What I Read (2): Aaron

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What I Read

What I Read is a semi-regular guest feature in One More Page allows them to talk about what the title says: what they read. I believe that every reader has a unique reading preference and no reader is exactly the same. What I Read explores that idea, where I let the guests talk about their favorite, genre preferences, pet peeves and everything else in between. :)

On my second What I Read feature, I am very honored to have one of my closest book club friends on the blog today. I can’t remember exactly who added whom first in Goodreads, but I met him in person in 2010, back when I joined the second Goodreads Filipino group meet up. Our only link back then were YA books, and I remember we talked so much about The Hunger Games and The Mortal Instruments when we were at Cafe Breton before that meet-up ended. Soon enough, I started calling him the Mighty Evil Overlord (because he is mighty and he can be evil and he is kind of an overlord), and then eventually my adopted little brother because we are on the same wavelength for  a lot of things. That, and I tend to spoil him for some reason — case in point: Christmas 2010, I got him for my Book Blogger Holiday Swap and then also got him for our book club’s exchange gift. Talk about giving too many gifts to one person, yes? :P

Anyway, even if we don’t have the same tastes in YA books, I know that a book will be good if he recommends pushes it to me. If you think I nitpick a lot, well, you haven’t met him. But trust me, his reviews (when he has the time to write them) very trustworthy. He’s one of the few people who can demand me to read a book sooner than I want to (case in point: Paper Towns) and (since we’re on the topic), he’s also probably the biggest Nerdfighter in the Philippines. Probably the biggest Doctor Who fan, too. He’s the blogger behind Guy Gone Geek, although that blog’s a little silent lately, but you can check him out on Twitter, Tumblr and Goodreads. :)

So, let’s give it up for my adopted brother, the Mighty Evil Overlord and my friend (who is celebrating his birthday seven months from now, woot!), Aaron. :)

Aaron (and Zombies) at Alabat Island

Aaron (and Zombies) at Alabat Island

In ten words or less, what kind of books do you usually read?

I seek extraordinary adventures and believable characters when I read.

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Somebody to Love

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Somebody to Love by Kristan Higgins
Publisher: HQN Books
Number of pages: 384
My copy: ebook review copy from Netgalley

After her father loses the family fortune in an insider-trading scheme, single mom Parker Welles is faced with some hard decisions. First order of business: go to Gideon’s Cove, Maine, to sell the only thing she now owns—a decrepit house in need of some serious flipping. When her father’s wingman, James Cahill, asks to go with her, she’s not thrilled…even if he is fairly gorgeous and knows his way around a toolbox.

Having to fend for herself financially for the first time in her life, Parker signs on as a florist’s assistant and starts to find out who she really is. Maybe James isn’t the glib lawyer she always thought he was. And maybe the house isn’t the only thing that needs a little TLC…

* * *

When I spotted Somebody to Love in Netgalley, I immediately requested it, having enjoyed Until There Was You last year. I wasn’t really planning to read this soon, but then I started and got to know Parker (and the Holy Rollers!) and I just couldn’t stop. Somebody to Love introduces Parker Harrington Welles, a children’s book writer who relies on the trust fund she had and building her world around her one and only son. She is essentially rich, but she didn’t really live as a rich girl. Which was fortunate, because when her father got jailed for an insider-trading scheme, Parker is left penniless save for what she had now and a house left to her name by an estranged aunt. Thinking she could easily sell the house for extra money to start again, she was surprised to find that the house was more of a shack and it needs a lot of work. Enter James Cahill, one of her father’s lawyers, who was asked to help Parker with whatever she needed. Parker had always been annoyed at James not only because of a shared history, and she really wished he wasn’t there…except that he’s proven to be helpful in fixing the house. That, and he’s looking pretty…well, hot is the only word to describe it.

