March has been off to a slow start for reading because IT’S MY BIRTHDAY MONTH! So I have been a little distracted with new video games and celebrations which means I’ve been staying up a tad too late to get much reading in.

I did read Extraordinary: A Story of an Ordinary Princess by Cassie Anderson which had been sitting on my shelf for several months now. It’s a graphic novel for kids so it wasn’t very long and I finished it in a single evening. It is really cute and I liked the moral of the story that being ordinary wasn’t a curse, but an opportunity for the princess to be whatever she wanted to be.

I’ve gotten to that part in my board game obsession that I’m reading books on the subject to have a better grasp on the history of the hobby and also the psychology behind play. I did a search in the library catalog and found several books on the topic, but the first one I picked up was Board Games in 100 Moves: 8,000 years of play by Ian Livingstone.

The book is packed with full-color photographs and brief history of the 100 games, some context for who played them and win, and, at least at the start, shows an evolution in games. One thing is clear – humans like to play games. We like to make up rules and then see if we can conquer those rules. Looking at the images from Ancient Egypt and Rome and India of people crowded around what is essentially a board game shows that we all want to have a bit of friendly competition now and then. I’m only a few pages in, still in ancient history, but it is a fascinating read. It is amazing how many of these games have survived with their rules intact (well, scholars are pretty sure they figured out the rules) and now they have been transformed into Tabletop Simulator mods and Dicebreaker can do play-throughs on their channel! WILD!

What have you read or are you reading in March?