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Welcome to my February 2025 month in review!
Travels/Exploration:
If you’re new here, you should know that my husband is a traveling healthcare professional and we travel the United States in our RV. He works three months or more at one hospital and we have fun exploring the area on his days off. Our permanent home is in Asheville, NC. He is currently working near San Diego, California. Here are the places we visited this month.
Naples, FL to visit my in-laws
Old Town San Diego (You can see a few pictures on my February 23 weekly update)
Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve
Disneyland (You can see a few pictures on my March 2 weekly update)
Watched:
This month on film was a very mixed bag for us. It was also a Lili Taylor month. She was not even remotely on our radar previously but she was coincidentally in three separate things we watched. (Mystic Pizza, Say Anything, and Outer Range) It’s a good thing we’ve decided we like her as an actress.
All Creatures Great and Small: Season 5–Words cannot describe how much I love this show. Sure, there are sad moments, but watching nice people care for and tease each other does my heart a lot of good in these trying times. I’ve loved the books since I discovered them on my dad’s bookshelf as a teenager. Watched via our TV antenna and the PBS app.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Season 2–I don’t consider myself a Trekkie by any means but I’ve watched quite a few Star Trek shows and movies. This might be my new favorite series, and I’m saying that as someone who loved The Next Generation. The cast is fantastic and the episodes are a good mix of tense and fun. The writers took some chances on some… different… formats in a couple of shows this season and it really paid off. One episode in particular had us howling with laughter. We’re sad that we have to wait for season three now, especially since this one ended on a cliffhanger. Checked out discs from the library.
Mystic Pizza–We’ve wanted to watch this since we visited Mystic, Connecticut over Labor Day weekend last year and we finally got around to it (There really is a Mystic Pizza restaurant but we didn’t want to wait in line for it). This coming-of-age dramedy felt a little predictable but Julia Roberts really shines in her first major role. Checked out from the library.
Say Anything–We trawled our Letterboxd watchlist for a rom-com on Valentine’s Day and came up with this ’80s classic. I missed a lot of ’80s movies but it sometimes feels like my husband saw all of them (and saw every ’80s band in concert) yet he’d never seen this movie. It was pretty cute but I doubt that I’ll remember much about it. I’m happy to have finally seen John Cusack in a trench coat holding a boombox over his head. Streamed on Hulu.
Being There–My father-in-law loves Peter Sellers and thought we might enjoy watching this movie because it was filmed around the Biltmore Estate, which is in Asheville, North Carolina where our permanent home is. It was funny and I liked the pointed political commentary but I think I was just too tired at the time to fully appreciate it. Rented from Amazon Prime.
The Marvels–I had vaguely heard that this was not a good movie but I thought maybe that was just some men being sexist about a superhero movie led by a female ensemble. No. It was not good. I like the individual characters but this plot didn’t make any sense and I felt that they weakened Captain Marvel. I would be fine with making her more…approachable, but this was silly and it bothered me. I can kind of see that they were making fun of other movies and female stereotypes but it missed the mark as far as I’m concerned. The good news is that, other than the newly-released Captain America: Brave New World, we’re caught up on Marvel movies. I hope The Marvels is the low point and it gets better from here. Streamed on Disney Plus.
Outer Range: Season 2–Don’t even start this. It was canceled after two seasons and there’s no resolution. It’s weird, which really intrigued us the first season, but all the characters got more and more unlikable as the second season went on, it’s pretty violent, it lost its way, and then it simply ended. Streamed on Amazon Prime.
Reviews Posted:
What You Are Looking for is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama, translated by Alison Watts, illustrated by Rohan Eason
Cannery Row (Cannery Row #1) by John Steinbeck
Seeing a Large Cat (Amelia Peabody #9) by Elizabeth Peters
Noir (The Noir Chronicles #1) by Christopher Moore, read by Johnny Heller
Amari and the Great Game (Supernatural Investigations #2) by B. B. Alston, read by Imani Parks
Bookish Posts:
Reading Stats:
Graphics from The StoryGraph. I read fewer books in February than January, which I expected since I didn’t check out stacks of picture books and graphic novels, but also less pages. My average book length increased from 196 pages to 320 and my average time to finish decreased from seven days to six. My audiobook time and rating are essentially unchanged.
Best Books I Read This Month:
Fiction: Somewhere Beyond the Sea (Cerulean Chronicles #2) by TJ Klune
Nonfiction: I Know Who You Are: How an Amateur DNA Sleuth Unmasked the Golden State Killer and Changed Crime Fighting Forever by Barbara Rae-Venter
Audiobook: Cometh the Hour (The Clifton Chronicles #6) by Jeffrey Archer, read by Alex Jennings
Other Books Read:
All links go to my review, either on my blog or on GoodReads.
Somewhere Beyond the Sea (Cerulean Chronicles #2) by TJ Klune
Cometh the Hour (The Clifton Chronicles #6) by Jeffrey Archer, read by Alex Jennings
¡Diez Manzanas En La Cabeza! by Dr. Seuss, translated by Yanitzia Canetti, illustrated by Roy McKie
I Know Who You Are: How an Amateur DNA Sleuth Unmasked the Golden State Killer and Changed Crime Fighting Forever by Barbara Rae-Venter
Winter Lost (Mercy Thompson #14) by Patricia Briggs
Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel #1) by Connie Willis
Island of the Blue Dolphins (Island of the Blue Dolphins #1) by Scott O’Dell
The Kamogawa Food Detectives (The Kamogawa Food Detectives #1) by Hisashi Kashiwai, translated by Jesse Kirkwood, read by Hanako Footman
Reading Challenge Update:
See more details on my 2025 Reading Challenge page. Title links go to the host’s challenge sign-up page.
| # Read | Goal | Complete? | End Date | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Books in Translation | 2 | 4-6 | No | Dec 31, 2025 |
| Southern Literature | 2 | 7+ | No | Dec 31, 2025 |
| Hundred Years Hence | 0 | 1 | No | Dec 31, 2025 |
| 💯 Craving for Cozies | 2 | 1-25 | Yes | Dec 31, 2025 |
| Nonfiction | 3 | 12 | No | Dec 31, 2025 |
| Classics | 1 | 12 | No | Dec 31, 2025 |
| 💯 Cover Lovers | 13 | 1-10 | Yes | Dec 31, 2025 |
| GoodReads /Reading by the Numbers | 23 | 100 | No | Dec 31, 2025 |
| The StoryGraph Onboarding | 0 | 5 | No | Dec 31, 2025 |
| 💯 The StoryGraph January Pages | NA | Read every day | Yes | Jan 31, 2025 |
| Classics Club | 26 | 50 | No | April 15, 2026 |
Hosts
The Monthly Wrap-Up is hosted by Nicole at Feed Your Fiction Addiction and Shannon at It Starts at Midnight. Best of the Bunch is hosted by Jessica at A Cocoon of Books. Link your post each month!
