Another April gone by, and what an interesting April that was!

I’m thankful I was so well organised this year and had over half of my posts already written and scheduled before April began, because the end of March and April itself was tough. Three of my close family died in March (non COVID-19 related but I don’t know if that’s better or worse) and then there was living life under lockdown. It was good to have this challenge to focus on though and have some structure in an ultimately very confusing time.

I’m very pleased I completed the challenge for a number of reasons. It’s my senventh year of taking part in this challenge and I do like how it’s become a “thing” for me and my blog. I’m happy it made me cut down my unwatched film list by twenty. My updated list of films I own but haven’t watched is on Letterboxd and I’m always looking for recommendations. The six films I reviewed that weren’t part of that list were ones I found on Netflix or similar.

The month started on a high with The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford which I gave four stars but it ended on a low with Zookeeper which I do not recommend and gave one star. The films I most enjoyed watching a writing about were The Quake, Imagine Me & You and West Side Story. Though I have to say it was hard to review so many films in such a relatively short space of time – my brain’s not made to work that way.

My stats for April this year weren’t as good as last year but were better than the 2018 edition, so I’ll take that. The most popular A-Z posts were my reviews of Let the Right One In, National Treasure and K-19: The Widowmaker. Previous years A-Z posts also got a lot of hits including the posts I wrote about for Bucky Barnes and Happy Hogan last year, and Hermione Granger and Kingsley Shacklebolt that I wrote for the 2017 edition of the challenge.

Because of the aforementioned personal and wider world issues going on, I visited very few blogs which is a shame. I mostly did a good job at keeping up with replying to comments and I should have hopefully got to everyone by the time this post goes live.

Every year in my reflections post I ponder whether or not I’ll take part in the challenge next year, and this year’s no different! But I think as long as I have an idea well ahead of time that I can write and schedule posts for, then I think I will. I think it’d be nice to at least do this challenge for ten years in a row – only three more to go!

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my A-Z posts this month. This blog will go back to a roughly equal amount of posts and books and films now. I hope all of you who took part had a successful A-Z in April, and sorry I didn’t get to your blog. For more information on the A-Z in April Challenge visit the website.