April has been the month I read the least since 2026 started.

Looking back, I can trace where my reading hours went. The weather turned warm (well, the Finnish version of warm, anything under 10°C outside already counts as a nice day) and everything that comes with spring started pulling me outside. I got my hands in the soil, started seeds, moved plants around, did the whole transplanting I look forward to since last winter. The terrace season opened up. And somewhere in between all of that, I joined a reading-together event for World Book Day, which was lovely in its own right, just not the kind of reading that stacks up on a log.

But enough about that. Excuses accounted for, let’s get into it.

I read ten books this month. Ten. And if I’m being honest, I walked away from almost all of them feeling nothing in particular. No urgency to recommend. No lines rattling around in my head. Just… books I finished and set aside.

ALMOST nothing, though.

Because the last book I picked up, more specifically, the very last page of it, intrigued me completely. That book was The Lion Women of Tehran, and it earned the only check mark I’m giving out this April. I started at 4 out of 5, but the number doesn’t quite capture what that ending did to me, and I ended up changing my rating to 5/5. It stayed. It’s still staying. If you want to know the full shape of my reading experience with it, head over to my review where I went into detail there.

As for May, I’m going into it with a stack of library loans already sitting on my shelf and, according to the reading platform ratings, actual promise. So here’s hoping the streak breaks.