My March reading list

Stormlight Archive, take 2

Photo by Pet foto

My plan for February was to start reading some of the books on my to-be-read shelf, including the first two books in Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive. Didn’t work out that way. They’re still sitting on the shelf, unopened, where they’ve been since some time in 2022.

I made it through about 80% of Colleen McCullough’s First Man In Rome before giving up, which took me far longer than it should have. (It gave me that weird experience of being interested and bored at the same time: I genuinely wanted to know more about Marius and Sulla, the Jugurthine War, and so on, but the way the story was told was just soooooo dull.) I did manage to get through Aristotle’s Ethics and Montaigne’s Essays, plus a couple of non-fiction books, but attempting Stormlight was just too much, given everything else that was going on last month.

Heck, I didn’t even finish the model of Nosferatu that I started weeks ago. Or write the story that’s been sitting in my head since January. Or do the planting plan for this year’s vegetable garden. Or listen to the new album from Marko Hietala and Tarja Turunen. Or file my tax return. It was that kind of month.

Orlok, minus head & hands. And no, he won’t have glow-in-the-dark shoes.

So for March, I’ve resolved not to get anything else out of the library or even look at my Kindle until I’ve read what’s already in the queue. (Or decided not to read them. I’m keeping an open mind. Fantasy is always a bit of a gamble with me these days.)

• Rosemary’s Baby, by Ira Levin. For The Paperback Show podcast I’m doing with Ricky Lee Grove. I don’t remember if I’ve read it before, but I don’t think so. If I did, it was a long, long time ago.

• The Way of Kings and Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson.

That’s it. Just three books in a month. I can do it.