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 Romance 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

So have a great week. I’ve posted the entire month’s reading here if you want to see it in all of its glory.
Happy Reading!