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Let us know how your reading went in April, if you had trouble completing this month's task, if you enjoyed the book you read and whether you'd recommend it!

Oh boy I flunked my April challenge. Picked up Stories of Your Life and was stumped on the very first story, it was a whole thing about Babylonian cosmology and I had to look up articles on Wikipedia to understand what the hell was going on!!! Very difficult.

And then I couldn't decided what else to pick up. Now May has started and since I have already read my May book, I have lots of time to catch up with April.

Hopefully you all had better luck than me this month!

I read two books, and I have another that I meant to read but schoolwork got in the way. School is done after Sunday, so I'll have more reading time!

Silence of the Lambs - I flew through this one. I've always loved the movie and reading the book was a great experience. Some things were a bit more thoroughly explained but overall it matched the movie quite a lot, especially the dialogue. 5 stars.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe - I actually finished this in the early part of May, but I finished before the wrap-up post so it still counts :P Another book where I grew up loving the movie, but this time, the book was nowhere near as good. There was far too much jumping around and too much filler, and certain important events in the book received very little fanfare. It seems to be more like a "slice of life" book when what I was really looking for was a narrative like the movie. The constant weekly bulletins and newspaper articles were very tedious and I ended up skipping most of them, as they were largely pointless. Plus, the generous use of the n-word from white characters (written by a white writer) who were otherwise supposed to be considered good people didn't sit right with me at all. 3 stars, but I'm probably over-grading it due to my fondness for the characters based on the movie.

After this weekend, I'm going to start A Long Way Home, which I also wanted to read for April but didn't have time.

I did two books this month.

The first was A Long Way Home. Last year I was on a memoir kick so this fed into that a bit. It's a good book but having already seen the movie it wasn't as effective as it probably should have been since I knew exactly where it was going and where Saroo's journey would lead him. It was nice to get to know a bit more about his biological family as the film neglected to mention that he had a whole other brother. Overall I enjoyed it. His story is fascinating.

The second book I read was Jaws. Let me just say for as much as I absolutely love this film I found the book to be pretty dull. It wasn't badly written by any means but I don't understand how it spent so much time on the bestsellers list and why people were like omg I need to make this into a movie. It's also the first time I ever heard of a threesome referred to as "threesies" which made me friend start questioning what "elevensies" actually is in LotR so hey there's that...

In April I listened to the audio book for The Lord of the Rings and read The Martian, both of which I enjoyed very much! Revisiting LotR was especially nice since I think it's been close to 10 years since I read it.

Gone with the Wind - This has been on my reading list for years since I love the movie. The racism I was prepared for, the sexism not so much... not sure what I was thinking since this is the 1800's... But movie Scarlett was much more likable than book Scarlett.

To Kill a Mockingbird - One of those classics I'd never thought I'd read but ended up liking. I was reading a fantasy type book concurrently and the difference in writing was astounding. I really enjoyed/appreciate the subtle writing style. I don't think I can ever read Go Set a Watchman.

I'm super-late, but whatever. I liked The Price of Salt, and I was pleasantly surprised none of Patricia Highsmith's personal terribleness leaked into it. There are some slight changes, and you get more of Therese's backstory, but really the only thing the book has over the movie is shower sex. Which, how dare they, but at least the movie doesn't have all the weird warm milk, mommy issue stuff either?