Cover Whore {2,368,090}

YAY!!!

What a better way to semi get me out of my funk, then with a COVER WHORE post!!

God Save the Queen - By Kate Locke

I'm not completely sold into steam-punk, but I LOVE this cover!

The Accidentally Genie - By Dakota Cassidy

Personally I love Dakota's Accidentals series, and the fact that this cover is all bright ass pink is awesome!

Into The Dreaming - By Karen Marie Moning

GO READ THIS BOOK DESCRIPTION NOW!

Kiss of Pride - By Sandra Hill

I don't know about you, but this dude is HOT & totally makes this cover!

Real Vampires Hate Skinny Jeans - Gerry Bartlett

Gerry's covers are always awesome, but this name actually caught my attention first :D

Ok, these are the only ones for now, but I will post more SOON!!

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

Where to start, really? :) I guess most of you are familiar with Wilkie Collins and his mother of all modern English detective stories The Moonstone. I finally read it and, to put it simply, I totally loved the book! Five bright stars for this one!

William Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) was born in London and lived most of his life not far from Oxford Street. His father was a succesful painter, his mother a teacher and an actress. Theirs was a happy marriage and young Wilkie, their first born, had a secure home. He and his siblings were encouraged to read and to paint from an early age. The Collins family also travelled in different parts of Britain and even spent two years in Italy. All this helped to develop Wilkie's imagination.

It seems that Wilkie knew quite early that he wanted to become a writer. His father, however, tried to steer his interests towards a more practical occupation by getting him a job as a clerk at a tea-importer's company. Later his father helped Wilkie towards a career in Law. In 1852 Wilkie Collins passed his final law exams, but he never worked in the profession. He used his knowledge of the law in his writing, though.

The first work Wilkie Collins got published was a short story called The Last Stage Coachman that appeared in a magazine in 1843. His first novel, Antonina, was published in 1850 and was well received by the critics.

Wilkie Collins was good friends with Charles Dickens. They travelled together and many of Wilkie's novels were published in serial form in Household Words, a weekly magazine edited by Dickens.

Wilkie Collins' domestic arrangements were rather unusual. For a long time he was in a relationship with two women, but did not marry either one of them.

The Moonstone is one of the two most well-known novels by Collins, the other being The Woman in White. I reread The Women in White 2010 & love it, but somehow it took me this long to read anything else by Collins. Boy am I happy that I finally did! The Moonstone is a detective story about the theft of a priceless Indian diamond told in multiple voices of different degrees of credibility. The plot is nicely intricate and the narrators are absolutely fabulous, if I may use such a word in this context! :) My two favorite narrators were Mr. Betteredge (of course! :)) and Miss Clack (surprisingly, but I really loved the way Collins had disguised humour in that insufferable woman's words! ). The main characters, Rachel Verinder, who has just got the diamond as a birthday present, when it disappears, and Franklin Blake, who is in love with Rachel, did actually not touch me so much, but that was only because of Mr. Betteredge's narration set the tone for my whole reading experience and I kept waiting, whether there would be more about him later in the story! (There was :))

The Moonstone was a joy to read from the first page to the last and I must say it should be required reading for anyone who likes a good mystery! So, run, run, run to the library near you to get a copy, if you haven't read it yet! :)

I count The Moonstone towards both The Back to the Classics & The TBR Pile challenges.

Major Speed Bumps, Downhill Blog Depression and possibly The End?

...........Ok, first this is all being written from my busted ass iPhone, so bare with me!

Lately if you haven't noticed I've been dragging ass, and majorly sucking at blogging/reviewing/following thru and keeping my attention from wondering...squirrel!

You might be saying, "Oh there must be a great excuse", and you bet your ass I have like 50 amazing excuses! But that's just what they are, excuses. Regardless of the fact that they're legit and completely pardon me from my crimes of a horrid reviewer, it doesn't make them right.

I feel, all the way down to my core, that I'm letting SO many of you down. All I want is to be someones inspiration. To spark a reading or reviewing passion they never knew was there. I want to be that constant in this huge blogging sea, but in finding it harder and harder to keep my fingers latched onto that lifesaver that's keeping my head above water.

