⭐⭐⭐
I’ve had this eBook for years, and I finally read it! This was so much fun. I loved the Irish humour in it, and I’ll read more in this series for sure. Maybe on audio, though. I think that could be even more fun!
Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch ⭐⭐⭐⭐
🎧 I’ve almost read this book countless times over the years, and now I finally gave it a go on audio I’m so happy I did! It’s a fun easy read and the narrator is wonderful. A bit too heavy on the male gaze for me but entertaining regardless! It was good motivation for my longest Sunday runs this month.
Marvel Unlimited
I slowed down a bit getting through X-Men, but I am still really enjoying them!
Marvel Masterworks: The Uncanny X-Men, Vol. 5
Collecting X-Men #132-140.
The Hellfire Club and the conclusion to the Dark Phoenix Saga were absolutely fantastic. The Hellfire Club are great villains, and believable as rich assholes with their own internal power struggle between Sebastian Shaw and Mastermind.
Unfortunately, Emma Frost was a mere side character (I don’t think she was even in this, just referenced as The White Queen), but I look forward to her recurring at some point.
Then the X-Men get beamed to space and just fight against the Imperial Guard to try to save Jean’s life, and in typically X-Men still this doesn’t go well for them and ends in tragedy. Sure Jean has “died” I think three times at this point but this one feels more permanent. The comic takes time to explore the emotional effect on each member of the team, but especially Scott, and I found it genuinely moving.
I have watched the 90s cartoon, and most of the plots are the same, even if the team is a bit different, but I don’t think I’d noticed just how much the X-Men lose. I am having a hard time remembering a time when they had a decisive victory! They spent most of the time captured and getting beaten up, and even if they do defeat the villain, it’s usually at some horrible cost. It’s this that makes them so interesting; they keep fighting, and they never give up.
The last few issues are Wolverine and Nightcrawler in Canada fighting the Wendigo with Alpha Flight. That gave a bit more background and development for Wolverine (including Kurt learning his name is Logan!) that added another delicious layer to the character.
It seems the next few issues are going to developed Kitty as a newest student at the School (which doesn’t have any other students!)
Marvel Masterworks: The Uncanny X-Men, Vol. 6
Collecting X-Men #141-150.
Arcade is back but this time with Doom, and I enjoyed Murderworld much more! Cyclops has left the team to deal with his grief over Jean’s (latest) death, and now Storm is the leader of the X-Men and she’s doing a great job.
The end of this collection sees the return of Magneto… Dressing a shipwrecked Scott up in a sexy outfit for reasons that are unclear!
This collection also has the Christmas issue where a Kitty fights a demon alone, that’s a great one!
Kitty is still an annoying “spunky” teenager, but that’s her character, hopefully, she’ll stop doing stupid stuff soon. The X-Men have a lot of patience for her (except Prof. X!), so I should too!
Currently reading
I got Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty through the Library, but I very quickly DNF’d because it was unbelievably dull! I listened to about half of Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman by Robert K. Massie on Spotify, and was surprisingly gripped by it given its non-fiction, but then I ran out of audiobook hours.. and then my subscription ran out. I’m not sure if I’m going to renew it yet (the £99 gift card from Amazon “hack” seems to have closed now), but I need another service to get audiobook my Library doesn’t have (it doesn’t have this one) so I might end up subscribing to Audible and finishing it on there.
In the meantime, I have just started listening to The Last Devil To Die (Thursday Murder Club #4) and loving it. On my Kindle I’m re-reading (finally) Babylon’s Ashes (The Expanse #6), which is taking as long to get going as I remember it did the first time around, but I still enjoy being in the world and with the crew of the Roci!
Adding to TBR
I did buy a couple of books this month through Kobo! This involved working out how to use Adobe Digital Editions to download and convert the ePub so I could load it into my Calibre Library and transfer it via USB to my Kindle, which took me a minute, but we’re all set up now. I’ve got a wishlist on the Kobo store and have been watching that, I also still have my wishlist on Amazon and looking at both, I’m finding they usually pop up for 99p in both places.
Anyway, I got One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston and The Blue Castle by L. M. Montgomery because they were both 99p and recommended by Plant Based Bride in her YouTube video of Romance books she enjoyed. I’ve found she has the same complaints about romance books as I do, and almost the same Emily Henry book ranking as me, so I thought I’d give these a try. I also just got Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino, which was almost on my My 10 Most Anticipated Book Releases for 2025 list, but didn’t quite make the cut for reasons I can’t remember now!
Book Tag/TTT!
I’m really loving joining in with Top Ten Tuesday! I’ve now added a category to my blog for these posts to make them easier to find. It is a really fun way to find new blogs and potential book friends.
- Unpopular Opinions on Books
- 10 Books with Renewed Perspectives for Spring
- 10 Books That Surprised Me
- 10 Fiction Books with ‘Museum’ in the Title
I actually missed a week this month, I missed April 1: Books You’d be a Fool Not to Read because I was too exhausted that week, and the prompt also didn’t inspire me. It felt like too much hard work at the time!
