Monthly Wrap-Up: March & April 2014

I started this blog and posted my very first entry on 16 March, less than two months ago! So here's my first wrap-up post. I'll be doing these monthly from now on, just to talk about what books I've read, and what books I'm planning to read, and maybe do quick updates on my life just so you know how many posts you can expect from me in the next month.

In the past month and a half I have read and reviewed 14 books! Below are the titles:

(Click on the cover to read the review!)
March
    

April

         

My favourites from March and April were:

The Miseducation of Cameron Post by emily m. danforth
Far From You by Tess Sharpe
Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan
A Kiss in the Dark by Cat Clarke
Pantomime by Laura Lam

I took part in LGBT April and out of the 11 books that I read in April, 9 had a heavy focus on LGBT content. The two exceptions were The Beginning of Everything by Robyn Schneider and The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender, which also had gay characters in them, but their gayness wasn't central to the books.

Overall in March and April, I read 11 books where LGBT content was central to the book! (And all 14 books I read had at least one non-straight character.)

I think what I enjoyed most about LGBT April was that for the first time ever, at least if I'm remembering correctly, I finally read a book with a bisexual main character. And not just one, but FOUR. FOUR!!! Since I'm bisexual, this has made me very happy; there weren't really any bisexual MCs in YA just a couple years ago, and the one book that I knew about that did have bisexual MCs didn't really interest me. (Alex Sanchez' Boyfriends with Girlfriends, for those curious.)

Anyway, the four books I've reviewed with bisexual MCs:

Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith
Far From You by Tess Sharpe
Adaptation by Malinda Lo
Pantomime by Laura Lam

Coming up next month

On May 1, 2, and 3, there's a campaign going on which you've probably heard about: We Need Diverse Books. I'm excited about this campaign because we do need diverse books. I need diverse books, and as you can see, I read a lot of them. But there's not enough. As a Chinese bisexual girl, I've yet to see another Chinese bisexual girl in the fiction I read. I'd really like to see myself reflected in a book sometime.

So, for the month of May, I'm committing myself to reading more diverse books! I've got a copy of Coda by Emma Trevayne (which has a bisexual MC, yay!), and I need to finish reading Aristotle and Dante Discovers the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saénz, which I started reading for the LGBT April Read-along but never finished since I was in the mood for something a little more fast-paced and thrilling. I've also got various other books ordered, including The Elites by Natasha Ngan, the cover of which looks like this:

When I first saw this in a bookshop, I flailed in delight. A YA FANTASY BOOK WITH AN ASIAN (well, half-Asian, as it turns out) GIRL ON THE COVER!!! It's a really damn pretty cover too. Ahhhhhhhhh. I'm so excited.

I really care about diversity in books, and I'll try my best to continue buying and talking about diverse books as often as I can!