April was another tough month for me. After the chaos of March, I had a couple of weeks to catch my breath a bit, before throwing myself into various work and non-work related events. I helped plan a Celebration of Life event for a friend, organized our store’s participation in the local Independent Bookstore Day bookstore crawl, and I also organized our third year (!) participating in a Free Comic Book Day at the Capitol event, with Free Comic Book Day, our biggest day of the year, looming on the immediate horizon. I can’t believe I found as much time to read as I did! But I credit some of that to the absolute BANGERS I picked up this month, that I couldn’t put down!

March has come and gone already!! The weather has been up and down, with extreme highs and lows (we had snow the day after the temperatures hit the 80s at one point!) and that honestly pretty accurately represents my energy levels this month. My birthday is in March, which is always great, but between social obligations, work, and general life events, I really spread myself a bit thin this month, and it felt like I didn’t get to read as much as I would have liked, and certainly it wasn’t always as invigorating for me as I usually find it to be.

This month, I delved into romantasy for the first time, followed up new volumes in various series that I’ve been following, and read some great nonfiction as well!

We were super lucky to host local author and artist Sophia Glock for a signing at Big Planet Comics of U Street, coinciding with the debut of her newest graphic novel, Before We Wake!! I read both that and her first graphic novel, Passport last month, so you can check out more about those books on my February 2026 Reads post!

February has been a challenging month. It’s short, and, at least for me, somehow it never feels like there’s enough time to get everything done. Between extended cold weather from January, Valentine’s Day, working on a Celebration of Life for a friend, and preparing for a signing at the end of the month, not to mention standard work tasks like getting in monthly initial orders which always feels like it’s sapping my very last brain cell, it somehow felt like I barely had time to read anything at all. Looking back at what I did read, somehow I got through more than I realized.

I think this month I managed to encounter some new all-time favorites, and tried some titles from authors I’m already familiar with (in one case, completely by accident!)

As a habitual reader who has barely left the house without a book close at hand for the last 30 years, I thought it would be fun to chronicle what I’m reading every month as the year goes by. I won’t claim to have the most educated opinions on things, nor the hottest takes — as they say “my opinion is my own and doesn’t reflect the opinions of anyone else” etc. But one of my favorite things at my job as a bookseller is getting to develop a relationship with readers — people who see my recommendations around the store, try something new, and love it, and come to me to talk about it. Maybe it’s naive to think I could extend that kind of community here, and the internet is a generally hateful place these days, but still, I’d love to share what I’ve been loving (and not loving) lately, and maybe my thoughts and opinions could guide someone out there too.