I hope you’ve all had a wonderful weekend. Ours started off quite stormy but today the sun was shining and it looks like a lot of our plants grew even more after the rain. I can’t remember if I mentioned it before but last fall we planted wildflowers in our backyard and in the past few weeks we’ve started to see little flowers here and there. I have no clue what most of the flowers are but I love it.

In book news I did finish Shadow Over the Fens by Joy Ellis and I really enjoyed it. I hope it doesn’t take me too long to get to the next book in the series. Isn’t that always the case though? I feel like I find a series I really enjoy but with so many other books waiting their turn it’s hard to stay up-to-date on the books.

Finally in my last post I mentioned that the shortlists for The Women’s Prize for Fiction and the International Booker were announced, but those aren’t the only book prizes in the news. For example The Stella Prize was recently announced. This prize honors Australian women’s writing and I hate to admit that is one that I have not really followed.

Another prize I’ve actually recently found out about is the Premio Alfaguara which is for a novel written in Spanish. Unfortunately in the past several years I hadn’t been reading a lot in Spanish so I’ve been slowly changing that. Luckily many of these books do get translated but I don’t need to wait for the translation and this is a great way to discover authors from Spanish speaking countries.

This isn’t to say that I just read prize-winning books but I used to follow some of the prizes a bit more and was always interested to see what titles were considered the best in writing. Lately I’ve been reading more about various literary prizes and I wanted to see if you think about literary prizes? Do you make it a point to read some of the shortlisted books for a certain literary prize? Or is there a prize you follow?

Alright and as I finished Shadow Over the Fens which was my Kindle read, that means I need to find another book soon to start reading tonight before I go to sleep. Hope you have a great week ahed.

Can you believe we’re at the end of April? It was a busy month for sure and some of my reading plans didn’t come together as I had hoped but thanks to newsletters from Poets.org and Knopf Poetry, I received a daily dose of poems to my inbox. So I did read at least one poem daily.

I also read the collection, Lima::Limón by Natalie Scenters-Zapico in which she explored the lives of women between two cultures and women fighting back against machismo and calling it out. Because this poetry collection uses a lot of Spanish words and references, that also earned it another thumbs up from me. I really liked this.

The other books I read this month were Incidents in the Rue Laugier by Anita Brookner; The Book of Two Ways by Jodi Picoult; and Cold Granite by Stuart MacBride. For me, Brookner is always a solid go to author who doesn’t disappoint. I really enjoyed the Stuart MacBride book and plan to read more in the series. But goodness, the Picoult book could not come to an end soon enough. I will try to do some quick recaps of all.

As far as May is concerned, did you see that both the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the International Booker Prize shortlists were announced recently? I think I’d really like to read at least one book from each list.

The most exciting thing I’m looking forward to though is a return to the bookstore! I’ve heard that the our local bookstore doesn’t allow for more than 30 minutes at the cafe. We weren’t really planning to sit and hang out for long anyway. I just want to check out the new books, see what magazines are available and just be in a bookstore again. I’ve already prepared my husband that some major retail therapy will probably be happening. Haha.

I hope you are all doing well and reading great things. I can’t wait to hear how your reading month was and if you are looking forward to any books next month.