March Book Round Up

I am going to try something new for my book round ups. Instead of uploading all the book images and inserting them as a tiled gallery here, I will use the monthly graphic available from my StoryGraph account, so it’s more consolidated. StoryGraph is an alternative to Goodreads and right now, I am using both. You can feel free to follow me over on StoryGraph if you’d like! My username is shown in the graphics. Goodreads is more linked to my real name so I won’t be sharing that. But they’re identical in what I am tracking right now. March was actually a pretty solid month for reads. I read 11 books!

1. I have read a lot of Jo Bartlett because I really enjoyed her Cornish midwife series. I am not sure if this is her newest book but A Mother’s Last Wish was heart wrenching and well written. It reminded me a little bit of Sophie Kinsella’s beautiful novel What Does it Feel Like?. I’d caution against this if you have a lot of anxiety about death or dying in relation to your children.
2. March was the month of re-reads for me, also. After hearing about some friends reading and re-reading them, I dove back into the Beauty series by Anne Rice. I read these in high school and they have a a LOT of sex, which I remembered because I was kind of uninterested in sex at the time, but way more spanking than I remembered. The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty offers a VERY adult and VERY alternative telling of the waking of sleeping beauty and thrusts her into a life of sexual slavery, essentially, with free-use and spanking at the top of the list.
3. Beauty’s Punishment builds on the story and adds in more characters and further develops the idea of a kingdom where other princes and princesses come to serve as a form of personal development, I guess? I honestly can’t say these are anything other than straight porn, but they’re good!
4. Of course, there’s CJ Archer on the list with her newest series, The Uncensored Memoirs of a Book Hunter, debuting with Laws of Witchcraft. This series delves into the time between the Glass & Steele series and The Glass Library series, with expansion on the curators of the Glass Library, Gavin Nash and Oscar Barratt. With magic, a mystery, and some good old fashioned historical fiction thrown in, this is a fairly classic Archer novel within a beloved world. I really enjoyed it!
5. During March I also traveled to Texas to visit a newer spanko friend, who had never met a spanko before! She had recently started reading the Outlander novels by Diana Gabaldon, which every spanko should know has the hottest and vibe-iest spanking in the first book, in Chapter 22. That said, MOST of the books are riddled with spankings and startles and the series itself is just soooo good. I first read them in high school around age 15 and have done several re-reads over the years. I hadn’t re-read any of them since 2021, when I read them all before the 9th novel was released. So we could chat about them, I picked back up with book 3, Voyager. It’s not my personal favorite of the whole series, but it does have spanking and of course, the love story of Claire and Jamie continues.
6. Unfortunately for me, I am a completionist, so I knew this meant I’d be reading the rest and Drums of Autumn was next on the docket. I do really love this installment actually, because I really love the addition of Roger Mac to the regular character list and ALSO it expands a BIT more on Lord John who is probably my third favorite character overall.
7. I took a short break from Outlander to read Daughter of Egypt by Marie Benedict. I actually won a free copy of this from a StoryGraph giveaway and it finally became available, so I was eager to get in this early access! I loved it! I have read a lot of Benedict, as she writes fictionalized historical novels about strong women throughout history. If you’ve ever watched Downton Abbey and done a deep dive into the history of Highclere Castle where it’s filmed, you’ll love this. It’s about Lady Evelyn Herbert and her very real interest in archeology and her father as the patron funding the search for the tomb of Tutankhamen. It delves into Egyptian history as well, with the story of Hatshepsut, one of Egypt’s most well known (of very few) female pharaohs.
8. Of course, I was in Marie Benedict mode at this point (and waiting on a library hold), and I realized I missed her 2025 release, Queens of Crime, in which a club of female post-war (WWI) murder mystery writers (including Agatha Christie!) aim to prove themselves to their male colleagues by solving a real murder. I really enjoyed this one and although the murder mystery portion itself was a bit predictable, the writing was, unsurprisingly, really well done and it was a good story.
9. Of course, I continued my foray into the Outlander world for books 9-11 of the month, with The Fiery Cross #5, A Breath of Snow and Ashes #6 (which was the first book in the series I had to actually wait for the release of in 2005 at the age of 16, after reading the first five), and An Echo in the Bone #7.
10. See above
11. See above

April has already been very book heavy since I finished the last two Outlander novels and have started on my next, Book and Dagger by Elyse Graham.

I wanted to share these other graphics from StoryGraph as well, because I thought they were interesting!

What are you reading? My yearly total so far is 30.

-M