Month: April 2016

April 25, 2016

Taming Your TBR…

As someone who is both a book lover and a shopaholic I find my TBR list to be growing not only in wishlist form, but in physical book form.  I now am the proud owner of 312 Kindle books and 5 shoulder high stacks of physical books (not like that is some huge feat- I’m 5 foot 3 inches tall and my shoulders aren’t that far off the ground).  Even given my height, this is still a massive number of books.  My to be read lists grows… daily. I read a lot of books, my goal for this year is 150- so I power through, but seeing these numbers is sometimes daunting even for a voracious reader such as myself.

Amazon has become a slippery slope for me.

“Readers who bought this book also bought…”

This sentence has become the thing that nightmares, credit card nightmares are made of.

I need help taming my TBR lists.  I have put a spending freeze in place, but that doesn’t help me sort through what I already have.

How do you tame your TBR?  Do you set a particular order and never divert from it?  Do you read in the order you purchase?  Do you just go based on feeling when you have to start something new?

Right now my TBR is conquering me, rather than me conquering it.

Consider this a plea…. HELP!

April 23, 2016

Book Review: I Let You Go – Clare Mackintosh

Good reads synopsis:

In a split second, Jenna Gray’s world descends into a nightmare. Her only hope of moving on is to walk away from everything she knows to start afresh. Desperate to escape, Jenna moves to a remote cottage on the Welsh coast, but she is haunted by her fears, her grief and her memories of a cruel November night that changed her life forever.

Slowly, Jenna begins to glimpse the potential for happiness in her future. But her past is about to catch up with her, and the consequences will be devastating . . .

 

So this is my 40th book of the year, and reading as much as I do it is really really difficult for me to be surprised by much of anything.  This books surprised me twice (at least!).  It’s dark, twisty goodness.  When I start a book I want characters I can get behind and occasionally I need a character to hate.  This had both.

That’s not to say this book is an easy read by any stretch of the imagination, the initial plot is disturbing and the twists take you to an even more troublesome place, but it’s not without reward.   It’s smart where other books may cop out and thought provoking when some ‘thrillers’ may gloss over.  It’s uneasiness is part of what makes it one of the better books I have read in my recent memory.

I am looking forward to what Clare Mackintosh has to share in the future, she has officially added herself of my ‘must read’ list.

Stars: 4.5/5

April 19, 2016

The Girl Who Never Read Harry Potter…

So… I’m an admitted bibliophile but there is one mountain of books I have yet to climb– The Harry Potter Series!

Somehow, in a world that is obsessed with the Potter series I have managed not to read a page and not to have seen even one second of a film.  I realize that this makes me a bit strange.   I can only justify it one way- the first Harry Potter book was published in 1997, when I was a high school sophomore.  This was before I was someone who read for enjoyment.  At that time I was still someone who had to read books and write papers.  My love for reading wasn’t something I developed until later and by that point the Harry Potter series seemed daunting and almost too large of a task to take on.  Maybe I needed to be years removed from the books and peoples complete obsession with them in order to feel the need to read them.

I’ve finally reached that point.  My goal is to read the series throughout the remainder of the year.  Wish me luck… wish for me to love them as much as people I know love them.  It’ll be really awkward if I turn out being the only person I know who doesn’t love the series.

April 17, 2016

The thing about series…

I’m going to start by saying that I love a series.  I love when characters tie back to previous characters.  I love keeping track of what I’ve read on FictFact (what a resource!)  What I’m saying is that I love threads.  Now I also like when a series book can also serve as a stand alone.  Is this both asking a lot and a bit backwards in thinking?  Sure.

Over the weekend I finished ‘The Bone Secrets’ Series by Kendra Elliot.

This is a series I have been reading over the past year or so.  It’s 6 books in total (5 full length books) and it is right in the wheelhouse of what I enjoy when I start a book.  I’m a sucker for a romantic suspense.  I need a little bit of “isn’t that awful” and “isn’t that lovely” and this series as a whole provides that in spades.

Synopsis from Goodreads:

After a brutal snowstorm in the Cascade Mountains, Chris Jacobs discovers two things he never expected to see: the charred shell of a cabin, and Gianna Trask and her sixteen-year-old daughter huddled in an SUV, having barely escaped from their burning vacation rental.

Still scarred from a childhood ordeal, Chris knows there’s something sinister about the scene—it’s the stench of burned flesh.

Forced to wait out the blizzard in their rescuer’s retreat, medical examiner Gianna Trask wonders if her hidden past has finally caught up with her. When a body is found in the destroyed cabin’s ashes and a forest ranger is brutally murdered, both Gianna and Chris must confront their secrets if they want to escape the violent threat lurking outside.

In the fifth book in the Bone Secrets series, Kendra Elliot leads readers on a dangerous, twisting journey of two lives forever changed by a fiery snowstorm in the mountains.

In this instance I really liked both lead characters.  Chris Jacobs is a carryover from a previous book and although I read the stories far enough apart to not remember all the nuances of his character in the earlier book I was quickly brought up to speed and remembered all the reasons I liked him and felt for him and his story.

I generally find it really easy to figure out the whodunit and this was not as obvious.

4/5 stars for Known

4/5 stars for the Bone Secrets Series

What is your feeling on book series?

Do you wait for multiple books to come out and binge or do you read as they are released?