Books read in March

Yet another reading month has come and gone and here we are - a quarter of the way through the year already. March is quite a long month so I've managed eight books this month and yet again it's a pretty electic selection.

Books for March:

14. The Tenderness of Wolves - Stef Penney

15. To a Mountain in Tibet - Colin Thubron. This blurb from Goodreads:

In his new book, Colin Thubron travels to Tibet, and takes the pilgrimage route to Kailas, the most sacred of the world's mountains, holy to one fifth of the earth's people, but rarely visited by westerners. Buddhists and Hindus have ritually circled the mountain for centuries, but its steepest slopes are sacrosanct and no one has ever climbed to the summit. Thubron made the expedition shortly after his mother's death, and his hike through a challenging terrain of rocks, lakes and remote monasteries is perhaps one of his most personal and poetic books to date.

Perhaps this isn't one of the author's best books, I don't know, but I never really felt completely involved in the story of his journey. Bits were interesting and informative but a lot of it felt repetitive and I struggled to finish it to be honest.

16. Insufficiently Welsh - Griff Rhys-Jones. The author is a very well known comedian and presenter of TV documentaries in Britain and *on* Britain. He was born in Cardiff but brought up in Essex and all his life has wondered if the Welsh people consider him to be 'insufficiently Welsh' to have a claim to his own nationality. Griff embarks on a journey around the various regions of Wales to see if this is so. Not only is the book a delightful travelogue for anyone wanting an introduction to Wales but the author's writing style is very readable and self-deprecating enough to be quite funny. Enjoyable but not one for the Welsh expert I suspect.

17. Helliconia Winter - Brian W. Aldiss

18. Sworn to Silence - Linda Castillo

19. The Killing Place - Tess Gerritson

20. Tooth and Claw - Jo Walton

21. Clear Waters Rising - Nicholas Crane

I said eclectic at the start of this post but there's a definite thread running through most of these books and that's cold weather, winter, mountains. No less than six have that connection and even the two that don't, Insufficiently Welsh and Tooth and Claw, have mountains somewhere in the book. I won't say it happened by accident because it didn't. I'm reading a lot about mountains at the moment and also enjoying books with a winter setting. Sometimes you just want to go with a theme and I find it's best to indulge yourself while it lasts.

Yet again I've read three non-fiction books this month. One was a bit average, one was good and one - Clear Waters Rising - was very good. So that's eight non-fiction books read so far this year. Very happy with that.

So, what was my favourite book this month? Well it was this one:

The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney. No contest really... well there was... I really enjoyed Sworn to Silence by Linda Castillo, Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton and Tess Gerritsen's 8th Rizzoli and Isles book, The Killing Place. But The Tenderness of Wolves had something extra: it was just brilliant and a worthy winner of my book of the month.

Next month I'm looking forward to continuing with Carl's Once Upon a Time IX reading challenge but other than that I'm not sure what I'll be reading. Possibly a couple of these off my tbr pile:

I also have a library pile of nine books at the moment, so I'd better crack on with those too. Whatever - I'm sure I'll find something...

~~~oOo~~~