52 Books in 52 Weeks – January

That’s right everyone, I am doing it again. Feel free to join me on this challenge. I am planning to read 52 books in 52 weeks. I will report back here on what I have read and will do my best to not have spoilers in my reviews so you can read them for yourselves. I am very open to suggestions as part of the reason I am doing this is so that I can try reading new and different things. Here is January’s list 🙂 Happy reading.

1. Avenger’s Angel (The Lost Angels #1) – Heather Killough-Walden

Randomly picked this book up at work, I love birds particularly predatory birds and owls. Wings are an amazing and beautiful invention of nature. I think this is the reason I enjoy some Angel fiction. The cover I had did not look anything like this one though, I possibly would have passed it over if it looked like this which would have been a shame. All in all I enjoyed this book, I liked the plot. I liked that the angels all had vey differing personalities and that in falling to earth their physical bodies took on parts of who they were as angels. Very interesting idea. There were parts that kind of grated against my equality views. Suffice to say that Uriel is not a man I would be attracted to, Angel or not. He was just a character that deep down was very dominant, you’ll have to read it for yourselves to see if he grows out of that.

I am definitely interested in reading the second book (little spoiler) as there was a hint it might be somewhat based in Australia 🙂 In all an interesting read, the plot was good and I was really taken in by the character of Samael who I believe is so much more than he seems.

Shout out to the Lilith character who was also great and I would love for her to be explored further. And who is this mysterious ‘Angel’ person? Hmm… Inquiring minds want to know 🙂

2. Blood Trinity (Belador series #1) – Sherrilyn Kenyon & Dianna Love

This was my first experience with either of these writers and generally speaking I quite enjoyed it. My favourite character was Feenix, such a great character, even considering he was only it in for a few pages. I particularly liked seeing the female protagonist’s interactions with him, it showed a very different side of her that I felt was integral to understanding who she is. I wasn’t really into the female protagonist’s name. “Evalle”, I know it was explained that it is pronounced, “E-vahl”, but it certainly doesn’t help her case. To be honest I kind of expected her to go wayyyy dark side or something. I get that the girl/woman has trust issues due to a dodgy past, truly I get it, but I felt like we were told about her dodgy past sooo many times in the book. I get it okay, something really bad happened to her, I don’t need to hear why she doesn’t like to be touched over and over.

I have just realised I am bitching about this book a lot considering I liked it and actually tore through it in just over a day whilst putting in a full day at work and sleeping in between. I liked the fast pace of the book and as I was reading it I felt like it was packed full of action, not always fighting action, but man that girl is busy. I felt like I was riding along on this crazy, uncertain, perhaps death at the end of it ride and I kinda liked it. I really liked the character of Storm, I loved the scene where he revealed his big secret and I liked the characters of Quinn and Tzader. Don’t really get the character of Isakk… maybe that is explored in the next book.

What more can I say? I am a supernatural loving girl and this book gave me all I could want whilst avoiding the trend of the last several years of having vampire and lycanthrope characters… go team 🙂

3. Messenger’s Angel (The Lost Angels #2) – Heather Killough-Walden

Yes I went back for book 2… honestly I am not at all sure how I felt about it. It was easy to read and get through. I didn’t really understand why the all powerful Archangels who know that the soul mates for whom they have been searching for 2000 years are coming out of the woodwork just go about everyday life instead of getting their asses in gear combing the globe. I mean, at least 2 of them can fly… surely between them they can cover some ground right? From what I can gather the two would never have met if not for the interfering of the “bad” guy Samael. He’s the most interesting character I believe, I am also interested to get inside the Angel of Death’s head so I will likely continue to read the series. I just, I don’t know, I didn’t really have much of a feeling for it either way. It was just there. I did like the descriptions of Scotland, probably because I have always wanted to go there. On to “Death’s Angel”…