This is only my second Higgins book but she’s slowly becoming my go-to read for anything light and fluffy but not too light and fluffy. I loved Parker for being a writer, and for being an all-around pretty good person despite the fortune she had in her name. Here’s a girl focused on her career and her family, and it was a refreshing thing to read. I liked her wit, and I know this is weird, but I liked that she talked to herself because I do the same thing too! ‘Talking aloud, the writer’s affliction.’ So that explains it! :P

I haven’t read the other Higgins book set in Gideon’s Cove, Maine (Catch of the Day — which Angie recently reviewed) so I wasn’t introduced to this place, but reading it in Somebody to Love was a very lovely experience! The small-town charm, the diner, how everyone knows each other — I want to go there! Of course, everyone knowing each other isn’t always a good thing, but I guess I wouldn’t mind if Vin, Maggie and the others are there. My favorite scene in this book is the part where Parker first enters the diner and sees everyone in town there — for what reason? It’s for you to find out. :)

Of course, I can’t not mention the romance in this book. I’ve been getting very lucky with the romance in the books I’ve been reading — almost all the books I read lately have this slow-burn romance going for them, and Somebody to Love is no exception. While James and Parker have a history that I wasn’t really much of a fan of, the development of their relationship was such a pleasure to read that I can’t help but giggling every now and then. I liked that James wasn’t just a token hot guy, but a character with his own hang ups and history and had his own story going for him. He’s an individual completely different from Parker, and reading their conversations and watching their relationship grow was the best part of the book.

Somebody to Love is definitely a mood-lifter, and it’s a great book to read in between serious books or when you just want to be lost in a good romance in a pretty place with interesting neighbors to boot. :) After this, I am definitely getting the two other Higgins books that this was spun from – Catch of the Day and The Next Best Thing. And then I will work my way through the rest of Kristan Higgins’ back list. :)

Somebody to Love by Kristan Higgins will be out under HQN books on April 24, 2012.

Rating: [rating=4]

Other reviews:
Fairy Tale Floozy

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The Reapers are the Angels

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The Reapers are the Angels by Alden BellThe Reapers are the Angels by Alden Bell
Publisher: Holt
Number of pages: 225
My copy: paperback, ordered from Book Depository

Zombies have infested a fallen America. A young girl named Temple is on the run. Haunted by her past and pursued by a killer, Temple is surrounded by death and danger, hoping to be set free.

For twenty-five years, civilization has survived in meager enclaves, guarded against a plague of the dead. Temple wanders this blighted landscape, keeping to herself and keeping her demons inside her heart. She can’t remember a time before the zombies, but she does remember an old man who took her in and the younger brother she cared for until the tragedy that set her on a personal journey toward redemption. Moving back and forth between the insulated remnants of society and the brutal frontier beyond, Temple must decide where ultimately to make a home and find the salvation she seeks.

* * *

I’ve been wanting to get The Reapers are the Angels by Alden Bell during the time I was so crazy for zombies in fiction, and that’s one of the reasons why I got this from Book Depository in the first place. I wanted to add every single book that had zombies in it, until it became a little bit too mainstream for my taste. That’s probably why I made this book languish in my TBR for a while, almost forgetting that I had this book with me until lately. Because you know, sometimes you have to dig through your TBR just to get some books out and get that number down.

The Reapers are the Angels introduces a world that is full of zombies, the kind that steel garages don’t really stop. There’s nothing really new about that, but then here comes Temple, a fifteen year old girl who’s turned herself into a vagabond after something happened in her past. She runs into a small community of survivors who take her in, but when she accidentally kills a man who tried to take advantage of her, she is back on the run now that his brother is after her. On her journey, she meets a group of hunters who take on a new way of survival, picks up a mentally challenged man who becomes her unwanted ward, stays with a rich family who refuses to acknowledge the state of the world and gets caught by a horrifically mutated group of people whose loyalty to each other leads them to kill. All this time, Temple fights the evil she thinks is in her while running away from the man who wants to kill her.

