Another month has passed and it is time yet again to provide my monthly reading review. This month I have managed to read a total 21 books which brings my overall total to 59 books for 2025 so far. I hit my monthly goal of 20 books and am well on my way to achieving my yearly goal of 200 books total. It is time for one of my favorite parts which is to go over some of the books that really stood out to me out of all of the ones that I read last month.
The first book I want to go over is The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo. I have read very few books based in this region of the world which sets this one apart right from the beginning. However, that was not why I picked this book. I picked this book as it was an extremely enthralling read that blended several different storylines together and did it very well. At the same time there was a really unique plot line that I was continually surprised by throughout the story which is not something that happens all that frequently. I am actually rarely surprised by the plot development when reading. One of the things that I liked the most about this though was probably the rather intense and vivid characterization that was present. Both the young boy Ren and the teenage girl Ji Lin are extremely lifelike characters and over the course of the book I really felt like I got to know them. They were both so different but there were also a lot of similarities between the two that only served to further highlight those differences. One of the biggest ones was that both characters felt trapped in their circumstances due to things that had happened and weren’t sure about where their future would take them, though they both eventually figured that part out as well. Another thing I really liked about the book that helped it stand out was how well it blended the normal mundane life of the characters with their various interactions with the supernatural, primarily in the form of dream conversations with the dead. I have seen very few books that blend these two disparate worlds and do it in such a way that there is equal balance between the two. A lot of books and stories end up leaning more one way or the other and show an over-reliance on one which lessens the importance of the other. This book played up the importance of both worlds in the overall story which I found both intriguing and impressive and this fact played a large role in why I enjoyed this book as well as I did.
My second book for last month was the dual biography that I read called A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and A Great War by Joseph Loconte that explored the story of how the authors C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were impacted by their participation in the First World War. There were a lot of things that I rather liked about this book and I really felt like it did a good job of exploring the interplay between the war and the artistic output of these two authors. In fact, I feel like overall I really learned a lot about both the war and the authors. This is actually a large part of why I picked this book as one of my books that stood out for last month. However, I also have to admit that probably anytime I read a biography of one of my favorite authors that I would end up picking them. Even with me picking this book there are a few things I want to point out about it. The book was great and well researched and it was meant to focus on the interplay between the First World War and C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien which it did. At the same time I often felt like the First World War as a topic often overshadowed the topics of Lewis and Tolkien. I think I would have preferred for it to go a bit more in depth on the authors. Overall, it was still a great book which is part of why I picked it for this list but I still would have preferred a bit more detail and depth.
My last book is one that I probably would have normally picked out anyway but is also one that I wanted to highlight for a more specific reason as well. March is Women’s History Month and this book focused on that exact topic. I am referring to The Sisterhood by Liza Mundy which is about the roles and careers of women who worked for the CIA since its inception shortly after WWII. I liked this particular book for a lot of reasons the first and most important of which is that is focused on and highlighted an area of history that is often frequently overlooked. That is something that has always bothered me as I genuinely think that there is no part or aspect of history that is too small or too unimportant to not be told and acknowledged. As such I enjoy books that tell the stories of minorities and their voices such as this one. This particular book just happens to be a rather outstanding version of such a story. It is incredibly well researched and well written and it provides a voice for the untold women who may not have had a voice prior to this, which is something that I can really respect. Reading this helped me to realize just how far certain elements and aspects of society can actually go and the after-effects or impacts of them. I’d like to think my eyes were already open, so to speak, on this topic but this book helped me to notice just how far I still have to go in realizing how widespread certain issues still are. Overall, this book definitely deserved to be highlighted again. I think I picked out some pretty good books for last month and feel free to go read the actual reviews for each of these books. Having seen some of what I read feel free to share some of what you read last month in the comments.