I’ve Been Reading. Have You?

The past few years I’ve been keeping a bit better track of what I’m reading and when. Primarily through the Reading Challenge on GoodReads. In previous years I’ve been truly horrible at keeping up-to-date with my records, but this year, oh, this year I’ve been marking my books as I start reading them and checking them off when I’m finished. The year started off with a bang - the books of The Atlantis Grail series by Vera Nezarian: Qualify, Compete, Win, and Survive. 

Since then, I’ve run through a few re-reads, some beloved, some simply enjoyable. For the most part though I’ve been reading new titles, both from favourite authors and new (to me) ones. 

I’ve read a lot of Nora Roberts’ backlist titles. Can I just say - I loved The MacGregors. 

I stormed through the books of the Dragon Blood series by Lindsay Buroker. I really enjoyed them, and my first foray into the steampunk genre. 

I’ve previously loved R.E. Butler’s various dragon series but decided to give Were Zoo series. To be honest, I found them highly entertaining. 

After seeing that The Cowgirl’s Secret Love (book 2, The Colemans of Heart Falls series) was scheduled to release in April, I realized I’d actually fallen behind on the Heart Falls series books. So, me being me, I started at the beginning of the Vivian Arend’s Six Pack Ranch series and read all the way through. Not only do I thoroughly enjoy the ranch romances, I’m also tickled reading about locations I’ve personally visited. 

  

Michelle M. Pillow took me diving into the depths with her Lords of the Abyss books. I haven’t read a lot of stories about mermen before. I was pleasantly surprised by the books. 

Princess and I marathoned through the Harry Potter movies, then I decided to start re-reading the books. I’m not quite marathoning through the books but I’m making my way through them all once again as the mood strikes. Currently, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is one of the books I’m working on. 

And then it was back to one of my personal favourite authors: Christine Feehan. She began her Shadow Riders series in 2016 with the book of the same title, Shadow Rider. Since then three more books have followed and the fifth book in the series, Shadow Flight released today. (May 5, 2020) I read through the first four books a couple weeks ago for the first time, and today I’m reading the new one. #ReleaseDayReading 

So what have you been reading? Have you discovered any new authors? What’s the best thing you’ve read so far in 2020? What’s the best thing you’ve read since (sorta) quarantine began? 

... coming soon - a complete list of the titles I’ve read in January, February, March and April 2020. 

The Much-Loved and Favoured

I occasionally find myself in a mood that has me turning to the steady greatness of some of my much-loved and favoured authors. For these authors I have many, many, many titles from their book lists gracing my shelves and digital libraries. Some titles I even have in multiple copies – the new release hardcovers, the well-read trades and paperbacks, and, of course, the easily transportable digital e-books. These books are housed – always – on shelves that prominently display the spines in my living room, my office space, in my kitchen and my bedroom. Despite the multitude of their books already owned, when I see a title by one of these authors which I don’t already have, I finagle some way to get it.

Always.

Well, 95% of the time.

Sometimes I have to briefly add it to my “purchase wish-list” until the next time I have the money to make the buy.

When I get in to certain moods I’ll storm through books by a specific author the way other women will dig their way through every flavour of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. And no matter how many times I’ve read or re-read a story, during these binge periods of reading I am reminded with every single book why I love the author’s work.

I’m not really sure of exactly what spurred my current headfirst dive into all things Nora Roberts. I suppose it was a combination of things that had my focus narrowing and my vision tunnelling to the exclusion of nearly all else for the past month. Primarily I guess the prod came from the whole #CopyPasteCris plagiarism debacle that is currently a BIG deal in the writing, publishing, and book worlds. I’m not going to go in to the details – if you want to learn more about it all, I recommend you check out Nora’s official blog Fall Into The Story where she has posted a series of really good and informative updates over the past month regarding the situation. Until word of the whole thing broke publicly, I’d never even heard of Cristiane Serruyo. But I’d heard of, read, and loved a good number of the titles and authors that she's purported to have plagiarised. (From my personal p.o.v., I think there is more than enough evidence to prove to even the most skeptical that the accusations are fact.)

So maybe it was anger, of a certain form, that plunged me into my current backlist re-read.

I actually managed to do some of that finagling I mentioned earlier to get myself digital copies of all The Stanislaskis: Those Wild Ukrainians series books as well as the books in The Stars of Mithra trilogy, and the books Three Fates and Public Secrets. All of which were personal previously unread Nora creations and all of which I absolutely loved. In the reading mix as well have been some of the newer NR releases, The Liar and The Obsession to name a couple.

One thing that I find so interesting is seeing the way Nora’s writing has adapted to the changing cultural, societal, and technological norms of the times. It’s intriguing to read a story that was published decades ago, for example Secret Star: Stars of Mithra #3 published in 1997, complete with it’s main characters’ reliance on his pager and fax machine, and imagine the story within today’s framework of technology. Would those technological advancements change the course the story would take in it’s telling? Or how about the reverse? Take the story in The Liar back 20 or 30 years and it’s possible that the whole truth within the dastardly tale never would have been revealed. 

I just finished (re)reading Genuine Lies and I continue to be fascinated by the glitz and glamour of Eve Benedict’s life through the decades, enchanted by the understated, but budding and building romance between Julia and Paul, and I am, as always, intrigued by the mystery and the twists as-yet-unrevealed. I’ve read the story several times before and still, every time is like the first and I’m never disappointed; and each time I re-read a story I find something new, something wonderful. 

In the past month I’ve read just about 20 Nora Roberts books – a fair number of them are even ones that I’ve never read before – and I’m still not ready to veer away from this course quite yet. Yesterday I scrolled through the list of Roberts’ titles I could get my hands on through my local library’s digital access license… Happily I now have 7 more of those personal previously unread NR stories waiting on my digital shelf to entrance me, with a couple more on hold and headed my way shortly. If I love them as much as I have all her other works, I imagine my purchase wish-list is about to grow even longer!

