Even after all my blathering on about not wanting to make love on Tuesday from last week, I find myself doing it this week. Funny how things turn out. I think it is probably like that thing where you fight tooth and nail not to turn out like your mother and then you are thirty and you wake up one day and you are like, “Crap in a bucket! Most of the things I do I do the way my mom taught me to do.” My mom is a complete hoarder and I visit her twice a year and I flip so far to the other side when I come home that I frantically search my home for things I can cull from my home. So I have learned to be just like my mother, in the opposite direction.
Browse Category by Uncategorized
Weekend Pick Me Up – Scoundrel by Zoe Archer
The weekend is here and it is officially autumn is SoCal. ~Well, my husband failed to close the sliding glass door last night and it is a nippy 61F degrees in the apartment currently. Despite my fleece and my blanket and my tea and my hawt guy Kpop videos, I’m still pretty cold. Ree-Ree, one of my kitties is not fazed in the least though and she is curled up in the sun baking as if it were any other day and sun cures all. And hell, it might in kitty world.
This weekend’s date with my husband is an arts and crafts fair in Del Mar. I know I just emasculated him, but he will live through it. He really comes to carry the credit card and bags. I’m going to get a jump on Christmas gifts. I’d really like to be done Christmas shopping this year no later than Thanksgiving. The best laid plans and all.
My Weekend Pick Me Up is an older book that I must re-read about once every two months. I really just adore the hero from it because he is a completely charming and unrepentant rake. Scoundrel by Zoe Archer is the second of her steampunk series the Blades of the Rose series and in my opinion it is also the best of the series, with Rebel being a very close second.
Any Day That Ends in YA – Undertow by K.R. Conway
Wow… Life is sometimes just a crazy bugger. I must say that I am a little overwhelmed today and it’s not really a pinpoint-able thing–it’s sort of all the little things. I’m fully okay with the fact that my husband never renewed my car registration in July, yet still I drive my unregistered car. But wow am I sucker punched by the fact that I can’t find the last edge piece in the puzzle we are trying to do. And thrown completely by the fact that the cushion on the couch won’t fluff back into something less smushed. And after having started using my Twitter account after years of letting it’s fields go fallow, I realized today that I didn’t know that the little @ button showed you comments addressed to you. People have been chatting my way and they must think I’m the rudest SOB out there. Life is just a crazy bugger.
My YA book choice for this week is K.R. Conway’s Undertow. This is another title I received from NetGalley. When I first opened my account I went a little crackpot crazy so I have about 19 novels to read from them and I feel awful because these nice authors, publicists and publishers loaned me these ARC’s in good faith that I would read and review them in a timely manner and due to my kid-in-a-candyland-excitement I really over-extended myself. On top of that, there are books that I would really like to read and review outside of my NetGalley obligation. So, all this being facts and brass tacks–I need to read more and read faster or I need to hope that those who granted me their kindness will extend it to excuse my weak nature. All books will be reviewed, in due time. This week K.R. Conway’s time has come.
Makin’ the Love Monday – Moon by Laurann Dohner
Makin’ the Love Monday! Oh mah gawds! It’s 9pm and I don’t even have the review done yet. I totally fell down on the job. It’s almost Makin’ the Love Tuesday Morning. Not that makin’ the love on Tuesday mornings is wrong–just it’s important to have some follow through on commitments. I’m commited to makin’ my love on Mondays. I’m rigid. And I’m also late. And to be really sticking honest–I have already finished writing the Any Day That Ends in YA which I consider my Tuesday post.
The reason this is a late post is that I really didn’t want to review Moon by Laurann Dohner for today. I wanted to do another book but L-I-F-E beefed my day and this is what I have. I was hoping to reserve a Laurann Dohner review for when True was released. There is really no universal law that says I can’t do more than one review by one author on my blog, even if I feel as if that is some sort of evil nepotism. The world will not collapse if I do this now and True when it comes out. The worse thing that could possibly happen is that I will piddle a little now and then piddle a little later instead of one piddle all alone.
Weekend Pick Me Up – Selling Scarlett by Ella James
Yesterday was my 40th Birthday. I have reached my 4th decade. If this was my wedding anniversary it would be my ruby year. Since it is only my birthday year I will be open to accepting sapphires. No need to be greedy.
For my big year I woke up with a killer headache on a day that just so happened to be one where I was going to see my neurologist about my migraines. Received a birthday gift of a shot of Toradol to kick it’s ass and then bought myself a Thai massage before coming home and spending the day with my husband watching Netflix and playing World of Warcraft. We had actually had bigger plans but crappy weather in SoCal is unusual and when it happens it sort of stops things in their tracks. It rained all yesterday and we nested.
