Special thanks to Leontine from Leontine's Book Realm for the super header.


Sunday, April 11, 2010

Weekend Round-Up

Well, another boring weekend. It's nearly 4:00 and I haven't tackled the laundry yet. Ugh. Did get groceries and cat food/litter and have a pot of minestrone on the stove so I guess not that bad. I also signed us up for Carbonite, the on-line file back-up site. Jordan Castillo Price said it was good when her computer crashed this past week so I'm giving it a try. It constantly checks your files to see which are new or changed and backs them up. No need to go in and trigger it, it just runs all the time and she said it's easy to get stuff back. I also saw that say you are on vacation and on a different computer an suddenly need a file, you can go in and retrieve it to any computer, so that's handy. Our desk top has it's moments and my daughter has hundreds of photos she'd be devastated if they were lost and my netbook is 18 months old and is the only place all my e-books are, so I bought a service for it too. For basically a buck a week it can't be too bad.

Skyman by Kiernan Kelly (23 pages)

Robert works in insurance and just got promoted to a window office on the 23rd floor of the Chrysler building. He sees a guy with long hair walking the steel girders without a harness and is amazed but pissed off because it ups the insurance premiums. He really has no use for blue collar workers and is a job snob. On impulse he goes to the bar across the street and runs into Joseph, the guy on the girder. They get off to a rough start when Robert makes all kinds of snobby assumptions about Joseph and the men in the bar. The next day he can't stop thinking about Joseph and on a whim goes back to the bar where he finds him again. He apologises and they end up going for dinner and start dating. However Joseph still refuses to wear a harness and after several months together Robert can't deal with knowing any minute he could get a call saying Joseph is a grease spot. It was quite interesting to read about how Joseph felt on the girders and his philosophy. He is a Mohawk and I understand many of the construction workers in NYC on the skyscrapers are Mohawk. So that was an interesting twist. Robert was a bit of a prat and hard to like but Joseph softened him a bit I guess you could say. A good little read.

What Hides Inside by Ally Blue (219 pages)

This is book 2 in the BCPI series. Bo has asked his wife for a divorce and she's turned into a raving bitch so Bo insists he keep his relationship with Sam a secret which is making Sam crazy. They hire Dean (who gets his own book later) who flirts with everyone and makes no bones he would hook up with Sam. Bo "breaks up" with Sam who does hook up with Dean, but he realizes it was a bad mistake and Dean gives him some advice. Meanwhile some kids at the local high school have disappeared and the principal wants them to check it out and prove there's nothing hinky in the tunnels like the student rumours say. They start investigating and find out it's yet another portal like Oleander House. It bursts open and two creatures come through. Bo is injured and nearly dies from the poison but pulls through. They are still trying to figure out where or why the portals are opening and Bo and Sam are now out to their friends and moving cautiously ahead with their relationship. I'm equally caught up in the paranormal aspect and the romance part. I want to know how both end and and I detest women like Bo's ex who use their kids to hit back. So I'm looking forward to the rest of the series.

Bonded by Jay Lygon (60 pages)

This is a really hard book to describe. It's very complex for so few pages but it makes sense when you are reading it. I'll try. Brandr is a Viking who is now a vampire and author. He has taken in three young vampires to show them the ropes. They are like roommates with benefits but he is probably closest to Kyle who is a prostitute. He considers that he now lives in a vampire frat house and he tries to be stern but they just ignore him. Here's an example of Kyle's response when he starts one of his lectures:
"Really. I can recite the whole thing from memory by now." Kyle's expression turned stern and he lowered his voice. "Back a million years ago, before the invention of fire, when I was looting and pillaging on my dinosaur--"
Brandr is out walking when he falls and Tyler accidentally ingests some of his blood. Much to Brandr's surprise it makes him bonded to Tyler, they can feel each other's emotions AND physical sensations which freaks Tyler out. Brandr tracks him down to "make him happy" because he hates feeling negative emotions. Kyle is pissed because he feels Tyler is competing for Brandr's affections. It ends up with them all in bed and it's hardly even a HFN, it's a multiple fuck-buddies make me happy for now ending but they are all so damn likable you're good with that. As I said I could write pages trying to describe it all, for 60 pages it had lots of stuff in there that made me smile and feel for Kyle and Tyler. I quite enjoyed this one. It was a pleasant surprise and not as serious as I thought based on the blurb.

29 comments:

Jenre said...

I went about reading these Ally Blue books all wrong cos I started with the last one in the series. Hmmmm...maybe I should try the first few. I like Ally's stories generally.

That last story sounds very odd. Then again it is a TQ book and they have a lot of stories where sex solves all matter of problems. Just read one like that myself :).

Tam said...

It was definitely not a "romance", I couldn't really see any of them hooking up long-term, and yet I liked all of the characters, each with their own personality and the fact that there was no HEA seemed to fit. But for those who like traditional romances it's not that. Brandr was even reading Sherrilyn Kenyon books to figure out how to seduce a human. LOL

I've read the later BCPI books, Dean's story and Bo's son Adrian when he's grown, they are easily stand-alones so far I'm enjoying Bo and Sam's story.

Chris said...

