The first month of this new year was pretty rough – my fibro’s been going haywire, and I just learned yesterday that they’re discontinuing the medication I take for it.

Thank the gods for books, amirite?

ARCs Received

I was beyond spoiled with amazing ARCs this month! I mean, just LOOK at these! So many of my most-anticipated – and so far, all the ones I’ve started reading? Have been SUBLIME.

Read

20 books read this month – five less than in December, but considering all my health issues this month, I’m satisfied. Quite a few rereads, mostly in preparation for their sequels. Lost In The Moment and Found was an excellent addition to the Wayward Children series; The Sphere of Winds was absolutely worth waiting ten years for; and I Keep My Skeletons To Myself became my first best-of-2023 read (I plan on trying to review it, but we’ll see if I can do it justice.) Whereas The Eidolon was very much my second; I wish I’d taken a picture, because I had literal goosebumps as I read the final page!

To the best of my knowledge, 12.50% of this month’s authors were BIPOC. Which is appalling; I’ve got to do better in Feb.

Reviewed

Kind of wish my first review of the year had been a positive one, but oh well! At least The Infinite was wonderful.

And I did write four DNF reviews, three of which were pretty in-depth, so REALLY, I wrote seven reviews altogether. Which is a lot for one month!

DNF-ed

Sigh. You can read my reviews of these here, but I’m really disappointed that three of my most-anticipated books turned out to be…not for me. (False Prince was a book I was challenged to read, so, still sad it didn’t work out, but not sad-sad.)

ARCs Outstanding

I’ve started just about all of these – and am tearing my hair out trying to write a review of The Twice-Drowned Saint, which is A VERY HARD BOOK TO DESCRIBE AND EXPLAIN. How does Cooney do this to me every time???

Misc

I started working on several rec lists this month, but I haven’t finished any – mostly because my fibromyalgia decided to flare pretty badly this month, which meant much less typing/writing time. Alas!

But I did get to take part in C S E Cooney’s AMA over on Reddit, which in fact happened today (is still happening? I don’t know when an AMA is considered over, so you may still be able to post questions depending on when you read this!) and where I got some answers to some very important questions – answers which have made me very happy!

Looking Forward

We had some truly marvellous books in January (not all of which I’ve finished reading!) but February promises even more! Excluding the ones I’ve already read or am in the process of reading, I am unspeakably excited for The Iron Princess – Barbara Hambly’s first new fantasy book in 16 years!!! And I’m very curious and hopeful for Dazzling, which sounds incredible.

Here’s farewell to January, and onwards to Feb!