March Monthly Wrap up and Stats

Ok if I thought that I was late for February’s monthly wrap up then what do I call this! But better late than never?

Wrap up time

So over the course of March I ended up reading a total of 4 books:

• Circe by Madeline Miller
• Scythe by Neal Shusterman
• Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts
• Thunderhead by Neal Shusterman

Click the links to see the book’s respective reviews

This month had a mixed bag of books, with two really low rated books and then two 5 star reads! Although both Scythe and Thunderhead were 5 star reads, I would have to say that Thunderhead took the favourite spot this month. Just the way that Neal Shusterman continued to expand on the Scythedom just had me hooked!

Did I make progress on any challenges?

In a previous post, I talked about the challenges that I want to take part in during this year. Even though I did not read that many books, I still managed to tick off some of the challenges:

• The Alphabet Challenge

Although I read a total of 4 books, I was only able to tick off 1 letter:

• S: Scythe

• Quarterly Bingo 1

The Quarterly Bingo challenge was much like last month: 2 boxes were ticked off in total!

• A book over 800 pages: Shantaram
• A book with an orange cover: Circe

This means that for the first Quarterly Bingo I only managed to tick off 9 out of 16 boxes, meaning that 7 prompts were left untouched. I feel like I did not make much of an effort to proactively read books that would correlate to the prompts, so I will try and pick out books that would help tick off some of the prompts for the next quarter.

Did I make progress on any of my goals for this year?

So as mentioned in my 2024 reading goals post, there are a couple of goals that I want to try and complete before the year rolls over! I only managed to tick off one goal this month which was to read a book with 800 pages with Shantaram which had a total of 936 pages. I know that this is 900 rather than 800 but hey! Got to take those wins. One of my runover reads The Toll has over 600 pages, so I need to find a book that has over 700 pages and then I would have completed this goal!

How many books off of my Monthly TBR did I read?

So I set myself the goal to read 8 books…and I read a total of 3. I have a feeling that I am a bit too ambitious with the amount of books that I think that I would read per month but hey ho!

The three books that were on my hopeful list were:

• Scythe
• Thunderhead
• Shantaram

In my defense I was on track to finish The Toll which was also on my hopeful list … but I then went home for the Easter weekend so that took priority!

Statistics!

I cannot wait to see this spread completed at the end of 2024! I love flicking back to it! I thought that since March marks the end of Quarter 1 I would do something a bit fancier! But first lets do that March statistics:

In total I had two 5 star reads in the shape of the first two books in the Arc of Scythe Trilogy, and they have become two new favourite books. If you liked the Hunger Games then please please pick these books up! You will not regret it. Although I had these 5 star reads I also had some let downs in the form of Circe and Shantaram. Circe was the biggest disappointment for the month, purely because I had such high hopes for it! And Shantaram was just a long slog (thank God for audiobooks!). This meant that this month was my lowest monthly average yet with an average of 3.38 stars

Thanks to the brick that was Shantaram I read a lot of pages this month: 2,209 pages! So it was my highest reading month yet, and it meant that I read on average 71 pages a day. This is not the truth, because I did not read every day in March. I had 8 days where I did not read at all, but then I had 9 days where I read over 100 pages! So it does even itself out a little bit.

Now lets make some quarterly graphs!

Here are some fun fun graphs! I thought that it would be nice to see different statistics throughout the quarter visually.

The first graph shows the number of books read versus the number of pages. It is satisfying to see the more books I read the more pages I also tend to read, but thanks to Shantaram last month my number of pages was a lot higher in March in comparison to January even when reading one less book!

My physical to audiobook ration is 25% audiobook and 75% physical book. I think next year I will track mixed in case I read and listen to a book like I did with Shantaram. I think that in total this year I will probably listen to 12 books on audio as I have a monthly subscription to audible, so it should work out in the end as being less that a quarter of the 52 books I should get round to being an audiobook.

The final graph is looking at my average rating and when I have 5 star ratings. To be honest when thinking about this I would have thought that the months when I have more 5 star ratings I should have a higher average rating, but March disqualifies this idea quite quickly. As mentioned, in March I had two five star reads but because my other reads this month were both 2 star ratings it brought the overall rating down by a lot. So I guess it just depends really on my other reads throughout that month.

And that is a wrap for this month! What did you think of the Quarterly rundown? I think it was cool to see a summary of the past three months. I am definitely planning on doing it every three months just to have a visual.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post! What was your favourite read this month? Come back soon to find out what books I am planning on getting round to in April!