Tag: Hajin Yoo

What I Read Last Week

Posted March 29, 2010 by Tracy in Features | 8 Comments

Good morning!

How are you all doing today? Well I hope. I know that some of you with children have them home this week for Spring Break – hang in there if you’re home with them. 🙂 My two are off next week and are so looking forward to it. They love hanging out with their Papa (my dad) because he loves taking them places. He’s 75 but has more energy than I do!

This past week we got to attend my youngest daughter’s 2nd grade play/musical – Life Cycles. It was seriously adorable. Everything went off without a hitch and I was so happy for them. My girl got a little speaking part as “plant 2” and she was so proud (and so were we). 🙂 I’d love to share a picture with you but at this little shindig we realized that our camera sucks at distance and low light…even on the low light setting. Ah well. It’s only a 3x zoom and normally takes great photos and video so I shouldn’t complain but dammit – now I don’t have good pictures! lol

It was also my hubby’s b-day this past Saturday. The girls and I spent the morning and afternoon running errands and having lunch with my in-laws and then yesterday my parents, brother and niece came over for dinner. It was a great time.

Because I was running around all weekend I didn’t get very much reading done. I think I read a total of 150 the whole weekend. I know, shocking. I started 2 books on Friday and have finished neither of them. lol

So what did I read last week?

First was Hunter’s Need by Shiloh Walker – book 11 in the Hunters series. This was a book that I read for The Book Binge for review but it was also a book for my Finish the Series Project. I think I still have 4 stories to go with the Hunters. This was Analise and Duke’s story. She’s a psychic with minimal psychic ability and he’s a hunter/shapeshifter. They have a nasty past with each other but they have a connection that neither can deny. This was good, but not great for me. I like Walker’s writing but I didn’t care for the heroine in this one and it really put a damper on things for me. I’ll let you know when my review posts on TBB.

Next up was Wicked Gentlemen by Ginn Hale. I loved this book. Say, loved it so much I want to have babies with it. Ok, maybe not that but still – it was fantastic. It’s now available in ebook as well so if you haven’t read it – do it! You can read my review here 5 out of 5 (this was also part of my m/m challenge)

Next up I read HardMan by Amarinda Jones for The Book Binge. This was the story of a girl at a fuck-me shoe convention and the convention manager. They meet, grumble at each other and then have wild sex in a storage closet. They start a sexual relationship but soon see it’s more. Again this was a cute book but I did have some difficulty with the heroine. I like Jones’s sense of humor but the heroine and her snarkiness got to be just a bit much after a while. 3.25 out of 5

My next read was my Tracy’s TBR challenge read for the week and one of my FTSP – One the Way to the Wedding by Julia Quinn. I’ve finished the Bridgerton’s!!! Took me long enough, geez! lol This one was good but probably my least favorite of the 8 books. Gregory falls in love with Lucy and wants to marry her but she’s promised in marriage to someone else…and her uncle is blackmailing her into holding her to the promise. Don’t get me wrong it was still a pretty good book but it was a little fantastical and a little sappier than I like. Wow, that sounds like I didn’t like it…but I did – just not as much as the others! 3.75 out of 5

Next was Totally Captivated volumes 5 and 6 by Hajinn Yoo (yaoi manga). I really love this series. The story of Ewon who is more or less conned into working for a loan shark, Mookyul, but throughout the series Mookyul falls for Ewon and there’s much angst and much sweetness. It’s beautifully drawn and it’s definitely a keeper. 4.5 out of 5 for both books.

Next was another yaoi manga called Yokai’s Hunger by Naona Bohra. This was a paranormal manga that involved Norito and Koma – who had been pledged/promised to Norito in a past life. They get together again but then have to deal with demons and Koma’s brothers – almost the same thing. It was pretty good. The graphics were ok but made me laugh. Norito’s nose was always shaded so it looked kind of animalistic to me and he seemed to have, most of the time, one of his eyes shut. It was just funny and I couldn’t quite understand why the author did that. 3.5 out of 5

That was it for me last week! I did have one review post this week on The Book Binge:

Don’t Kill the Messenger by Eileen Rendahl

Happy Reading!

8 Comments

Tagged: Amarinda Jones, Ginn Hale, Hajin Yoo, Julia Quinn, Shiloh Walker, The Book Binge, yoi manga

What I’ve Been Reading This Week

Posted November 2, 2009 by Tracy in Features | 18 Comments

Happy Sunday!

I hope you all had a good week this past week. What did you all do for Halloween, if anything? Did you have fun? My girls dressed up and went to trick or treat. This year my hubby got to walk with them and I stayed home and read while waiting for kiddies to come to the door. We live on a hill so we don’t normally get that many kids but this year was the slowest year since we’ve lived here (6.5 years). I think we have about 15 kids. Yikes! lol We don’t normally buy a lot of candy but I couldn’t even get rid of what little we had! lol

Here are the kids in their costumes. It was a really pleasant night so they didn’t have to worry about jackets this year which was nice. I had a lovely indian squaw and a 70’s chick. 🙂 The picture of my youngest is blurry but it was the best view of her costume, so, sorry.

