Opinions of a Wolf

You may have noticed (if I have any constant readers left) that things have been awfully quiet around here. I seem to be in a phase where I’m longer so interested in writing in-depth book reviews (although I’m still reading voraciously). Writing reviews has been starting to feel like an unwelcome chore rather than a joy. But I do still love the online book reading community. It can be a challenge to find fellow voracious readers, and this helps me connect with you. So what to do? I tried out the haiku reviews. Those were fun but also too time-consuming for my average week. So I’m going to try this out. Summarizing my month of reading once a month. This will also free me up to do occasional posts of other varieties if I want to. Thoughts on book trends, summaries of new sewing projects, news of my gardens (both productive and succulent), and more. If I feel like it. I hope you’ll enjoy the monthly summaries and find some good reads for yourself through them. Also in light of wanting to keep things simpler around here, I’ve decided to only feature the cover of my favorite read of the month. Maybe one day I’ll return to my more in-depth reviews.

As you can tell from the title, I’m very far behind in my book reviews. My oldest month was the month of February! So you’ll have a few of these in a row while I catch up, and then we should be onto a monthly schedule.

I started off February devouring a romance, which seems appropriate enough for Valentine’s Day month. Stay Until We Break by Mercy Brown is the second in her new adult series about a punk rock band in the 90s. This one centers around Sonia, the band’s business manager. She’s the type of character I usually struggle with empathizing with (a poor little rich girl) but it worked for me anyway. I think I just really enjoy the setting and I find it a real hoot that the 90s count as historic fiction now.
(4 out of 5 stars; buy it)

Next I tackled the scifi classic Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell Jr. It’s the scifi novel that inspired the movie classic The Thing. It centers around a team of Antarctic researchers, and, of course, things go awry. I read it with the intention of watching the movie, but I basically found it to be a less interesting Alien vs. Predator so I never got around to watching the movie. I did listen to this on audiobook format, though, and I found the narrator to be so good that it bumped up my enjoyment a bit.
(4 out of 5 star; buy it)

I wrapped up the month with another audiobook (I can’t remember at this point why I was reading so many audiobooks) in the form of a Scandinavian thriller: Unwanted by Kristina Olsson. As is the case with many thrillers, this centers around a mismatched investigative team looking into the mysterious disappearance of a child. The narration was mysteriously accented (I know it’s in translation. You don’t have to drive that point home by having the narrator have a thick accent….) but I found it deliciously spine-tingling, nonetheless.
(4 out of 5 stars; buy it)

(I also read five other books at the beginning of February, but I’ve previously reviewed them here).

My total for the month of February 2017:

• 8 books
  • 7 fiction; 1 nonfiction
  • 5 female authors; 3 male authors
  • 3 ebooks; 2 print books; 3 audiobooks

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