Longest Month (2021) Reading
If your February was anything like mine, you’re probably feeling as I am this first week of March, exhausted and drained of all energy. It’s Thursday so there’s light at the end of the week. All last month the only thing I really wanted to read was book candy. I’d much rather read than watch TV, but I still want a quick read that doesn’t require me to think a good deal. What I want is a twist on reality. I turned to whatever books I could borrow digitally from my library systems.
First up are two non-fiction titles, both are approachable but for different reasons.
I love stitch dictionaries and will flip through them again and again looking for inspiration. I want to swatch almost every stitch in Norah Gaughan’s Twisted Stitch Sourcebook. For more about it, please read my post at little acorn creations.
During the academic year, a semi-local lab holds lectures for the public and attended for years. Now we can attend without leaving the house, but we seem to keep missing them. It was nice to scratch my astrophysics itch by finally reading, The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack. It’s incredibly readable and interesting. You can find an adapted excerpt about the Big Rip at “Tearing Apart the Universe”.
Now to the fiction.
Sabrina Flynn’s Ravenwood Mysteries hooked me in and would not let me go until I finished the series. Riot and Bel are the stars but it’s Flynn’s writing of all the rest — the time period, other characters, locations, weather, clothing that made this such a compelling read.
One of the digital systems my library uses started offering “bonus borrows” that didn’t count toward limits. It’s how I picked up G. A. Aiken’s Scarred Earth series. It is categorized as Fiction > Romance > Paranormal – Shifters and Fiction > Fantasy > Humorous. It’s true, I often couldn’t hold in my laughter and scared the cats more than once. It was a nice fun read even with the obvious twists on convention. It felt good to laugh.
I’ve become an Ilona Andrews Reader, in that I read everything they publish. (My gateway was Kate Daniels.) I wanted to read the Hidden Legacy series for a while, but the library didn’t have a license for the first book and checking out real-copy books is not easy at this time. So, I waited and last month Burn for Me was finally available to borrow. Then I devoured the rest of the series. As an only child I was incredibly fascinated by the Baylor siblings. I finished the series two weeks ago and am still thinking about the characters. That’s a good thing.
It’s well established that I’ve been a Mercedes Lackey Reader for years. I read all the Valdemar books, as well as her other series (and am still looking for some of the titles). My hold request for the fifteenth book in the Elemental Masters series was filled and I read it last Sunday. It’s an interesting series and I’d like at some time to reread the first books and see how the world and characters have grown and evolved. This book isn’t perfect, but it was nice to see how the series could shift to a land and ocean away from where the earlier books are set.
Since finishing Hidden Legacy I’ve been drawn into the world of Jane Yellowrock by Faith Hunter. I’m likely enamored with very different aspects of the stories than most readers. It’s time to confess that I’ve been scribbling stories, characters, and places in my notebooks for months. So, I’m reading differently lately and paying attention to how characters develop and (urban) fantasy worlds are shaped. Plus, there’s something about reading this book when a purring cat is making biscuits on your lap with her razor-sharp claws.
I also read the first in the Clockwork Century series by Cherie Priest. This was as an audio book narrated by Kate Reading and Wil Wheaton and while I found the two voices jarring and parts of the story a slog, I’m still curious enough to read the next book.
What am I reading next? I’m trying to break my borrow only from the library habit while the books I have here that are gathering layers of dust. Unfortunately, few of those are what I’ve wanted to read for the past year, so we’ll see what happens.