So April is done and as part of the 75 Books Challenge, here is my list for the month:

King Dork by Frank Portman (reviewed in my June column)
Lost Thoughts of Soldiers by Delia Falconer
Darkhenge by Catherine Fisher (reviewed in my May column)
The Ocean and All Its Devices by William Brown Spencer (reviewed in the May issue of Bookslut)
Unnamed memoir for Booklist (more about this after my glowing review is published!)
The Not Knowing by Cathi Unsworth (to be reviewed this summer)
Generals Die in Bed by Charles Yale Harrison (ditto)
A Brief History of my Impossible Life
Travels with Myself and Another by Martha Gellhorn
Free Basball by Sue Corbett (in my July or August column)
House by Michael Ruhlman
Buttermilk Hill (reviewed in this summer's Eclectica)
Heredity by Jenny Davidson
A Private History of Awe & Country of Language by Scott Russell Sanders (in June Bookslut)
Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Nailed by Patrick Jones (June column)
New Orleans Mon Amour (in May for Voices of NOLA)
That Fernhill Summer (in July/August column)

I feel pretty good about this list - I think it's a nice balance between adult and YA adult titles. I did read a few titles from the TBR pile - Sylvia Plath was the biggest accomplishment from that department as I've been woefully behind on reading her for ages. I thought House was also an excellent building/moving memoir, one of those niche books that can be so dreadfully boring if done wrong but was quite excellent in this example. (And rang very true I thought.) The one thing that stands out from looking at books 51-68 is that I still need to work on balance. I'm discovering this a lot when it comes to putting my columns together - I have a tendency it seems to end up with a bunch of big important books all at once and I think that can be a bit overwhelming for any reader. I had two war books this month (three if you count Sir Neville whose been with me for weeks) and that almost seems too harsh. It's all in the balance I keep thinking, but it's hard to stay upbeat when so many important things are going on in the world. Do I skip the two books on coal this month? Or not finish Sir Neville and WWII? The stack of YA historical fiction waiting for a late summer column includes a Japanese American boy in WWII Hawaii, a Japanese American girl interred in the US during the same period, a French girl abandoned on an island, a young boy fighting WWI in Palestine and on and on.

Balance, balance, balance. Need to keep thinking about that or the reading could get very tough indeed.