Speed-Reading Book Nerd Reviews

It's another vacation book review....

Cue the chick lit and romance book reviews of stuff I got for free!

This site is not on hiatus.

I'm just doing a lot of research reading right now, which is so not interesting to review here. Um, yeah, hopefully this will change in May.

Whoo-ee!

I reviewed 134 books on here in 2007. Holy crappity!

To review or not to review...

I have a policy on here of not reviewing books I couldn't finish. (One book, I could not get past page 14.) It doesn't seem fair of me to review them if I couldn't finish. So this is...well, I don't know what this is. I think I just want to gripe about it, really. Or at least, warn people not to buy this book if you have the same problems with it that I do.

That said, I got about halfway through this one before realizing that I just plain did not want to continue reading it. I don't know who Shelley de Lange is, but I had to agree with what she said here. I like vapid heroines who are funny. I like people who are fighting against love. But...erk. Venus's vapid got old real fast. The chick lit stereotypes were too stereotypical. Likewise, a plot that boils down to "Date someone!" "No!", repeat a billion times, loses its flavor real damn quick. And this is coming from someone who in real life, is pretty much like Rachel on that front.

But what really made me put this book down was the dude. Let me quote Shelley:

Another weird plot choice is that when the story starts and Venus decides to help Rachel find love, Rachel has already met her one-and-only, so there's no "cute meet." She's known him for more than six months no less, and he's been asking her out this whole time. She's always refused him, doesn't even flirt with him, but he's convinced that "she's the one for him" and keeps on trying despite her telling him NO. Well, in any SANE world, a guy who is that persistent and doesn't hear a woman's "NO" is a STALKER.
It's really hard to root for a guy who comes off as pathetically fixated on a girl for no good reason, no matter how handsome or how "nice." Rachel hasn't done anything for Luke, hasn't made him laugh, hasn't charmed him, he was a customer and she was a bank teller, and he just decided she was the one and that was that. And does Luke do anything romantic like stand outside her window playing a cool song? Nope, he just keeps showing up at her place of business and asks her out while she's working. Not exactly a smart move.

But even more annoying...Luke is perfect and perfectly bland. Not a thing goes wrong with Luke, nor does he have a quirk other than the stalker thing, (which the book doesn't acknowledge) in the 100+ pages I got through. Luke has no personality. He's Perfect Man To Order, down to being a fireman. The man has no quirks, no banter, he is just there and perfect, the universe's reward on a platter. Gee, why wouldn't you date Mr. Perfect?

Now, the "hey, let's interview his exes to see what's wrong with him?" plot is not a bad one. But frankly, I had to stop once I found out that the last ex breakup was due to her being a lesbian. The no-fault dump! He's not really bad in bed after all!

Nobody's that perfect, even if Zeus picked him out for you personally. Gawd. Too much.

I'm back and armed with book reviews

... written while I was on vacation. This will take me a while to write them all up, though. OY. They'll be posted when I get them up (written in order of reading them, most likely), but I've spent the last two weeks trying to catch up on everything I missed doing in the previous two weeks, so I make no promises as to promptness here. (Hell, it's already the end of the month.)

Blog hiatus

Except for one pre-posted review that I was asked to hold for a few weeks, this blog will be on hiatus while I am on vacation and offline for the first two weeks of July.

Note to all agents:
All books sent to me by agents that I haven't read or finished reading by today will probably not be read during this time, because I want to be able to devote proper time and attention to them (also, due to packing space I'm sticking to bringing small paperbacks or e-books with me).  If anyone wants to send me books, please wait until mid-month to do so, or at least reasonably expect that I won't get to them for awhile.

Note to all readers:
I have been given a stack of paperbacks of the "cheesy romance" ilk, which I will be bringing on vacation. (Especially since any of them that stink can be Bookcrossing'd while I'm there, thus freeing up room to pack souvenirs.) I will be attempting to write reviews of these while on vacation, assuming I can read my own handwriting to type them up when I return. It'll be a Beach Reading Series, if you will.

This is a test post. Ignore this post.

There's now some sort of Amazon widget for auto-linking books, and I just want to see if it's working. This post will probably be deleted/updated a lot before it's deleted, so ignore however many times this pops up on a feed.

Testing: Stitched-up by Stephanie Vermeulen.

And the hiatus is over.

(Now I've got "Shady's back...back again" stuck in my head. Oy.)

Anyway, I've got this three-day weekend, and I have been cranking out some reviews while I've got the time to myself (for a change) now that the familial hell has finally blown over. My TBReviewed pile is scaring the crap out of me, but there you have it. Let's hope I can even remember them all by now.

Notice to anyone who's sent me books in the last few months to read: I will be starting those soon. At this point in time I didn't want to start reading anything else until I got some of this backlog from Christmas, et al. taken care of here.

I hate to use the word hiatus, but...

I am having family difficulties going on right now, and I am way behind on writing reviews. This will probably be continuing through the entire month.

The blog is not dead, but don't expect too much out of me before February. I am hoping to get some done here and there, but who knows at this rate.

*sigh*

The year in review.

Some people read 50 books in a year. Some people want to read 100.

The aforementioned Chickie and Kalamity were discussing book-reading in chat today, so I decided to count how many I'd read last year. For once in my life I can actually COUNT how many there were, since 2005 was the first full year of this site.

Adding in the books of my friend's that I read and can't review online... it comes out to 131.

131 books in a year.

Daaaaamn, girl.