Books

Book 706: Throwing Hearts – N.R. Walker

I might be nearing the end of this MM romance craze. I have a few more in the backlog, but in general I’m thinking my brain might need something a bit meatier. (I don’t know if that pun is intended or not because there has been plenty of meat in these books. [eyebrows eyebrows])

I’m not sure if this is a result of Walker’s writing style, there’s a maturity missing that is refreshing in the right moment, but also a little frustrating in most other moments, or if it’s reading so many back-to-back. I’m up to 23 this year (not counting heteromance or graphic novels) and the bulk of those have been in the last 6-10 weeks.

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Books

Book 705: The Weight of It All – N.R.Walker

For our anniversary Tim got me a new Kindle Oasis (so freakin’ fancy) and a Kindle Unlimited membership. I’d avoided the unlimited membership because of the rumors that it’s flooded with self-published works and knock off copies of popular works, but I am definitely going to take advantage of it and see if I can find out if it’s worth the rather steep price when I can get 95% of what I want from my local library.

My first stop, was of course MM romances because why not? I liked the premise of this one, a larger guy dumped because he gained weight and become complacent in his relationship slowly finding himself and falling for his hell-a hot trainer who has his own backstory. What I didn’t realize was that I had previously read a book by N.R. Walker, Upside Down, that I thoroughly enjoyed.

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ARC, Books

Book 271: Too Busy For Love – Tasmin Baker

I always wonder whether to count novellas as full books when I’m tallying for the year, but why shouldn’t I? I won’t lie and say I requested a copy of this book from the publisher because of the blurb, I’ll be completely honest and say it was the cover. I received a copy of this from the publisher and received no compensation for my honest opinion.

So clearly this is a case where the marketing worked and will probably get the book a lot more readers than the story itself. I mean just take a moment to appreciate it. Now, I don’t want to completely mislead you, the novella wasn’t horrible, it just could’ve been so much better. I think the biggest problem I had with the novel was that I couldn’t tell where the story was set and the language was off. There seemed to be a strange mixture of American, British and Australian English and this really kept me out of the story.

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Books

Book 112: The Book Thief – Markus Zusak

This is one of those situations where I’m glad I don’t read the backs of books carefully each time before I start reading a book. I went to the library knowing there was a book about a book thief I wanted to read. I assumed this, The Book Thief, was the correct title as a few people have blogged about it recently and I’ve a friend who also recommended it…

About a quarter of the way through the book I realized this was definitely not the book I thought it was, but kept reading. Whoops! When I finished The Book Thief I went back to my handy list of books to-be-read and found the book I planned on reading was actually called The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett. A stretch, but same basic premise – a person who steals books – but completely different stories and tales.

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