So why spill all this emotional vomit now?? It's has been a looooong time coming, but putting it into words hasn't really hit me until now.

Please, please just bare with me while I figure these messes (excuses) out on my end...Spunky, fun, BRIGHT NEON colors every where Jessica will be back. And probably soon then you, and even I, think!

Asylum Blog Tour - Playlist & Giveaway!!

Day 10 – The Asylum Soundtrack

Thank you to the spunky Redbull-loving blogger, Jessica, for hosting me here today!  I thought it would be fun to do a post on the ideal ASYLUM soundtrack, if this series was to be turned into a movie. I LOVE music and I’m open to songs from all genres (as long as they don’t involve an organ... organ music makes me want to run through a closed window).
The following songs would be my picks for THE perfect ASYLUM soundtrack. Mind you, I could probably come up with a dozen more, if I had more time   I set them to specific scenes in the book but tried not to label them anything too spoilery.  

Sofie’s Magical Assault – SWEET DREAMS (Marilyn Manson)
“Am I Stupid?” – LAST NIGHT I DREAMT THAT SOMEONE LOVED ME (Dala)
Frozen – COMFORT ME (Feist)
Confronting Caden – UNINTENDED (Muse)
The Ambush -  INERTIA CREEPS (Massive Attack)
Watching Snow Melt – LOVE, LOVE, LOVE  (Of Monsters And Men)
The Rave – RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW - (Fatboy Slim)
Julian’s Dirty Little Secret – KNIFE GOING IN  (Tegan & Sara)
On The Platform –  ALL THAT I AM LIVING FOR(Evanescence)
Reunited –  STARLING (Tori Amos)

Take a listen! You may meet some new artists you haven’t heard of before or rekindle your love of some older ones  Thanks for being here today and thank you to Jess for hosting me.  Hope you enjoy Asylum and make sure you grab an e-copy of Anathema for FREE right now on all the major e-retailers!!

Enter below for a chance to win copies of K.A. Tuckers AMAZING books!!

Best of Indie 2011 - Biggest Villain

Each day this week we'll be voting for a different category!!

- Monday (1/9): Favorite Author (Round 1)

- Tuesday (1/10): Best Hero & Heroine

- Wednesday (1/11): Most Drool-Worthy Cover

- Thursday (1/12): Biggest "Slime Ball" Villain

- Friday (1/13): Favorite Author (Semi-Final Round 2)

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- Monday (1/16): Favorite "Freshman" & Favorite Series

Who's the one villain who you would LOVE to see get theirs? You know, the one who you'd light on fire, throw down a cliff, then have a party right after??

Vote for the Biggest Slime Ball HERE!!

Prizes:

2 lucky voters today will win:

1 e-book of Anathema by K.A. Tucker

&

1 e-copy of Death's Hand by S.M. Reine

Happy Voting!

Cover Whore (1,453,999)

Ok......ready for it......

M.R. Merrick has revealed the cover to Shift, which is the 2nd book his The Protector series!

If you haven't read Exiled, go buy it NOW! It's on sale here:

Smashwords

Amazon

Not only have I been threatening him with bodily injuries patiently anticipating the sequel to Exiled, but the cover as well....for obvious reasons ;-)

Here's a little bit about what to expect in Shift

**CONTAINS SPOILERS IF YOU HAVE NOT READ EXILED**

Devastated by the loss of his mother, Chase is trying to balance the life he’s been left with, a family he’s still getting to know, and power he never thought he’d have. He doesn’t understand why the Goddess has named him the Protector and granted him two gifts: the Mark, a tattoo that now covers his back, and the ring. But between getting interrogated by the Circle and psychic attacks from Riley, the Mark is the least of his concern. There’s a demon inside Rayna that’s fighting to be released, and it’s not her inner witch. It’s something else–a monster threatening to tear her apart.

As Chase struggles to control his magic, his enemies are closing in. Everyone has staked a claim on his ring, and destroying it may be his only chance to stop Riley. But Chase must decide if stopping him is worth risking the lives of everyone he cares about, or if protecting the ring will be enough to save his world.