So there’s a couple of cool things going one this month – actually I’m sure that there’s more than a couple but these are the 2 at the top of my list:

1) The very cool offer from Blind Eye Books when you buy Josh Lanyon’s new spec fiction book Strange Fortune between Nov. 5 and 20. You can read the offer here on DIK.
2) All Romanc e ebooks is celebrating it’s birthday all during the month of November. For every day that you buy a book you’ll go in a drawing. If you are chosen then they will purchase all of the books for you that are on your ARe wishlist (up to $100.00). Sounds like a great deal to me and I have a lot of books on my wishlist.

Well I finished the October reading month with a bang. It was a fun week. I read quite a few yaoi manga’s that I got from Kris’s yaoi swap and a couple that I bought for myself and added to the sway. So it may seem like I read a lot this week but those manga’s go super fast and I can gobble em up in no time.

First for the week was Atlantis Unleashed by Alyssa Day. This is book 5 in the Warriors of Poseidon series and the book that made me start the whole friggin series. lol So…when my review posts for The Book Binge I’ll let you know.

Next was Totally Captivated volume 1 by Hajin Yoo. I read Sarah’s interview with Rowan McBride and he mentioned that this was his favorite yaoi manga (actually manhwa which is the Korean counterpart). I looked it up, it sounded interesting, so I bought it. It’s the story of a guy who is kind of harassed/blackmailed into working for a crime boss who is of course gorgeous and totally young. There’s definitely some sexual tension going on between the two but we didn’t get past more than a couple of kisses in this volume. It was good, but not great – some confusing parts where I wasn’t sure who was talking to whom and why. I hate when the characters get shrunk down in some of the frames in manga. The really good looking guys all of a sudden look like their 10 and it’s kinda creepy, I must say. Anyway, I think there are 9 volumes to the story so far – dammit! So yes, I’ll probably have to get those too, eventually, cuz I need to see what happens! 3 out of 5

After that was anoth yaoi manga called Maid in Heaven by Hisami Shimada. This one is about a boy who takes his grandmother’s place as a maid when his grandmother falls ill and the “master” and the maid fall for each other. Kinda funny that they kept trying to have sex and kept getting interrupted. Again, the shrinking of the characters – especially during sex? Just. Not. Right. The overall story was cute though. 3 out of 5

Next I read U Don’t Know Me by Rakun (yaoi manga). This one I bought at the same time as Totally Captivated and I really liked this one a lot. Fab graphics, pretty, pretty men and a decent story line. There were a couple of times at the end when I was wondering whey they even included certain aspects of the story but can only assume that future volumes will complete the tale. The sad thing is? Currently there are no further volumes so I just have to wait. 4 out of 5

The Dark Highlander by Karen Marie Moning was my book for my monthly Re-read Challenge. You can read my review here.

More manga with Barefoot Waltz by Romuco Miike. There were a couple of cute stories in this one that I liked. I can’t tell you about all of the stories because it would take forever. The graphics were ok – not great. 3 out of 5

I think I got a little yaoi’d out of this one. lol Last manga of the week was I Want To Be Naughty by Mei Sakuraga. This was pretty cute as well. Stories of a trouble maker and a student council president finding each other. 3 out of 5

My Tracy’s TBR Challenge read for the week was Suzanne Brockmann’s Kiss and Tell. This is book 1 in the Sunrise Key trilogy. It was cute. A very quick and easy read. A woman who was raised on the island of Sunrise Key goes back for a vacation and falls for her brother’s best friend. They had always been fighting previously so it was kind of a revelation to her that she found him attractive. There were some issues I had with the heroine’s personality that made this just an ok read for me but I may read the next books in the series. 3 out of 5

Next up was Blood Bound by Patricia Briggs. The second book in the Mercy Thompson series and I loved it. It was so damned good and I can’t wait to read more. At first I was afraid that I wasn’t going to like it. You know…I think I’ll have write a review cuz I can’t fit it all in a little blurb. lol So look for that. 🙂

Home for the Holiday by Wendy Stone was a book I bought this past week. I was looking for Halloween and Holiday stories and bought it on a whim. It was a contemporary story about best friends falling in love when they head to the heroine’s parents’ house for Christmas. I almost felt like this was 2 different stories about the same characters put together in one 120 page book. The first story should have ended after about page 50. Overall it was kind of convoluted – sisters taking boyfriends away, cheating, horrid future mother-in-laws, date rape drugs and pregnancy – and that doesn’t name everything. lol 2.5 out of 5

Last up was One Summer by Karen Robards. KristieJ posted on DIK on Thursday and she was talking about bad boys. She mentioned Johnny Harris from One Summer and the blurb caught my eye. My local library had the book in stock so I picked it up. Johnny is definitely a bad, bad boy. But he’s also extremely intelligent and I loved that about him. He was accused of murder and sent to prison for 11 years and he’s gotten out with the help of straight-laced Rachel Grant, his ex-English teacher and a woman he’s had the hots for since high school. This was a good riomantic suspense read. I didn’t figure out whodunit til the middle of the book and then really couldn’t figure out why the culprit was doing it til the end. Rachel got on my nerves a bit because she loved Johnny no matter what but seemed like she was always trying to change him. I did like her though most of the time because she was a strong character and truly believed in Johnny’s innocence. Gotta love that. 4 out of 5