Hmm. Not sure about Skywalker, but I am sure about Bonded - no, not for me!

I'm looking forward to hearing more of your thoughts as you read BCPI - as I've probably mentioned, it was one of my very early m/m reads and it hooked me but good. :)

Oh, and I just started the Carbonite free trial. We are either all really bad for each other or really good for each other. I can't decide! ;)

Tam said...

I went back and looked at the Bonded blurb an it really doesn't do the story justice. It makes it sound more traditional that it is I think so I have a feeling some shoppers may be disappointed when they get it. It worked for me but I know it's not for everyone.

For BCPI I know Bo and Sam end up HEA because I read Adrian's book but I'm eager to see more development of the paranormal stuff. I did want to smack Bo a few times in this one, but he redeemed himself.

And you can blame Jordan for the Carbonite thing. LOL It's probably going to take a week to back up our desk top. Too much stuff.

Chris said...

Heh, I have about 170 gb to backup from my laptop. That's going to take a leetle bit of time...

Tam said...

170?!?!?!?!?!!? Holy Hell. I have 3 and it's about half done. We only have 30 GB and for some weird reason it's only at 1%. I'll plug that computer in directly to the internet tomorrow while we aren't home, maybe that will help it go faster.

Chris said...

Yeah, not going very fast here, either...

What can I say? I have a lot of music and photos...

Kris said...

In other words she has a lot of pron.

Chris said...

I do not!!

Tam said...

Uh huh. "photos". Got it. ;-)

Average Reader said...

Vampire frat house roomies with benefits? Ha, ha! What's not to like?

Tam said...

There was a lot of humour in how the young guys behaved and it made Brandr crazy at times. Just not very traditional which I enjoyed.

Kris said...

"I do not!!"

Yeah. Sure you don't. Tam and I are totally convinced.

Chris said...

Your biggest concern would be that I had something cool that you didn't have in your collections... ;)

Kris said...

So you admit it! HA!

Tam said...

This probably falls under way TMI, but I've never understood the concept of downloading/saving porn because once I've seen it, I don't want to see it again and there is all kinds of free movies (or pieces) on-line so I've never quite grasped the porn collection concept. Maybe it's a boy thing?

Chris said...

All I have are cookies. :)

Lily said...

Not to sound stupid (I hope), but what's a Mohawk? I thought it was a hairstyle? And in case it is a stupid question maybe the fact I've never been to NY will be in my favor. :D

The only one I've read is Ally's. I liked them all but didn't really start to really really like them until about book 4. Bo got on my nerves with his not wanting anyone to know about them, his pussyfooting around with the bitch of a wife and frankly for a while I could barely stand him. But he did grown on me and by the end of the series I loved them together.

Haven't read the others. The first one sounds ok but Jay's doesn't sound like something I'd like.

Good luck with your meeting day tomorrow.

And OMG, love your hottie. A bit of scruffy beard, chest hair, treasure trail and a piercing, YUM. :D

Chris said...

Lily: The Mohawk hairstyle is named for the Indian tribe that favored the style. :)

Lily said...

Oops, maybe if I had used Google before commenting I wouldn't feel quite so stupid now. LOL :D

Tam said...

He is pretty isn't he Lily?

I do get a bit frustrated with Bo and his fear his wife will use stuff against him but at least he actually talked to a lawyer about it. People get so freaked about stuff like that (in real life too) and it makes me crazy. Get the facts people. So we'll see if he continues to annoy me in future books. LOL

Don't feel dumb Lily. I probably should have said Mohawk Indian. Most of them live south of Montreal so I hear about them often hear I forget that they aren't so common everywhere

K. Z. Snow said...

"Brandr was even reading Sherrilyn Kenyon books to figure out how to seduce a human."

Mistake Number One.

(It frightens me to think what y'all have stored in your hard drives. Truly, it does. Castanet, however, is very interested.)

Janna said...

I've finished Ally's second book last night. And in the end I didn't feel the urge that strongly anymore to smack Bo. ;) Let's hope it's not a 1 step forward 2 steps back kind of relationship, cos... grrr!
Gotta admit that I want to keep reading this series. Like you, partly because of the paranormal mystery, partly because of the romance :) It's a good series so far!

Tam said...

Well KZ, he didn't have to work very hard on the seduction part since Tyler more or less fell into bed without much provocation.

I swear to god I only have cookies and 98% of them are PG-13.

Tam said...

I agree Janna, Bo had redeemed himself at the end, we'll see how it goes. I haven't started book 3 yet.

Janna said...

Me neither, but I will in a few minutes :)

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the heads up about carbonite. I back up all my ebooks on an external hard drive and have a portable hard drive where I back up my work files. Last summer our school server crashed and I lost two years of materials that I had created. It was devastating!

I agree that Bo redeems himself. I really enjoyed the series.

Tam said...

Well, my daughter claims Carbonite is causing our desk top to freeze up. Does seem like it since it was working fine this morning and we come home and it's frozen. We're probably freaking backing up viruses. LOL It's not caused any problems on my Netbook. :-P

Chris said...

Hmmm. I was wondering if it was Carbonite freezing my computer. It gets one more chance - if it's frozen tomorrow morning, I guess I'll try Mozy or one of the others.