Books

Book 788: Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell #1) – Hilary Mantel

I clearly was not in a hurry to read this one. It has been on my Kindle since I purchased it in December of 2011 and that was TWO years after it won the Booker Prize! I avoided it for some time because I was waiting for the remaining two books: Bring Up the Bodies (2012) and The Mirror and the Light (2020), but I also avoided it because it’s a freakin’ tome. It comes it at just under 560 pages.* Thankfully the next one is shorter (436), but the last is 200 pages more coming in at 764 pages! OOF that is going to be a commitment when I get around to it.

I also actively avoided it because that was around the time that I came to realize that in general I find myself enjoying the runners up to the Booker Prize more often than the actual winner. There’s like a mental hurdle I don’t think I can quite make the leap over to fully appreciate and see the beauty in most of the winners. I knew this was long and I knew that it had A LOT of description and the formatting was weird (minimal quotation marks, the point of view), so I knew it would be a big challenge for me.

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Books

Book 787: Winter Ball (Winter Ball #1) – Amy Lane

Oh how the tides of turned, these days I’m like GIVE ME ALL THE MM Holiday Romances, whereas when I first read Lane’s Christmas Kitsch back in 2013 I was much more cautious and actively staying away from them. At last check as I write this, I have over 22 books tagged with holiday romance. HA!

I have no memory of that first book I read which mostly tells me that it wasn’t bad. Looking back over my review and my rating of three-stars just reiterates it was a middle of the road book with no major problems and I kind of feel that’s where this one ends up too: probably not the most memorable book, but nothing so egregiously wrong that I’ll remember it only for that.

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Books

Book 785: Lonely Hearts (Love Lessons #3) – Heidi Cullinan

What was missing from Heidi Cullinan’s Love Lessons series? A fake boyfriend romance, so of course that’s what she provided and I soaked up in the third installment Lonely Hearts.

Picking up immediately after Fever Pitch, Cullinan dives right into the story of Elijah, the jaded and toying with the lines of addiction and safe sex roommate of Aaron from the last book, and Baz, life of the party big man on campus, but hiding a soft inside with a heartbreaking backstory.

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Books

Book 777: Ben’s Bakery and the Hanukkah Miracle – Penelope Peters

If you want to know how to piss me off when it comes to a book put the setting in Boston but don’t do your research and don’t have the book copy edited or proofread. That’s a guarantee to piss me off. This could’ve easily been a 4.5-star book because of the hilarious hockey kids trying to be matchmaker for their coach, but nope.

I apparently put this on hold when I was in the middle of my 12 Books of MM Holiday Romance binge, but forgot about it until I was notified on January 3 it was available. I went ahead and read it as I’m making my way through Timothy C. Winegard’s fascinating tome The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator, because let’s face it as fascinating as it is, that book is dense as hell. Continue reading “Book 777: Ben’s Bakery and the Hanukkah Miracle – Penelope Peters”

Books

Book 776: Star Spanked (Holiday Romance #3) – Leighton Greene

And to finish off 2020 I finish off the kinky romance trilogy I unexpectedly walked into. Instead of a Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa (those are so hard to find!) or New Year’s MM Romance I read a 4th of July Independence Day novel!? Oh well, I actually ended up reading one more MM Holiday Romance after the first because I forgot I’d put it on hold at the library.

Star Spanked finds us once again deep in the kink world of Los Angeles. We find out that Jon and Connor from Winter Wonders are now engaged (or married) and Tristan and Seth from Taming Tristan play a decent sized role in this novel as Ezra, a model seeking to get out of the industry is Tristan’s roommate. The other protagonist is semi-celebrity British ex-pat Sebastian.

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