APRIL IN REVIEW

I wrote thirty-two reviews total in April. Twenty-five were for books published this month; so out of forty-nine DRCs I got that were publishing in April that's 51% of the total DRC haul. Quite a few, six of the twenty-four unwritten reviews or 25% of the unreviewed ones, are June-review bound because they're QUILTBAG stories.

I'm very pleased with this level of performance...I need to make a consistent effort to keep the current-month reviews at least that percentage of my total writing output. Otherwise I risk getting turned down by publishers and aggregators for things I really want. Like John of John, which I did not get despite raving about his previous books and my perfidious friend did. *sulphurous muttering*

There were three excellent reads in April: The Violence: My Family's Colombian War

and An Honest Living: A Memoir of Peculiar Itineraries,

...both memoirs and both highly politically charged on the non-fiction side. I'm glad I read both before May Day.

In fiction, the Azeri novel via those wallet-flatteners at New Vessel Press My Dreadful Body by Egana Djabbarova and translated by Lisa C. Hayden. It's a deeply involving and truly disturbing story of a woman's sociocultural experience of femaleness and the physicality of womanhood.

My favorite read of the month was, however, my biggest surprise: Self-Help from the Middle Ages: What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us About Living by Peter Jones, which I requested on a whim since I think about medieval times the way normal men do about the Roman Empire. It was enlightening, it was upsetting to my prejudices and ideas about the people of the times, and it humbled me for its astonishing and evident deep-diving into archives I did not know existed. Impressive work!

I didn't HATE my one Pearl-Ruled read, just...well, got squicked out by what it means, and whether I could really get behind that. Can't all be bangers, of course, or the very idea of the banger is meaningless.

My May plans involve mostly short-story collections and anthologies. I'm making this kind of round-up and planning report a monthly feature, unless it bombs totally because I already do a version of it on LibraryThing so why not go wide?