4. Death’s Angel (The Lost Angels #3) – Heather Killough-Walden

Much better than no. 2 I must say. I liked that it wasn’t the same story again with the archess. I had started to feel like it was just going to be the same sort of this over and over again. I figured they would all go like this: She wants to resist him, but every fibre of her being wants him so bad… oops she gave in and they slept together and are now magically in love. – To be honest there is a fair amount of that going on, but I liked the addition of the extra characters. It gave it some depth, to be honest there are parts of the ending I didn’t see coming. Some might think part of the ending is trite, but I liked it because it wasn’t what I expected it to be. Nice change. Unfortunately it looks like ‘Warrior Angel’ has only been released in electronic book format so I don’t know if I will get to that one, it will depend on price etc. The love scenes in this series I am still finding really out there and strange, I pretty much skim over them until I see they are done. I guess some people are into that sort of thing, but it was not overly my style 🙂

5. Alterant (Belador series #2) – Sherrilyn Kenyon & Dianna Love

Did I mention in my review of book 1 how much I love the Gargoyle? He is just gorgeous and I love seeing the softer side of our hero. I really like the way Evalle is developed in this second book. In the first book she felt a little lost and there was a lot of repitition regarding her not wanting to be touched and why. In the second book you get more information about this and her feelings when she is touched are much better described – I love her fierceness, her steel backbone, her quick way of summing up a situation to make a decision as well as her complete confusion when it comes to all things to do with romantic relationships. I love Storm’s character, we should all be so lucky to have someone feel about us the way I think Storm feels about Evalle. There are a lot of characters going on here, but I never felt lost which was great. Tristan’s character is developing beautifully, I am really enjoying the fact that finding out information about him feels like pulling teeth, slow and suspenseful – please give me more about him! This book has pretty much every character a fantasy lover could want and the action is great for the bloodluster in me 🙂 Often these books are good with character development and heavy on the lovestory, but light on the gore – snore 🙂 Bring on the guts people. I tore through this book and can’t wait to get my hands on the next one.

Great first month of reading. Have any of you read these books? What were your thoughts?

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Brand New Year – 2015

Happy New Year guys! I hope you have all had an amazing festive season filled with love, laughter and family time. I’m a little late on the celebratory statements I know, but at least I made it in before February came around hahaha.

I have been so super busy with starting my new job. There is so much to learn and to do, I was recommending changes within my first 4 days of the job. I have found myself in a busy, busy role with daily challenges and I am happy as a pig in mud 😀 The ladies I have working for me are great and so experienced, they are just so great at their roles and know the place inside and out.

So it looks like this year is going to be full on. Like I said last year I have generally moved away from the idea of “New Years resolutions”, but I like the idea of goals, because no one is perfect and there is always room for improvement and adventure (however small they may be). I also think that goals should be fun as well as challenging. Therefore I have spent some time thinking about the kinds of things I wish to accomplish this year, here is my list:

• 52 Books in 52 Weeks – I definitely want to keep this going. I love reading and discovering new worlds and people through stories. Now I am working at a Public Library I have easy, daily access to a plethora of reading fodder 🙂 Like I said guys… pig in mud. I would like to keep challenging myself by reading different things. I would like to try at least one Bibliography this year and a couple of Non-Fiction books. I still did not get to read the Hobbit 😦 It will happen, hopefully this year 🙂
• Try something new – This was another challenge I took on last year in order to break myself out of the routine I was in and I really enjoyed it. Particularly in relation to expanding my knowledge of food and cooking… so much fun! I also did brave things like cut off my long hair which looked pretty good and I now keep it shoulder length 🙂 For the most part trying new things was positive and I think that it was a great goal to set myself so I am going to keep it going for 2015. Trying new things in 2014 also made me better at my job. We had the comment from a lecturer that the Library classes on research strategies were boring so I completely changed them and used pop culture references to demonstrate search strategies and aspects of information literacy. It was so successful that I was invited to present at the Uni conference at the end of last year, it was the first conference I have attended and I presented at it, how awesome is that?! Trying new things can be amazing!
• Health – I am not going to say I am going to lose ‘X’ amount of kilos. I’d like to lose a lot of kilos, but I know that is difficult because of my conditions and at the moment I am eating okay (most days), but I am not really exercising. With this new job I am often stuffed when I get home (plus having to cook dinner etc.) The second week of my new job I also got slapped with a stomache virus, couldn’t take time off… so I didn’t. Come last Saturday I went to bed early Friday night and slept for over 12 hours. I get that these are “excuses” in Personal Trainer terms, but I am working on it.
  I am going to commit to ensuring I am taking my medication. There are so many now that sometimes I lose track. So I am grandma-ing it and have bought myself a pill organiser. I plan to set it up every Sunday night so that my pills for the week are ready to go and all I have to do is take them 🙂
  
