I went to one my local indie bookstores on Saturday, Malvern Books, and could have easily spent all afternoon looking through the shelves. The store is not very large but it has a wonderful section of works in translation, NYRB classics, poetry and of course independent presses. As it was Independent Bookstore day there was also a bookstore crawl event happening which meant that a lot of the visitors to the bookstore were on a scavenger hunt. I saw lots of people taking selfies with books. Too cool.

I didn’t do the scavenger hunt but I was on a bit of a hunt. I wanted to find a couple of books that would be outside of my usual reading comfort zone. Here are the two I found:

High Tide by Inga Abele. Told more or less in reverse chronological order, High Tide is the story of Ieva, her dead lover, her imprisoned husband, and the way their youthful decisions dramatically impacted the rest of their lives. I have not read anything by a Latvian author so I’m very excited about this one even though I’ve read a couple of reviews that make me think this may be a challenging read.

Homesick by Eshkol Nevo. This remarkable, kaleidoscopic novel tells the fragmented stories of a group of women and men brought together by chance in a small neighborhood in the hills of Israel. This is also a a book with a setting very different from the ones I typically read.

Now how about you? Do you have some new books for the month?

I hope you all had a wonderful weekend. We got to see some friends today who were in town visiting. They’ve moved to Sweden last year so it was great catching up with them and we hope to see them again later this year (in Sweden!). I did my bit in supporting the independent bookstores by spending some time browsing in Malvern Books and I’ll tell you more about my finds in another post.

This post however is about April reads. I wasn’t sure how the month was going but in the end it was a good month.

I read poetry, mysteries, a book in translation – basically a good mix and total of six books. The books were: Where’d You Go Bernadette by Maria Semple, The Dry by Jane Harper, In this Grave Hour by Jacqueline Winspear, Interference by Amelie Antoine, Where All The Girls Have Gone by Jayne Ann Krentz and a collection of Langston Hughes poetry. While I enjoyed most of the books my favorite was definitely the Hughes poetry collection.

This month is also my quarterly check in on my Reading Challenges for this year. I’m participating in four challenges and here’s my progress so far:

What’s In A Name – Two out of six books read
Back To The Classics – One book out of 12 categories
Read My Own Damn Books – Seven out of 20 books
Poetry Reading challenge – Two out of five collections read

I have to say that when I choose books I don’t necessarily think about the challenges. It’s mostly after I read the book that I wonder if I can add it to the totals so I’m pretty happy with my progress so far. I do wish I was making a bit more progress on the Classics but let’s see what the next few months bring.

How about you, how was your reading month and what are you looking forward to in May?