This weekend we are having a “brown out” where we aren’t using any electronic equipment and are spending the weekend doing things together. We have paperback copies of The Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card to read when we aren’t out of the house going to the zoo and having my birthday dinner. We haven’t really had a weekend like this since we were in college. This all being the case… I have to do my Weekend Pick Me Up early since David is taking tomorrow off to start our our vacation early. I’ll whip this out now so you can start yours early too!
This weeks recommendation is a romantic suspense by Ella James called Selling Scarlett. I found this book on Amazon on a search for free Amazon books. It is the first in her new Love Inc. series about a seedy underworld pleasure brothel in the Nevada desert that caters to the affluently jaded and infamously bored.
Any Day That Ends in YA – The Spirit Keeper by K.B. Laugheed
I had a case of reader’s peckishness over the later part of last week and I tried to read Tijan’s Carter Reed and I wasn’t feeling it. Opened up and got to chapter eight on Flight, the First book of the Crescent Chronicles. I got to 40% of Love in the Time of Global Warming. Barely made it into Endless by Amanda Gray, which is one I’m supposed to review for NetGalley–not sure what I’m going to do there. And I bought but didn’t even tap into the Bayou Heat books by Alexandra Ivy & Laura Wright. I was sort of having my own version of my baby sister’s attention span on book boyfriends.
Finally yesterday, with the blood vessels in my head trying to evict either my brain matter or protesting the housing of my skull… somehow I managed to get two books read. I don’t know what it says about me that I can do more reading with a migraine than I can without one.
The Spirit Keeper by K.B. Laugheed was really an incredibly great book. I hate making statements like that because I can hear my Photography Instructor from college saying in the back of my mind that that is not the correct way to give valuable criticism. But this book really is a great book. (Nancy, I am going to qualify it now! I swear.)
Tongue Wagger – The Last Alive by H.L. Wampler
This is my first Empowering Lemon Bundt Wednesday and the reference will probably be lost on most but it is a Buffy the Vampire Slayer quote from when Willow goes to join the Wicca circle at UC Sunnydale. Inspite of the tongue and cheek meaning to the comment it is meant to infer that the members have a mean amount of girl power. My Wednesday blog posts will be for books with heroines who kick serious boot-ay!
The first urban warrior to be featured is Emma Taylor, the zombie slaying survivor of an apocalypse started when her sister becomes patient zero after a mysterious bite on a family camping trip. The Last Alive is a very fast paced novel. From the first page it takes off and there are no lulls or pauses. Tension is created by an alternating look between the fortified Pittsburgh she lives in present time with flashbacks to the initial outbreak and it leaves the reader caught precariously between the panic of then and desperation of now.
Morning Tea with the Author – H.L. Wampler
Today is an auspicious day because it is the beginning of a new addition to my blog, Morning Tea with the Author, which is a Q&A with authors about books, writing, reading and everything in the kitchen sink.
My first author is H.L. Wampler, creator of the novel The Last Alive, a horror story about a zombipocalypse that begins when her twin sister is bitten in the woods while camping and then things get really hairy.
Makin’ the Love Monday – Found by Evangeline Anderson
I have spent the last week under a ton of blankets trying to shake the chills and sleeping off some sneaky poorlies. I wanted to get a good deal of reading and other assorted “life necessities” taken care of before the beginning of October. But alas, the cold hand of illness brought me to my knees and I only read about four books this past week.
My Makin’ the Love Monday selection of this week is one of the Brides of the Kindred novels by Evangeline Anderson, book four, Found. I started reading this series after finding one of the titles on a Listopia lists, Mars Needs Women Trope, which just made me giggle to no end. When I read the first book, Claimed, I was about 70% on board but I had this really horrible problem… I truly HATED the heroine and her sister made me want to eat glass. I really liked the males though, Sylvan who is a main character in the first and the hero of the second–Hunted, is one of my favorites. BUT I hate his HEA too. Then there was Sought… Deep is so yummy–all broken and tortured and his light half and eager to please brother, Lock. But Kat was freaking irritating as all hell. There was this ray of hope… In Sought Lauren is introduced and she is Xairn’s mate for the fourth book, Found, and she is wonderful. How could this possibly go wrong?
Any Day that Ends in YA – Runes by Ednah Walters
I didn’t think there was any real estate left in my heart for another book boyfriend but I was wrong. It is getting a bit crowded in there but Runes by Ednah Walters has pretty much smacked me upside the noggin’ and left palpitations in my chest upon introduction with Torin St. James. Man, arrogant jackasses. There just aren’t enough of them in YA to appease my hunger.