It’s past time to recap my February reading progress.

Total Books: 3   Total Pages: 1057   Longest: 552   Shortest: 234

Genres: 3 (Biography – 1, Fiction – 1, Mystery – 1)

The short month and other commitments cut my reading time quite a bit this month. Or it may also have been the subject matter of the biography I started at the beginning of the month which took me until past the middle of the month to finish!

Don’t expect me to explain the science, but I did find the story of Doudna and the events that inspired her to her success to be fascinating. The politics, competitiveness, and comradery of working in the academic community was very interesting as well, especially when everything culminated in the race to find efficient and effective testing for COVID-19 and developing a vaccine. The profound implications of these research discoveries leading to the development of technologies which can impact individuals as well as the entire human race also lead to considerable moral and ethical questions. Like so many discoveries – these implementations can be used for good purposes or nefarious purposes. I’m hopeful for the former.

From the Amazon description: Pippa Jones is a fortyish former literary sensation who fears she will be a one-hit wonder. After the follow-up book she was almost done writing, Podlusters, had to be tossed (it ended up sharing a plot and title with superstar author Ella Rankin’s summer blockbuster!), she couldn’t write a thing. Months of staring at a blank page made her confidence vanish like a one-night stand. When she finds out that she has only five days left to finish (or rather, start) or repay an advance she’s already spent, Pippa has a brilliantly original idea. Okay, fine, her twelve-year-old son came up with it as a joke, but Pippa and her teenage daughter approved.

Pippa’s not only going to make a bold statement, but she’ll change the book world while she’s at it! Can she pull it off? At this point, she doesn’t have a choice.

When Pippa’s publisher gets intimately involved, it unlocks a series of plot twists she never saw coming. From the courtyards of posh Beverly Hills hotels and Malibu mega-mansions to Brentwood and Santa Monica bookstores, Pippa races against time—in her used Volvo—and discovers more about her career, marriage, family, friends, and herself than she ever could have dreamed up.

The “months of staring at a blank page” got me to select this offering. I think I may have mentioned before that I wanted to be a librarian when I was younger because I thought you got to sit around and read all day! Once I figured out that wasn’t the case, I thought I’d like to be an author since I liked reading so much… until we started having to write essays in school and I spent hours staring at the blank page trying to decide what to write and how to start.

I really enjoyed his Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders last month, so gave it a go. There are currently 5 “Hawthorne and Horowitz Mystery” books. As might be guessed, Horowitz has written these in the first person with himself as one of the main characters. Hawthorne is a former policeman turned private detective who convinces Horowitz to write about him yet doesn’t easily provide any personal information about himself making it difficult for Horowitz to fully describe him to the reader creating conflict between the writer and his subject. Obviously, there is also a murder (or two) to be solved and, like Magpie and Moonflower, many suspects to evaluate and eliminate. I’ll read the other books in the series eventually if they become available on Kindle Unlimited.

Hopefully, I’ll get through a few more books in March, but with March Madness here maybe not!