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First, the important piece – what we accomplished and got to mark off our lists this month:

Ashley IN MEDIAS RES:

• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
• Profit First: Transform Your Business from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine  by Mike Michalowicz
• Broke Millennial: Stop Scraping by and Get Your Financial Life Together by Erin Lowry
• The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan

Nikki IN MEDIAS RES:

• A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas
• Sanditon, Lady Susan, & The History of England: The Juvenilia and Shorter Works of Jane Austen by Jane Austen
• Once Upon a Christmas Wedding by Scarlett Scott, et. al 

Ashley FIN:

• A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas * Completed in January
• The Golden Hours  by Beatriz Williams *Completed in January
• Crazy for Loving You by Pippa Grant
• Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters by Anne Boyd Rioux
• A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas
• 3 Clients in 30 Days: 30 Day Top Producer Blueprint For Real Estate Agents  by Krista Mashore
• Business Ownership: The Joy. The Pain. The Truth by Hannah Paramore Breen
• Down Under by Donna Alam
• Sexy Shorts by Kathryn Nolan
• Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano

Nikki FIN:

• Crazy for Loving You by Pippa Grant
• A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas
• The Golden Hours  by Beatriz Williams
• A Million Junes by Emily Henry
• The Dark Secret by Tui T. Sutherland
• Tuesdays at the Castle by Jessica Day George
• Wagered in Winter by Scarlett Scott
• Business Ownership: The Joy. The Pain. The Truth by Hannah Paramore Breen
• Down Under by Donna Alam

Nikki: 
When I look at what I’ve read this month, it makes me happy.  I read across several genres, barely sneaking in a nonfiction book in the nick of time on the recommendation of a friend, but it’s there!  I covered romance, fantasy, YA, middle grade, and nonfiction! That feels like a nice balance. I haven’t picked up my two anthologies again, but left them on the list just for kicks.  

I had two highlights of my reading month.  The first – buddy reading with more than just Ashley.  Y’all, when one of my close friends told me she DNFed one of my favorite books (and one of Ashley’s too – A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas), I was devastated and had to know why.  I asked, she told me (it’s spoilery, and she’s 100% right with her reasons), but I had to know how far she got before she put it down so I asked if she got to [a very memorable part you see coming from the first page of this title but not the first book in the trilogy].  Nope. Well lovely, you need to give it another go, and you need to power through until that point because it’s worth it. I know it’s hard, and I know characters don’t act right (drama y’all, in books, to move the plot), but it’s amazing. So, four of us are reading the series together.  We were trying to stay together-ish and it mostly worked until my darling got into Mist and Fury.  She struggled through the beginning, because it’s hard content, but she did it.  Then she raced through and paused at Chapter 56 waiting for me to catch up. Ashley though, she just left us and finished the book.  It’s #2 in a dramatic trilogy, but it does have a bit of an epilogue that makes me not hate the ending (even if I did immediately curse and one-click purchase #3 while reading in bed instead of sleeping because not moving immediately to the resolution was NOT an option).  

That other highlight – one of my local librarians shared several weeks ago that she’d read The Golden Hours  by Beatriz Williams and really enjoyed it.  She didn’t tell me more, and I was already in the hold line for it.  After I read it, I went in the following Saturday, as is our routine, and we had an AMAZING conversation about it!  If you are reading books and don’t talk to people about them, bookish people who can dig in with you, PLEASE LET US KNOW.  WE WANT TO BE YOUR PEOPLE! If we’re not (yet) reading the type of books you’re looking for, let us know in the comments what you’ve liked or what you’re planning to read – if the title(s) look interesting to us (because everyone has their druthers – one of my bookish friends loves thrillers and I just…except when she’s super excited about a title and it’s available at my library), perhaps we’ll add them to our TBR and we can read them together and discuss.  

What did you read this month?  What was your favorite part of the experience?  

~Nikki

Ashley:
I was not as thrilled as Nikki was over her list of books for February. I’m more relieved than happy. Mostly because two books, Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy and 3 Clients in 30 Days were floating around on my in progress list for several months and I just needed them to disappear from my list so that I could feel like I was accomplishing something. And yes, I know that is classic ‘shoulding’ on my reading life, and no, I do not like it, but sometimes it happens and one just has to move on from there. I have several other books that are constantly floating around my in progress list and we can discuss those at another time…they will probably float for a while longer because I own them and several are dead tree.

As for Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, I truly enjoyed it. It was a fabulous, 100% non-fiction, scholarly read about Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, and the historical impact of the book in the world. Seriously fascinating. Once I got to sit down and read it, and really dig into the meat of the work, I just kept wanting to read. My issues with it sitting on my in progress list was because I lost it from the library in December without having gotten farther than the first chapter, and when it finally came back around to me at the end of January, I had other books in progress that had to take precedence. Thankfully, I was able to finish the book with a day and a few hours to spare before it disappeared from my kindle yet again. I was honestly disappointed when the book ended around the 80% mark of the pages in the kindle edition, because the remainder of the book was footnotes, the appendix, and the index. It had been a while since I had read a scholarly work, and I felt cheated that there wasn’t more information for me to consume. C’est la vie.

3 Clients in 30 Days is obviously a real estate business book to help me grow my business and manage my time in the most productive ways. I struggled so hard through this entire collection of how-to’s from other successful real estate agents, and it was mostly because of the lack of skillful editing, repetitiveness of the suggestions, and honest to goodness unrealistic timelines for things like ordering listing photos, ordering real estate signs to be made, etc. It’s over, I’m done, and if you’re a brand-new agent it’s probably a good idea to read it, but do not use it as your everyday guide to accomplishing your task. You will burn out in trying to find clients and not have enough time to service the ones you have.

I didn’t follow along in our ACOMAF Buddy Read because, when I was reading it I really, really, just needed the win of finishing a dang book. Nothing in the book was going to surprise me, I read it twice last year, twice in 2018, and I really just didn’t want to put it down because I love it so much! It was the 3rd book I had finished this month, and that was on the 15th. That’s two weeks where I only finished one book a week, one of them on the first of the month! I’m only a little sorry that I skipped ahead, but these in progress danglers are getting to me and I’m trying to work through them. But, I need to have more patience with myself.

I obviously hadn’t been reading the things that I felt like I wanted to read, but rather what I should or needed to read, and that’s no way to handle the Reading Life. Has there ever been a time when you struggled through something similar as regards to the bookish life and how did you overcome it? I always find re-reading a favorite helps get me over the hump.

Goodreads says I’m 3 books ahead of schedule, but I’d like to finish another 2 this week before February ends…I think I can do it with all these dang in progress.

~Ashley