This month was composed of the ups and the downs, the highs and the lows of reading experiences. Nevertheless, 2 out of the 5 books will very likely make it into the top picks of 2020, so that makes it a good month in my point of view! Regardless of being in the situation of the COVID-19 virus lockdown, stuck at home for weeks/months and not working anymore, I somehow still didn’t find myself reading more than regularly.

I didn’t have an exact reading goal set at the beginning of the year but have rather decided to see how my reading will flow. Ever since I joined a couple of book clubs (the 1st one in October 2019), I have managed to get through much more books than ever before in my life. While increasing the quantity of my book game, I also managed to elevate my “reading quality”, which was the most unexpected and pleasant personal discovery. Looking back at the past 4 months, I noticed that I managed to get through about 4-5 books on average per month, even on the side of my full time job. That’s when I decided to challenge myself and set the goal to read 50 books this year (which will be the highest number of books read per year in my entire life!), while writing detailed reviews about each and every one of them! Let’s see how this journey will end in 6 months 😉

Concerning the current daily life, I guess nowadays quite a bit of time gets taken away by the cooking, doing groceries, cleaning more frequently than usual, catching up with friends and family and so on. A new little routine also made its way into my day – watching movies on a video projector in the evenings, which I can’t complain about 😀 All those activities have replaced quite a few reading hours but I’m trying not to force myself, rather take the time as it feels most natural to me.

For the books that I got through in April 2020, they managed to stay varied:

• 2/5 books were written by female authors (like last year, I set a goal of having the balance of 50/50 among female and male authors by the end of the year);

• 2/5 books were written or translated in German (1 of them was an original, the other a translation; I’m aiming at switching up my predominantly English reading with some German and Russian);

• 2/5 were non-fiction books (I have been predominantly reading fiction my whole life, so I’m trying to change that up and end the year with around 30-40% of the total of the books read to be non-fiction);

• 2/5 of the authors were American (I realised that I tend to get stuck in a bubble of American authors, so I try to change that up a bit more).

Here the list in the chronological order that I read them (the complete reviews are linked within the titles of the books):

• “Vox” – Christina Dalcher: ★☆☆☆☆ (1/5)
• “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” – Ocean Vuong: ★★★★★ (5/5)
• “Why We Sleep” – Matthew Walker: ★★★★★ (5/5)
• “How To Do Nothing” – Jenny Odell: ★★★☆☆ (3/5)
• “Qualityland” – Marc-Uwe Kling: ★★★★☆ (4/5)