Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Top Ten Tuesday

So now I'm all into Memes again and found another one that I liked. Over at The Broke and the Bookish they started a meme a while back (which I am just now discovering!!!) all about top ten lists. And Hey! I'm all about lists. I make lists all the time (I might not use them but I feel good just making them.) This week's Meme theme is......

Tah-tahtah-TAAAAAHHHHH...

Top Ten Favorite Covers of Books I've Read


In no particular order....

Oh and you may discover I lean a little towards the shallow superficial side when it comes to some of my covers...what can I say? I likey some hot men!

With this cover I really loved the colors and the divided scene...
With this cover I liked the black and white with the red color pop for the writing...
With this one I have to admit I normally don't like cartoonish covers but this one struck my fancy with the naughty noir feel LOL...
Once again I fell in love with a black and white cover with a color pop....
And again....
And again....hmmmm maybe it's the blue????
Hey at least it's not blue....
But this one is PURPLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Tattoo+Tool Belt=Yes Please!!!!!
I DARE you NOT to stare at this man's chest....a lot. Oh, and his left nipple may or may not have invaded my virtuous thoughts repeatedly. (I admit nothing!)


And there we have it folks....my top ten favorite covers of the books I've read. Some of the covers were better than the books themselves unfortunately. However, none of them were 'bad' books. Meaning, all of them got at least 3 stars from me and actually a few of them got 5 stars.

So, what are your top 10 covers?
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Monday, May 20, 2013

Stacking The Shelves



It's been forever since I participated in a meme and I especially enjoy sharing my new book finds so Stacking the Shelves (aka StS) is some kind of awesome sauce. I found this meme over at Tynga's Reviews which is a pretty impressive book blog, by the way, so you should check it out soon.

Basically the meme is super simple. Just list your recent acquisitions. Easy Peasy. Right? So, here are some of my recent additions to my Mt. TBR (I add to the mountain by purchasing used books anywhere I can find them. Or new books from amazon, B&N or even Walmart. I borrow them from the library too. Some even are gifted to me by NetGalley or the author themselves for reviewing...pretty much anywhere I can get my hands on a book I'm super happy. I'm not particular about the type of book either. Ebook, paperback, hardcover or audio...I love them all!) Oh and each book cover will link back to amazon (no they don't pay me LOL). I just find it helpful when I'm looking up a new to me book.....

On Ebook

free on kindle!
free on kindle
NetGalley (8/13/13 release)
NetGalley (7/16/13 release)
NetGalley (7/29/13 release)
NetGalley (6/25/13 release)
only $.99 on kindle!
Library books
Purchases

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Sunday, May 12, 2013

A Dinner in Bellagio by Carlotta Melzi d'Este

Synopsis: A forty-something widow spends the summer on Lake Como in Italy to finish the cookbook she is writing but finds herself distracted by a 20 year old man-child. A lot of cooking happens and a lot of sex occurs and somewhere along the way they fall in love.
My Thoughts: This book is pretty much a mess. From the beginning to the end I was constantly wondering if this book was poorly translated from Italian to English or if the author purposely wrote it in English thinking she had a superior grasp of the language. Many of the sentences are awkward and clunky and often the dialogue had a randomness about it where multiple thoughts were blended all together within the same paragraph.

"I can use my mother's recipe or my grandmother's recipe. Both of my grandmothers had a different one. There are heavy recipes or heavier recipes. Tonight we will use my aunt Palmira's one. It's so rich that I suspect she had learnt it from a priest."

Another issue I had was that the author spent a lot of time telling us what she wanted us to know about the characters and the setting but never just showed us. There were many times where the story broke away from the 'action' to tell us background information. It would have read better if the information was discovered by the reader through Rose and Agostino's interactions or adventures. In addition much of that background information tended to read like it was part of a research paper. There were even footnotes peppered throughout the book.

The author had an interesting idea incorporating recipes of dishes that Rose and Agostino made but with one recipe following ever chapter it felt a bit much. After reading a few of them and realizing that there was no way I'd actually make any of them (mostly because some of them called for ingredients I had no idea where to find) I opted to skip them. This made the book go a lot faster for which I was very grateful.

The only thing that rivaled the number of recipes would be the amount of sex found in the book. Yes, this book has a warning "Warning: explicit sex and BDSM. 18+" but to tell the truth, it was not the amount of sex or the kind of sex that I found horrible. It was actually the rather uninspired phrasing used to describe the sex that I found offensive. None of their sexual encounters could be mistaken for romance. Here is an example of a weirdly worded and non-romantic sexual encounter....(I substituted a couple words that are more offensive but left those that can be found on a 'This is your body' poster at your doctor's office but I can assure you the rest is all the author's work.)

"I was lying on my back, and Agostino knelt among my legs putting my feet around his neck. He forced me to lift my [badonkadonk] from the bed and he penetrated me. He squatted and his [rooster] went back, he knelt and reached the deepest part of my vagina. He began to do the exercise faster, squat and knelt, back and forth, again, again...

"Agostino!" I yelled. I didn't want to end just at the beginning!

He slowed down panting and moaning. He was too concentrated to grin at me.

Slow. Fast. Slow. Fast. Slow......"

His [rooster] was rubbing my vagina upper wall. I'd never found such a perfect position. I was on the verge of an explosion. Abruptly Agostino stretched his legs under my lower back. I had to bend backwards and his [rooster] reached the cervix.

Fast. Fast. Hard. Fast. Boom!" 

The book is chock full of these encounters.

In addition the author had a habit of being quite repetitive. Repetitive in her description of Agostino (he had a brat face, a brat smile and a brat grin which we read about in every chapter) and extremely repetitive in the fact that the characters were always laughing or giggling yet nothing ever seemed funny.

"Rose, sei cosi bella sotto la luna! You are so beautiful under the moon!" He yelled at me in Italian......

......"Buona notte, Agostino. Hai passato una bella serata? Good night Agostino. Did you have a nice evening?" I answered him, me too in Italian.

He stared at me for a full minute then he burst out laughing. He couldn't stop.

"I'm sorry, Signora. I'm a werewolf tonight."

I laughed back at him and wished him goodnight before that crazy dialogue became dangerous."

I normally would try to balance my review with some positives about the book but after more than a week of trying to come up with some I'm still drawing a blank other than I was able to read this utilizing my Amazon Prime benefit for free. Because I finished this book I feel obligated to give it a rating more than 0 cups of coffee but it truly was not enjoyable for me so I give it 1/2 a cup of coffee. Carlotta's efforts deserve that much recognition even if I didn't like them.