March 2024 TBR

It’s somehow already time for my March TBR. Next month’s reading has ended up filled with the dark and gothic, packed with vampires, curses, witches and secrets - even the lightest choice I’ve made is a historical fiction about Anne Boleyn so I know going into it that this will not be a happy ending! Still, I’m excited to get stuck into everything on this list (well, with perhaps one exception you’ll read about shortly) and my biggest problem is choosing what to read first.

Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice

This will be one of the first books I pick up in March in order to complete the first of four Read It Watch It challenges for the 52 Book Club. Throughout Jan and Feb I watched the whole first series of the TV adaptation (I’ve already seen the 1994 film several times) and now it’s time to finally read the first book of the Vampire Chronicles series, something I’ve been meaning to do for many years.

Weyward by Emilia Hart

Another must-read for March is Weyward, my local book club’s pick for the month. I picked this up magical feminist fantasy novel in paperback the other day after finding it going for half price and I’m excited to dig into it. I know this is a very popular book at the moment - it has been featured on Between the Covers and is a current Richard and Judy Book Club pick - so I’m curious as to whether or not it will live up to the hype.

Cursed Cruise by Victoria Fulton and Faith McClaren

Why am I doing this to myself? Cursed Cruise is book two of the Horror Hotel series. I read book one about two years ago and enjoyed most of it until it reached one of the most disappointing conclusions I’ve ever come across. The resolution was boring, there were dozens of dangling plot threads, and the whole thing was a rip-off of a Netflix documentary. Why then am I reading the second book? I don’t actually know other than the cover art sucked me in and I need to know whether or not this will be any better than its predecessor.

Where Sleeping Girls Lie by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé

I read Àbíké-Íyímídé’s debut novel Ace of Spades back in 2021 and loved it, so when I spotted this I knew it was a must-read. Some of the blurb sounds broadly similar to her first book: an elite school with sinister secrets and crime around every corner, missing girls and dead students, so I’m curious to see what spin is put on this new story and whether there will be another huge plot twist like in her first book.

Buzzword: Character Name in Title

The Buzzword prompt for March is a book with a character name in its title and I have many books on my TBR that would fit the bill. Possible choices include Emma by Jane Austen, Carrie Soto is Back by Taylor Jenkins Ried, more from the Brown Sisters trilogy by Talia Hibbert, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, or Amari and the Great Game by B.B. Alson. At this point, I’m leaning toward Anne Boleyn: A King’s Obsession by Alison Weir, the second in the Six Tudor Queens series but that may well change.

The Return of the King by J. R. R. Tolkien

I spent September - December 2023 reading the first two parts of the Lord of the Rings trilogy but had to set the third and final part aside to get to some other books. It’s high time I got back to the story and finished it off once and for all.

Edgar Allan Poe

In 2023 I also started making my way through The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe but haven’t picked it up in months. Partly, that’s because the next instalment in my copy is The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket - Poe’s only full-length novel - and I’ll admit to feeling intimidated by it. However, I want to complete this read-through one day so it might be time to finally dig into this one.

There are literally dozens of other books on my TBR but I’ve decided to limit my March hopefuls list in the hope I might be able to squeeze in some mood reading later on. Let’s see how that turns out! What are you planning to read in March?