Welcome to my late April and May wrap up! I normally manage to post my monthly wrap ups in the first few days of the new month but I was so late writing my April wrap up I thought it would be better just to combine the months. I haven’t been posting much recently because of exam season but it’s finally over so hopefully I can be more consistent with reading and posting. I did post quite a lot in April though! Here are my posts for in April and May:

• March Wrap Up
• Top 5 Wednesday: Sports
• Top 5 Wednesday: Swoon Worthy
• May Anticipated Releases
• Top 5 Wednesday: Surprising Reads
• Things I’m Looking Forward to This Spring/Summer
• Top 5 Wednesday: Adult Book Love
• June Anticipated Releases

I had fun doing a weekly blog challenge with T5W and actually managed to stick to it for a month which is pretty impressive to me, so I’ll probably try a few more different challenges.

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Reading Stats

April

I read 2 books and 676 pages with an average of 23 pages a day!

♡ my average rating was 3.75

♡ 1 physical books, 1 ebook (1 ARC)

♡ 1 thriller, 1 sci-fi

♡ 2 adult

May

I read 2 books and 560 pages with an average of 18 pages a day!

♡ my average rating was 4

♡ 1 physical books, 1 ebook (1 ARC)

♡ 1 short story collection, 1 contemporary

♡ 2 adult

Definitely slower months but all of the books I read were 3.5-4 stars so I had a fun time reading them.

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The Books

★★★★

I really enjoyed Portrait of a Thief, but not for the reasons you might think. Although I was excited by the heist plot, what really interested me was the promise of discussions on colonialism and museum, and heritage. The actual heists are fun as long as you suspend your disbelief, but I preferred reading about the characters and their different outlooks and all the themes discussed. Yerba Buena surprised me because apart from the sapphic romance I didn’t think I’d enjoy it too much, especially as a contemporary. However, I really loved that it was character-based, and how it was less focused on the romance and more on their development particularly Emilie. The last four star read was Her Body and Other Parties, a short story collection. There were two stories out of the eight that I really didn’t enjoy or understand but everything else was 4 stars and above. I really liked the overarching themes of gender and sexuality and the blend of genres such as horror, dystopia and magical realism.

★★★½

I also read The Martian, which I didn’t enjoy straight away and had to push myself to keep reading. I wasn’t a fan of all the maths and information overload, and some of the time it just felt like we were just jumping from one problem solved to another without anything meaningful. I did like the main character and his narration though, and things picked up later on, especially with the inclusion of other POVs.

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Thanks for reading! How is your month going?

—ella♥

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