Isn't this cover GORGEOUS! Seriously, when I got this in my e-mail at work I started SQUEE-ING....which in turn made everyone else in orientation look at me funny, but it was SO worth it!

Seven Gothic Tales by Karen Blixen

Many years ago,it might have been sometime during the 90s, I saw an old black and white TV-interview of Karen Blixen. I probably watched the programme, because I had seen and loved the movie Out of Africa (starring Meryl Streep as Blixen and Robert Redford as Denys Finch Hatton) which tells about Blixen's Kenyan years. Anyway, in the interview Blixen told a story about a letter she had recieved from the King of Denmark as a thank you for a lion-skin she had sent to the king and which she used as a miracle-working device to ease the pain of an injured Kikuyu youth. I was mesmerised by her storytelling, and, as she told the story as a truth, amazed by the story itself! Later I read somewhere, that the story might, in fact, have been imaginary. If it were, it took nothing away from the power of her storytelling. There and then I knew that someday I would read her works -and that I would love her stories! (The story about the letter is published in her story collection Shadows on the Grass, if you want to read it.)

I had always thought that Out of Africa would be the first of her books I'd read. I have actually owned a Finnish translation of the book since, well, probably about since I saw the movie for the first time, but somehow it just never has been the right time to read it. A year or two ago a saw a copy of Seven Gothic Tales on sale and bought it. It still took me this long to read it, but I must say now was totally the right time for this collection of Blixen's stories!

Karen Blixen was born in Denmark in 1885. She married her cousin Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke in 1914 and the couple moved to Kenya where they owned a coffee plantation. They divorced in 1921 and Karen Blixen stayed in Kenya managing the plantation until the coffee market collapsed in 1931. She then returned to her native Denmark. She died in 1962.

Seven Gothic Tales, published in 1934 under a pen-name Isak Dinesen, was her first book. I find it interesting that she wrote the stories in the collection in English and not in her native tongue. Her later books were often published simultaneously in English and in Danish.

As the name says the book consists of seven stories. All are set in the 19th-century, most in the first part of it. The stories are set in continental Europe, in Denmark, Germany and Italy. There are noblemen and spinsters, lovers separated and lovers brought back together, there are pirates, bishops and whores, a prioress of a convent that actually is not a convent, a monkey and even a ghost!

I liked all the stories and cannot put one before the other. In most of the stories Blixen uses a narrator who starts the story, but inside the narrative there are more voices, separate tales told by other characters that move the principal story forward. This technique really appealed to me. I remembered the TV-interview and could actually inside my head almost hear Blixen telling the stories I was reading. :) I also loved how the stories in the collection were bound together by one of the main characters of the first story playing a minor role in the last one. There were also some small details that kept popping up in several of the stories i.e. for example talk about bones or about wings and flying. It might just have been vocabulary that Blixen enjoyed using or maybe it all was a clever way of making the different stories to form a nicely matching whole.

Here's a funny little snippet from a story called The Supper at Elsinore:

"The old professor of painting said: 'When I was in Italy I was shown a small, curiously shaped bone, which is found only in the shoulder of the lion, and is the remains of a wing bone, from the time when lions had wings, such as we still see in the lion of St. Mark. It was very interesting.'
'Ah, indeed, a fine monumental figure on that column,' said the Bishop, who had also been in Italy, and who knew that he had a leonine head.
'Oh, if I had a chance of those wings,' said Miss Fanny, 'I should not care a hang about my fine or monumental figure. But, by St Anne, I should fly.'
'Allow me,' said the Bishop, 'to hope, Miss Fanny, that you would not. We may have our reasons to mistrust a flying lady." [p. 208-209]

Seven Gothic Tales is a book I will keep and cherise in years to come. No doubt this will become one of those books I want to revisit every now and then.

I read this book for The TBR Pile Challenge.

Best of Indie 2011 - Badass Heroes & Kickass Heroines

Each day this week we'll be voting for a different category!!

