Last year, February’s tally suggested it was one of my busiest reading months. Which I chalk up to January being over-stuffed with reading ambitions, which overflowed into the following month. This year, that feels true once more.

With the exception of L’Arabe du futur, a graphic memoir scooped up randomly on a trip to a distant library branch in the city, all of these books have been in my reading plans since December (or longer).

Like Mary Hocking’s trilogy about three sisters, which Danielle and I have been intending to read for more than a year. Mavis Gallant’s Home Truths collection, which marks the midpoint of my reading through her published stories. And Friday Black, which Andrew Blackman recommended later last year (and, then, I listened to an interview on the NYT Book Review podcast).

All of these have been waiting their turn. Including a reread of Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood, which is a reprint of the three novels which comprise the Xenogenesis trilogy: Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989).

When I first read the trilogy, it was an exercise in patience, because I desperately wanted to read the books all-in-one-go, but I had to wait for library copies to arrive. So I read the first in January 2000, the second in March, and the third in April. I remember that it seemed to take forever.

In the meantime, I was reading other feminist authors, including Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Adrienne Rich’s poems and essays, Jean Rhys and, even more classic, Sarah Scott and Frances Sheridan. Along with my first Gabriel Garcia Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude) and finishing Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy, although I’d read Leviathan the previous year.

That was a rich reading winter. And if this reading winter is even half as brilliant, I’ll be doing alright.

If you had to choose your next read from my stack, which book/author would you choose?

How is your reading shaping up, this fine February?