  I am also going to try and link ‘trying new things’ into this area. Trying to be active by trying new things or doing things I don’t normally, I think this will make it more interesting for me and therefore easier to accomplish. I will also use it to try new foods that are healthier for me. For instance I tried avacado some time ago (years) and I hated it, this year I am going to try it again.
• House – We were supposed to have our new house completely finished by last year… yeah that didn’t happen. Thanks land development people. So my dream for this year is that we will be moving into our new home around my birthday 🙂 Gotta dream big guys.
  
• Baby – It’s about hope 🙂 This year I have a new job, I am going to have a new house… these things come in 3’s right?! I want to wait a little while until I am settled in my new job before I get all gung ho about trying again. We are still doing the right things on the right days, but we are not measuring and medicating and temperaturing 🙂 Come on baby… this has to be our year… we are waiting to love you 🙂

What goals have you set yourself? Do you have any suggestions for 52 Books in 52 Weeks? Or do you have a low GI recipe to recommend?

52 Books in 52 weeks – December

I didn’t quite get this post out before the end of 2014, but I did get it done. This post is going to be a little different. For my last post on 52 Books in 52 Weeks for 2014 I read a trilogy my mother recommended to me written by Nora Roberts. I haven’t really read Nora Roberts before and to be honest I had the impression that she was a romance novelist and I usually like my novels with some more meat than that. But… I was wrong.

Here is the list 🙂

Number	Title	Author
50	Blood Brothers (Sign of Seven trilogy #1)	Roberts, Nora
51	The Hollow (Sign of Seven trilogy #2)	Roberts, Nora
52	The Pagan Stone (Sign of Seven trilogy #3)	Roberts, Nora

I am going to write about the trilogy as a whole. I probably should have written my thoughts about each of them down as I finished them, but by now you guys would know that when I get to reading a series I pretty much rip through it hahaha. This trilogy I finished in 3 days.

Sign of Seven trilogy – Nora Roberts

As I said before I resisted this trilogy at first, but my Mum has a lot of reading experience and has put me onto many great authors over the years and I trust her judgement so I decided to give it a go. As usual I will try to keep my review as free from spoilers as possible, but that is kind of hard.

Overall I really enjoyed this trilogy, I loved the mix of fantasy, thriller, romance etc. One thing I believe is that Nora Roberts is either an amazing researcher and should possibly have also been a librarian or she is just extremely knowledgeable about a tonne of topics. Generally speaking the trilogy was awesome. I loved the character of Cybil, she was my favourite – being a researcher are you really surprised I identified with the character of the same profession?

I actually really liked that the story initially starts with 3 male protagonists. It’s not often that seems to happen in books like this so it was nice to see. I loved the grandma character of Elsie, one weird thing I noticed was that in the first book she was 97 and in the second she was referred to as 93… apparently the Grandma is Benjamin Button… who knew? hahaha. Sorry for nitpicking, I can’t help it.

Whilst it was an easy read it dealt with some intense things at times. I kind of liked that it made me uncomfortable, most writers would stop before writing about taboos like rape (don’t worry this isn’t much of a spoiler). To me the fact that this writer didn’t shy away from writing about the kind of things that would in reality happen if the situation could happen in reality shows some balls. Kudos.

The only other thing that bothered me is the epilogue at the end of the series. I felt there either needed to be a second epilogue or that the first one should have been written differently. There were three things in particular I wanted to know about. If I write about what they are though it would be a HUGE plot spoiler so I seriously can’t.

All in all I would definitely recommend reading this series if you are into supernatural thrillers/romances. The details are great and the characters are well developed. Each of the 6 (yes, 6) main characters are well fleshed out and I like the details about their families and the town. All in all, good stuff and a great end to my 2015 52 Books in 52 Weeks. I am definitely considering repeating this challenge for 2015, I have found it very fulfilling and fun. I didn’t get to the Hobbit 😦 unfortunately it is still packed in boxes waiting to be moved to our new house which is not yet finished. But with my new job I will have access to a tonne of books this year, so if you have any suggestions please write them in the comments below.