- Monday (1/9): Favorite Author (Round 1)

- Tuesday (1/10): Best Hero & Heroine

- Wednesday (1/11): Most Drool-Worthy Cover

- Thursday (1/12): Biggest "Slime Ball" Villain

- Friday (1/13): Favorite Author (Semi-Final Round 2)

---------

- Monday (1/16): Favorite "Freshman" & Favorite Series

Today it's time to vote for your favorite Hero & Heroine! You know those fabulous characters that just won't leave you memories!

We'd put a few of our favorites into a list below to help jog your memory, but there's also a slot to add your favorite if it's not there!

2 lucky voters from this round will each receive these GREAT Prizes:

1 e-copy of Descended by Blood - By Angeline Kace

&

Some FAN-TASTIC Swag from K.C Neal

**The 1st giveaways IS international**

Spreading the word isn't mandatory, but is SUPER appreciated!

Best of Indie 2011 - Favorite Author Round 1

Each day this week we'll be voting for a different category!!

- Monday (1/9): Favorite Author (Round 1)

- Tuesday (1/10): Best Hero & Heroine

- Wednesday (1/11): Most Drool-Worthy Cover

- Thursday (1/12): Biggest "Slime Ball" Villain

- Friday (1/13): Favorite Author (Semi-Final Round 2)

---------

- Monday (1/16): Favorite "Freshman" & Favorite Series

 

Today it's time to vote for your favorite Indie author of 2011!

We'd put a few of our favorites into a list below to help jog your memory, but there's also a slot to add your favorite if it's not there!

Remember you have until Thursday the 12th to vote in this 1st round!

2 lucky voters from this round will each receive these GREAT Prizes:

1 e-copy of Ethereal by Addison Moore

&

1 e-copy of Spartan Heart (1 or 2) by Kristine Cheney

**These giveaways ARE international**

Spreading the word isn't mandatory, but is SUPER appreciated!

My Week in Books 8.1.2012

This was a nice four day work week, as January 6 is a national holiday in Finland. The week between New Year and Epiphany is usually rather quiet at work, no meetings, less e-mail & phone calls. This year was no exception, but start of the new year also brought an organizational change and instead of being a head of one department I am since January 1 the chief librarian, which means more responsibilities. I am very much looking forward to the new challenges, though, and I am very lucky in that I have a very good staff working in our library.

On the reading front I started the year with the Christmas present from my Dad: All Clear by Connie Willis. As I've mentioned before I read Blackout in November and enjoyed it very much. All Clear continues where Blackout ends and it was every bit as enjoyable as the first part of the story, even though it did turn out to be more tragic than I thought beforehand. These two novels are no funny romps à la To Say Nothing of the Dog.

Read my review of Blackout here.
Read my review of All Clear here.

After reading all four of her time travelling novels I think I should add Connie Willis into my list of favorite authors.

Earlier this week someone tweeted a top ten 2011 fiction list by Foyles' web editor Jonathan Ruppin. I just love Foyles flagship book store at Charing Cross Road in London. It was love at first sight when on one of my earliest trips to London I first visited Foyles and the store has kept its place as my favorite bookstore outside Finland ever since. It used to be a tie between Foyles and the women's bookstore down the street from it, but later the women's bookstore was incorporated into Foyles. Anyway, Mr. Ruppin's list included some very interesting novels and I immediately put on hold the two that interested me most. I got both the next day. The novels are:

-History of a Pleasure Seaker by Richard Mason
-The Godless Boys by Naomi Wood

I have been really itching to start with my 2012 challenges and as soon as I finished All Clear I picked up a book that has been patiently waiting for its turn for quite some time now: Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen (=Karen Blixen). This was my first Blixen book, but I have known for years that eventually I will read her & love her writing! To learn how I knew that read my review of Seven Gothic Tales that will be up in a couple of days.

This week I also ventured on a totally new endevour: to read an e-book! I don't own a separate e-book reader, but have the laptop version of Kindle. I have uploaded quite a few free e-books onto it, but have not got around in reading any of them. I simply prefer paper books. However, Girlebooks had available The White Ladies of Worchester by Florence F. Barclay for free. I uploaded it and am determined to make it the first novel I've ever read as an e-book. We'll see how it goes...

All in all this was an enjoyable week. Let's hope the next one is a good one, too!

