Monthly Reading - March

This month has been a good month for reading books that I've thoroughly enjoyed.   It started with this book, which I borrowed from our local library and really enjoyed reading.

So much so, that I devoured it in a couple of days.  I've already written about this book in a blog post so I won't go into great detail here, but I will say that it's approach to managing your money made me stop spending money needlessly almost overnight.  It provided a completely new to me way to look at my spending and money habits.

The second book I read this month was this one by Winifred Holtby.  I was drawn to this book because I've read a book by this author called South Riding in the past and enjoyed it.  In addition, her books are set in East Yorkshire where I grew up, which also roused my curiosity.

I haven't read a Virago modern classic historical fiction book for a while. I used to read them a lot and have a few scattered about that I still need to read.  This book has definitely made me more prone to picking them up as I really enjoyed it.

Set in a fictional village in the Yorkshire Wolds, it tells the story of farmer's wife Mary Robson, whose encounter with a Young socialist writer changes her life and the village forever.  This book was beautifully written and although some of the characters weren't always easy to like, it was such a good read.  To it's credit, it's ending was in no way as predictable as I was expecting either, which was a definite bonus.  I have another book by this author in my pile to read this year, and which I am now looking forward to.

My next read was another book from the library on the subject of money and how we spend it. In it, Dunn and Norton, (respectively a Psychologist and Professor of Marketing at Harvard by profession) examine what kinds of spending really make us happiest and how we can tailor our spending to make our lives better and achieve increased feelings of happiness. Although some of the areas where spending resulted in increased happiness did not exactly surprise me, the research they used to back up their ideas made this book a very interesting read.

Although this month was a good month for reading, it wasn't such a good month for reducing the pile of books by my bed, because several of the books I read were acquired from the library or were new additions to the pile.  I'm afraid I went against my book buying ban and bought one book from a charity shop for 50p and one from the library for 20p, which have subsequently been added to the pile.

The book I bought from the charity shop was this one by Sue Townsend, which is made up of some of the articles she wrote for her regular column in Sainsbury's magazine in the 1990's.  As I never read Sainsbury's magazine, I found this book very entertaining, and it had me chuckling to myself on numerous occasions.  If you like a book with a good dose of self-depracating humour and healthy cynicism, this might be the one for you. Although it was published over ten years ago, it didn't seem at all dated to me and was also super easy to pick up and put down.

The next book I read this month was this one by Anne Fine.  Again it was a new acquisition, being the book I bought for 20p from the library.  I enjoyed this book which was basically about step sibling rivalry and it didn't take long to read it as it was a large print book.

Talking of large print books, I am now reading this one, which was also purchased from the library some time ago. It's huge with over 500 pages.  It might take a while to get to the end, but so far I'm really enjoying it.  I might even try to watch the DVD of the film, once I've finished reading it.

A great reading month, but hopefully, I'll make better progress reducing the pile next month!!