Or perhaps running away isn’t the right term. As the story goes on, it doesn’t really feel that Temple was running away — perhaps there was something else. It was almost like this chase gave her some kind of purpose, and it was interesting to read about that. Temple is a different girl and we know it right from the start. Why she chose to be alone is a mystery, and how she seemed to unafraid later on as she travels is another question. Her character makes this initially simple and typical zombie story come more alive. The Reapers are the Angels isn’t a story of zombies or the fallen world but a story of a person wrestling with her past and trying to atone for this. Temple’s brokenness makes her who she is — the hard, no-nonsense girl with awesome fighting skills — but it doesn’t lessen her compassion for others who need her help, even if she doesn’t really want to help at all. I found her unlikely “friendship” with Maury, the mentally challenged guy she helps and “adopts”, quite endearing and possibly my favorite part in the entire story.

But this book isn’t really an easy read. The lush writing helped a lot in making me want to read this, but this is a bleak book — not quite as hopeless as The Forest of Hands and Teeth and also not quite as action packed as The Enemy, but still pretty, well, not cheerful. There were also lots of philosophical talk, which makes this book really a story of survival and how humanity carries on after an apocalypse. I think what makes this book a little harder for me to read was the gross-out factor — like I said, I may have gone soft, and there were some scenes in this book that made me stop reading for a bit just so my stomach would stop churning. Oh Tina, what do you expect of a zombie book, anyway? Just…don’t read this while eating, especially for some parts.

Even so, I find that I loved The Reapers are the Angels, especially for how it ended. Sigh. –> That will be my one and only clue for you. I think The Reapers are the Angels is a beautifully sad but deep book, and I was a very satisfied reader when I finished the book. It’s not at the level of how much I loved Mira Grant’s Feed, my favorite zombie book of all time, but Alden Bell’s creation has made it into the list of zombie books I will recommend to people who want to read about them. This is a good one, folks — gross scenes aside, this is a zombie book that lived up to my expectations, and I hope it lives up to yours, too.

See, God is a slick god. He makes it so you don’t miss out on nothing you’re supposed to witness firsthand.

Rating: [rating=5]

Required Reading: February

Other reviews:
The Book Smugglers
Good Books and Good Wine

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Smitten

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SmittenSmitten by Kristin Billerbeck, Colleen Coble, Diann Hunt and Denise Hunter
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Number of pages: 432
My copy: ebook review copy from Netgalley

Welcome to Smitten, Vermont. With the help of four friends, it’s about to become the most romantic town in America. The proposed closing of the lumber mill comes as unwelcome news for the citizens of Smitten. How will the town survive without its main employer? A close-knit group of women think they’ll be smitten too.

* * *

In a town called Smitten, their main source of income is their lumber mill. With the lumber mill comes the men, who’s used to providing for their families, content with the life of being men despite the fact that their town had a very…well, feminine name. What happens then, when the town’s only source of income closes? The women come to the rescue, of course. Taking advantage of the town’s name, a group of friends planned to turn their town into a romantic tourist spot. Armed with lots of ideas and a whole lot of faith, Natalie, Julia, Shelby and Reese work with the rest of the town to and pray that their ideas would take off and put Smitten on the map — and maybe, along the way, they would find someone to be smitten too as well.

I love short stories and anthologies for the simple fact that they’re so easy to read and digest. I got Smitten from Netgalley because of that, followed by the fact that one of the authors in this book, Kristin BIllerbeck, is a favorite. I was in the mood for a cozy romance last month (being February and all) while I was in the middle of some (sort of gross) zombie books, so I picked up Smitten ready to be, well, smitten. Interestingly, the authors of this book are all friends with each other in real life, and they even had a note at the start of the book to share their story of their friendship. Like I said, the only author I have read there is Kristin Billerbeck, so I was looking forward to reading what she wrote there, and I was also curious with how the other authors write. Maybe this would convince me to get some of their books too.

The best thing about this book IMHO is the setting. The town of Smitten came alive to me from the first page, and I was rooting for the girls’ ideas to come to fruition in the town. Smitten seemed like such a picturesque town that needed some feminine touch, and I looked forward to reading how the town improved towards the romantic direction in each story. It may seem a little too much of a perfect town at some point, and maybe if I thought of it a little further as a too nice town it would be a bit creepy. But I want to be there, and I want to spend some time in their town even if I wasn’t a part of a couple.