All Clear by Connie Willis

All Clear is the final part of a duology by Connie Willis. I read the first part, Blackout, in November and wrote a post about it in the beginning of December. I mentioned in my post that I had asked Santa to bring me All Clear and the good girl that I am :) he honored my wish and there it was under the Christmas tree: a nice copy of All Clear! I started reading my new book during the Christmas holidays and finished the mighty tome (of 793 pages) on January 2. That made All Clear the first book I finished in 2012.

I'm not going to recap the plot of Blackout here. Do take a look at my post on Blackout to learn a bit more about that. I'll just say that All Clear continues exactly where Blackout finished. And as the following is going to be a bit spoilery, if you haven't read Blackout yet but wish to do so, you might want to skip the next paragraph.

Blackout ends with the three historians from 2060 being in London in 1940. They have found each  other but they are stranded in the past and they don't know why their drops (=their gates back to their own time) don't open.

All Clear follows the destinies of Michael Davies, Merope Ward and Polly Churchill as they try to find a way -not only back to their own time-but to survive in World War II London. Back in 2060 Oxford Mr Dunworthy and young Colin Templer (who is very much in love with Polly) are desperately trying to find a way to save the historians stranded in the past. Not only have the three historians been in WWII longer than expected and don't have any information about where the bombs and rockets will fall, but one of them has a deadline. One of them has done an earlier trip to 1944 and if they don't get back to the future before that, that person will die. Unfortunately it starts to look like time travel itself has disturbed the past and that the travellers are straded for good. What if the time travelling historians have inadvertently changed the outcome of the war?

All Clear was a worthy ending for an interesting story started in Blackout. Sometime towards the middle part of the book I felt that the story dragged a bit, but it definitely did not last long and,  oh boy, Willis had quite a few surprises weaved into the narrative before the end! I'll repeat what I said about Blackout that also All Clear is a wonderful piece of historical fiction as well as a worthy time travelling novel. Willis has clearly done her reseach and written a very believable WWII story.

I cannot finish this post without mentioning my favorite characters in this duology: the Hodbin children Alf and Binnie, who enter the story as evacuees in the beginning of Blackout. They are portrayed as total nightmares! If something went wrong, got broken or dissapeared, it was a safe bet one of the two, is not both of them, was behind it. However, as the story progresses they start to play an important role in the narrative (which does by no mean mean that they better their ways :)). While reading All Clear I kept wishing that the story would tell what happened to them after the war and luckily Willis provided a very satisfactory answer to my wish. :)

I have now read all 4 of the time travelling novels Willis has written. There is still a short story called Fire Watch to read. And, of course, there are all her non-time travelling novels to explore. Her novels will surely keep me nicely entertained for a long time to come. :)

Best of Indie 2011

Sounds SUPER exciting doesn't it!!?? And you don't even know what it is yet!

The brilliant Cynthia, over a Book Reader Addicts, and I have allowed our genius minds to collide to create a MASSIVE event showcasing some of the best Indie authors of 2011!

During this week+ long event you're be able to vote for your absolute favorite in the following fabulous categories:

• Favorite Author
• Favorite Series
• Favorite Book
• Best Hero
• Best Heroine
• Best "Scumball" Villain
• Favorite "Freshman"
• Most Drool Worthy Cover

We've each contact a few of our favorites from this last year & threatened them with monkeys and improper grammar asked them very nicely if they'd like to donate some awesome prizes toward this event......and what do ya know, they didn't hesitate!

Who are some of these FAN-TAB-U-LOUS prizes from, you're asking?

(click on the authors name to learn more)

M.R. Merrick

Amber Scott

Angeline Kace

Heather Hildenbrand

Rachael Wade

S.M. Reine

K.A. Tucker

Deb Apodaca

K.C. Neal

Kristy Quinn

Dee DeTarsio

Jamie Magee

Ednah Walters

Kristi Cook

Deena Remiel

And that's just to start!

There will be PAPERBACKS, E-BOOKS, SWAG, BOOKMARKS, AND AWESOMENESS!!

Voting will start on Monday, the 9th & run Thru Wednesday, the 18th!

(There will be choices offered, but feel free to add your own favorite into those categories)

Now grab a button and go spread the word!!!

