January 2021 Wrap Up | My Reading Month In Review

Intro

I cannot believe that it is February as I type this! I have no idea what happened to January! (Actually, I do. I was busy posting about it on instagram. In fact, the tl;dr is that I had a whole host of medical issues & grad school started.) January was a really busy month because I was doing readings for two intensive grad school courses as well as dealing with all those medical issues, so I read twenty three books this past month. Which is rather low for me. So, how was my month overall?  

What I Read This Month

Pretty good to be quite honest! I had four five star reads, The Queens Rising and The Queen’s Resistance by Rebecca Ross, Fire by Kristin Cashore and Namesake by Adrienne Young. 

I had a whole bunch of four star reads as well! My reread of A Court of Wings and Ruin was a four star. Other four star reads were: Sweet & Bitter Magic, The Once and Future Witches, A Sky Beyond the Storm, An Ember in the Ashes, The Lives of Saints, Master of One, and The Burning Shadow.  

As far as three star reads I had a few of those as well! Bitterblue, A Reaper at the Gates, Divine Blood, The Chalk Man, The Hiding Place, The Swallows, The Book of Two Ways, A Deal with the Elf King, The Assassin’s Blade, and To Love and to Loathe were all my three star reads.  

I only had one two star read: Truth, Lies and Second Dates.  

And I had no one star reads! Which is really fun. Sometimes I get one or two a month, but I think I picked books I knew I would like this month, and I think I did pretty well with that. 

My Thoughts

The most surprising thing this month for me was that Fire, was a five-star read. I liked Graceling and Bitterblue, but I adored Fire. And Namesake is now my highest rated Adrienne Young book!  I started several series, and some I plan to continue (Master of One, Origins) and others I don’t plan on continuing (Divine Blood). I also finished a few series’ and they had an epic conclusion. There were a few standalones I enjoyed by CJ Tudor and surprisingly I did not cry at Jodi Piccoult’s book. 

The most disappointing thing was that Deal with an Elf King I didn’t like as much. I really wanted to love the book, but I just thought it was okay. Kova has other works that are far superior to this one. I guess I was also disappointed in To Love and to Loathe because I didn’t enjoy it as much as the other book.  

I realized that I read a few novellas this month. Both for very popular series. I didn’t like The Assassin’s Blade as much as I wanted to. But it was nice to get backstory. The Lives of Saints was ridiculously gorgeous. The illustrations were beautiful and I enjoyed learning about the saints that make up that world. 

Looking to February…I don’t have a lot of books on my TBR. Mostly because my budget is shot due to medical issues. I don’t own a lot of TBR books at this point. (Only one; Wicked.) But I have a few books I own that I’m rereading that I didn’t like for some reason or another that are getting second chances before being sold or given away.  

Wicked, The Family Upstairs, Red Rising, Crier’s War, and There Will Come a Darkness are books I aim to read this month.

How was your January? What are you thinking of reading this month?