The stories were pretty entertaining, too, although I can’t say I liked all of them. This is a collection of stories but I realized that it’s not really an anthology because the stories are all connected to each other and you can’t read the next without reading the one that precedes that because you’d get spoiled. Think of it as a series of spin-offs in a book. The thing with short romance stories, though, is they don’t have as much time to develop the romantic relationship from the ground up. By this, I mean, the stories can’t really start from the two characters getting to know each other for the first time and then their relationship developing from something because it would need a longer length to make the relationship feel more realistic to avoid the risk of it being another insta-love story. Unless of course that is the real intention. But anyway, with this in mind, the love stories in Smitten were all about the girls and their old time friends or old acquaintances in the town that they never really paid attention to, or have pined for but has been unrequited for some time until this. To be perfectly honest I had a hard time adjusting to that because I was used to reading full-length novels with the romance starting from the very start. The idea of old-time friends suddenly turning into lovers took some time getting used to ((You know this just shows how I think of the friend zone, LOL. But let’s not talk about that here.)). But once I got used to it, I got all the nice tingles when the stories developed.

But as nice it was for the romantic relationships to start from friendships in Smitten, I felt that the shortness of the stories kind of hindered the book from delivering a bigger “oomph”. For some stories, I was just getting used to the two characters dancing around each other and (wholesomely) flirting when suddenly, they’re on their first date or someone’s confessing their love or someone is stealing a kiss from someone. Before I got used to that, the couples are fighting, or having an argument or dealing with old issues. The only story that didn’t feel too abrupt at some point was the last (my favorite among the four), and it even had some kind of foreshadowing from the previous story, which made it exciting for me because it felt like a spin-off (and you know how I love spin-offs). I’m sure the word count limit is an important factor and it’s one of the things that made the stories so and we can’t really do anything about it as a reader. I just really wish that the stories were just a little bit longer.

Despite those nitpicks, Smitten is still a pretty good book. It was exactly what I expected it to be: a nice and cozy, fluffy, romantic read. Granted, there could have been more swoony moments, but overall, it’s a nice (and clean!) book about romance and faith. My favorite story is Reese’s, but like I said up there, don’t skip the stories! Reading the first three makes Reese’s story the most satisfying of them all. :)

Rating: [rating=3]

Other reviews:
Vic’s Media Room
These Pretty Words
Reading in Winter

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Required Reading: March

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Well hello there, favorite month!

Okay, January was some sort of a reading high and I blame it on the newness of the year. February was a different story — I don’t exactly know what happened, but I was a slower reader. Sometimes I could go for a day not flipping a book open. Books I normally finish within three to four days, I finish in a week. Maybe I was just too busy, but it felt weird to be reading a book for so long that isn’t even that thick.

But I have another theory. I think I may have gotten soft. Remember, my Required Reading theme for February was zombies, and I thought I would just be able to jump right into the undead shambling goodness…but no. Believe it or not, the zombie books I finished left me…grossed out. The only zombie book I was partially grossed out with was Married with Zombies, and that was an apocalypse book. I thought I had a stomach made of steel from all the zombie books I’ve read…but I was wrong, apparently. Which led to my being a slow reader last month, I guess.

Recap!

  • The Enemy by Charlie Higson (3/5)
  • The Little Prince by Antonine de Saint-Exupery (4/5)
  • The Reapers are the Angels by Alden Bell (5/5)

I read a total of 9 books this month, which isn’t really that bad. But I totally missed out on Warm Bodies (I would have read it if I could, but reviews talked of gross parts so I thought I’d pass for now) and Game of Thrones. I really hope to find time to squeeze GoT soon!

As for the TBR reducing challenge…gasp, my TBR still at 128. Ack. Most of them were galleys, anyway, and I only bought 3 books for February, two of them pre-orders while one is a secondhand book. Can I try to reduce my TBR to 125 next month? I hope so!

Required Reading: March

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