<a href="http://takingitonebookatatime.blogspot.com" target="_blank"><img src="http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d200/sickboarderchick/Best-of-Indie-4-1.jpg?t=1325795324" alt="Best Indie of 2011" width="125" height="125" /></a>

In 2012 I Pledge to...

...complete the challenges I've joined.

...read at least 10 books by LGBT authors or on LGBT themes.

...write more reviews. (I did pretty poorly in this in 2011 & ended up reviewing only a small portion of the books I read.)

...deepen my reading with filling in some gaps in my reading history i.e. READ MORE CLASSICS. (Is there something in the air or why have I read this same thing on a number of other book blogs, too?? ;))

...enjoy reading even more than I did in 2011. I want to find wonderful new to me authors & revisit some of my old favorites (Mrs Dalloway, anyone? ;)). I want to be swept away by great stories and beautiful writing. And I wish to share it all with you, the wonderful book blogging community!

Here's to a beautiful reading year!

Review & Giveaway: Josephine Lost - By Rebecca Gahagan

Author: Rebecca Gahagan
Website
Release Date: 8/16/2011
Purchase Info: Amazon, B&N, Tate Publishing


Looking back on that day, December 16, 2012, I wish I would have enjoyed it more. If wishes were fishes, right? Everything was so simple then. If I had known my whole world was about to spiral out of control, I would have called in sick to work and slept the afternoon away.


Nineteen-year-old Abigail Thornton’s family means everything to her. Her quarreling brother and sister, her ailing father, and her overbearing mother matter more to Abigail than anything in the world.


That is until one fateful December day changes her life forever. Betrayal and death sweep through her family and life as she knows it will never be the same.


Abi is drawn into a battle waged for eternities between the Arkos and the Scrios. Abigail is the Arkos’ Chosen Soldier and with the help of Harrison, her Guardian, she fights the ultimate battle to save the souls of mankind. Abigail’s sister, Josephine, falls in with the Scrios, the enemy bent on destroying the world.


If Abigail succeeds in her mission, she must battle her sister and leave what’s left of her family forever. Should she fail, she will cease to exist, and the world will fall into an irreversible darkness.


In the midst of chaos, she finds a love truer than she’s ever known and the courage to defy those whose only mission is to destroy her.


But will it be enough? Will she be able to save the world from a terrible fate? How will Abigail be able to fight a sister who she once loved?

First Thought: Honestly, my first thought ALWAYS goes back to the cover. With the intensity of the eyes, it reminds me of the battle that is mounting throughout this entire book!

Ok, so as most of you know, I picked up this book because I feel 100% in L-O-V-E with the cover! Thank god what was written on the pages matched the outside, or I would have been a very disappointed person.

Abi, the main character, you can tell right off the bat she's going to be a great to watch develop. You can tell from the beginning that there's that little something lying right beneath the surface just waiting to pop through!

One character who I absolutely admired from the beginning of the book was Abi & Josephine's father. He may be wheelchair bound, but his strength & wise insight completely touched my heart. Just the way Rebecca wrote about Abi's father makes me emotional, she was able to capture their bond & love perfectly.

As I got into the book a little more things TOTALLY got interesting. First, there's Harrison (a 9 on the YUMM-O Meter), who is assigned as Abi's guardian, BUT Abi has NO clue what in gods name is going on. All she knows is that weird people are smashing her car windows magically, her sister's turned into the poster child for Hot Topic & now the fate of the world rests on her shoulder. Kind of a tall order to fill. don't ya think?!

My patience level while reading this book was so on the edge it was ridiculous! I know there's this EPIC battle brewing, but the feelings bubbling within Abi are about to explode! Not only is she grieving, attracted to Harrison, and inevitably having to fight her sister to the death, but she's worried about.....things.

Oh, you thought I was going to tell you...BAHAHAHA, now you'll just have to grab this book yourself. It's definetly a different read, but the tension should have you on your toes & through this book in no time!


4/5

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GIVEAWAY!

Rebecca has graciously offered up a signed copy of Josephine Lost to 1 lucky winner!

a Rafflecopter giveaway