Nora Roberts is just one of my ‘much-loved and favoured authors.’ There are others and if you’ve followed this blog in the past, or follow my Facebook Page, chances are you’ll know who some of the others are. But what of yours?

Who are the authors who’s books you are inspired you to read, re-read, and read again? Which authors do you have extensive library space devoted to?

If you had to pick an absolute favourite, who would it be? 

*book covers were curated from Nora's official website, or from Goodreads. 

**If you'd like to discover the full list of books published by Nora Roberts, I recommend her website as an excellent place to start!

Catherine Gayle and Dark Realities in Romance

The last week or so I’ve been reading Catherine Gayle’s Tulsa Thunderbirds series. The first four books – Bury the Hatchet, Smoke Signals, Ghost Dance and Rites of Passage were re-reads for me as I worked my way up to reading the fifth book Rain Dance for the first time. That’s my thing you know, re-reading the previous books in a series to prepare for the new(est) release. Now here’s the thing about Catherine’s books: I got Breakaway, book 1 of the Portland Storm series, for free. I decided to give a “Hockey Romance” a try because Heli Dad (my hubby) and I had started watching and going to our local WHL team’s games and I figured ‘why not?’

  

Then I fell in love.

October Round Up: Whatcha Been Reading?

It is the end of October and between one thing or another it has been a crazy busy month for me. On top of the regular constant running for the Corner Table Kids, my younger sister got married (necessitating an extra-long weekend trip away) and my dad had a work accident and spent most of a week in the ICU. Needless to say reading hasn’t been the #1 priority this month. However, I’m really quite good at fitting in a chapter here, a few pages there, or whatever, so I figured I’d let you know at least a bit about the books I’ve read this month!

Through September I was reading the Dragon Kin series from G.A. Aiken and since I had discovered I’d nearly missed one of its new releases I figured I’d better check on release dates for my other favorite authors/series. And THAT is basically how my October reading list was compiled! So, highlights…

Dark Legacy, book 31 in the Dark series from Christine Feehan released September 5^th. I had to re-read the previous title (Dark Carousel) to basically re-grasp the thread of the storyline that this book would follow – the Carpathian stories of the Dark series are sort of, but not really stand-alone novels in my mind. I mean you can read any one of them by itself, at any time. It would be a good story, you’d very likely enjoy it, but without the rest [of the series] you may not understand everything that’s going on. With a series as long standing and as richly diverse as the Dark series is, honestly there is just so much history that’s drawn upon that not having the series backstory can make it more difficult to follow. However, I’ve found that in many ways the Dark series has some natural groupings to the books that may make understanding it a bit easier – by which I mean, for example, you wouldn’t necessarily have to read books 1-10 to understand book 15, you may just need to read book 13 & 14. (Those book numbers are just examples, not actual recommendations.)

The Carpathian stories of the Dark series are some of my favorite to read. You have these men who are of varying degrees of ancient, and everything that implies, and women who are quite simply modern. The women have grown up in a world of relative gender equality and come to love these ancient, in some ways barbaric men. They love them completely and they’re loved completely in return. On the romance side of things every book is a joy as you get to watch these two vastly different people figure out how to relate to one another, while at the same time they’re falling head over heels in love with one another. Dark Legacy is a perfect example, as we watch one of the most ancient Carpathians (to date) fall in love with a woman who is quintessentially modern with her expectations. I really liked it.

Sherrilyn Kenyon writes a couple of my other absolute favorite series. From another long-standing series, Dragonsworn is the 28^th book in the Dark-Hunters series and came out in early August. This book is part of a story arc that began with Son of No One (Dark-Hunters, #25) so I had a bit more to re-read before diving in to it. Throughout the series there’ve been random comments about “the dragon in the attic” at Sanctuary (the New Orleans bar that is a regular feature in the stories). I’m not sure when I realized that there actually was a dragon in the attic but this arc takes that, and a whole lot more, and runs with it. Dragonsworn pulls together a few threads of storyline that have been building for quite a while and we’re finally beginning to see how they’re all entwined. At least that’s what seems like to me.

Unlike Feehan’s Dark series, in the Dark-Hunters it’s not just the written history that’s immense, and it is, but world mythology is drawn on heavily as well – which makes for unlimited possibilities when mixed in to fiction. That fact right there, that’s one of the reasons I read every single Dark-Hunter book that comes out and why I happily re-read the series over and over. Honestly, I’ve never read a Dark-Hunter (or associated series*) story that I haven’t loved. Dragonsworn is no different.

*Kenyon has a number of series that exist within or parallel to her Dark-Hunter world and the stories/series are listed separately on her website, as well as all under the Dark-Hunter banner. These include: Dark-Hunters, Dream-Hunters, Were-Hunters, Lords of Avalon, Hellchasers/Hell-Hunters, and Deadman’s Cross series.

The last (new) book I read during October is also from Sherrilyn Kenyon and is the first book in her Deadman’s Cross series. As also part of the Dark-Hunter world, Deadmen Walking has a couple previously well-known characters and introduces a whole host of new and interesting folks for us to get to know as well. The book actually released back in May (at the time I was a little busy having a baby). I actually pre-ordered and purchased it at release time. Then you know life got a little hectic and I forgot about it. I’m kicking myself for not having read it sooner but boy, oh boy, was it worth the wait! I loved it! The Deadman’s Cross may well become a favorite series of mine all on its own, regardless of its association under Kenyon’s Dark-Hunter banner.

So what did you read this October? Have you been re-reading old favorites? Discovering new loves? Did you dive in to a spooky Halloween themed booklist for the month? Really – what have you been reading?