TTT: A look back at a decade of March reads

Top Ten Tuesday: A look back at a decade of March reads.

I love the idea of today's proposed topic: to list queries to Google based on what I was reading. I do this all the time, often mid-book, however I just can't remember any of my searches right now. So I am off-the-board today with a look back at a decade of March reads. I've been listing my books on Goodreads for over ten years, so this task is doable right now.

Here is a list of books I was read in March, one per year, for the past decade, along with the rating I gave it at the time on Goodreads:

2024

Lady Tan's Circle of Women by Lisa See

This is my current audiobook for an upcoming book club. The book is about the life of women in the 15th Century in China. Of special interest to me is the information about Chinese medicine of the day.

Not finished, no rating yet.

2023

Textbook by Amy Krouse Rosenthal

I learned about this wonderful, unique author earlier in 2023 and devoured everything by her that I could get my hands on. Textbook is a memoir, of sorts, and so fun and unique (there's that word again.) I went into a sort of funk around this time as I learned about her death in 2017 from ovarian cancer. I wanted more books like this one, and its predecessor, Encyclopedia of An Ordinary Life. Sigh.

Rated 5+ stars.

2022

Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger

March 2022 was a nightmare. My cousin's husband, a deputy sheriff officer, was killed in the line of duty. The whole family spiraled into almost unrecognizable grief and sorrow. I decided to reread Ordinary Grace at this time and it really helped me, and hopefully others as I shared what I gleaned from it. Check out my review if you want to learn more about the book and why it was helpful. (Title is hyperlinked.)

Rated: 5 stars

2021

Dragon Hoops by Gene Luen Yang

The best graphic memoir I've ever read. Yang not only tells his own story but teaches us about basketball as he learns about it from his research and his students. Most of my reviews are read and ignored by about 50 people, I'd say. The review I wrote about Dragon Hoops gets thousands of views per year. If you get discouraged writing reviews for seemingly no one, keep this in mind. Every once in a while one of your reviews may take off. Stick with it.

Rated: 5 stars

2020

The Year of the Monkey by Patty Smith

Remember March 2020? How could anyone forget it? This is the month that the world shut down due to COVID. Just before that infamous event, I read this little gem of a diary/memoir by Smith, my first by this famous author/artist/musician.

Rated: 3 1/2 stars

2019

Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver

I am a huge Kingsolver fan but Unsheltered isn't my favorite by her. That said, I really appreciated the book and how it helped open up my thinking on topics oft in the news today.

Rated: 4 stars.

2018

Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld

A modern retelling of the Pride and Prejudice story by Jane Austen. I like the original classic MUCH better but this was fun especially trying to imagine the events of P&P happening today.

Rated: 3 stars.

2017

Lily and the Octopus by Steven Rawley

I cried my way through the end of this short little book. It is about a dog and his owner.

Rated: 4 stars

2016

Quiet: The Power of Introverts In a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain

Ms. Cain pulls together all kinds of research on introversion/extroversion. This book gave me a lot of insights into my daughter and several of my past students who are introverts. It lent itself to an excellent book club discussion. Unfortunately, I never published a review of it.

Rated: 5

2015

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion

 The Rosie Project was truly a publishing phenomenon, having been picked up by 38 publishers worldwide. It was called the "feel-good-book-of-2013" which was extended to 2014 and 2015 when I read and discussed it in both my book clubs.

Rated: 5 stars.

2014

Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein

Oddly this is the only YA book on the list. I say that since I was a teen librarian until I retired in June of 2017. Rose Under Fire is the sequel to the much admired Code Name Verity by Weir and is the second book in a series of four novels by the author. I loved them all. Rose Under Fire is set in WWII and includes distressing information about the Polish women who were forced to be lab-rats for medical experiments.

Rated: 4 stars.

This was both a fun and an odd activity to complete. I tend to think of my life on a timeline littered with books. Can it really be ten years since I read The Rosie Project? And five years since I was reading The Year of the Monkey when all hell was breaking loose in the world because of COVID?

Do you keep records of the books you've read? What were you reading five years ago when COVID started? Ten years ago? Last year at this time?

-Anne