Talkie Tuesday: Pursuit of Jade

 

"Be a good pig in this life; be a good man in the next."

 

Hello everyone!

 

Welcome back.

 

Sorry for a bit of delay on Tuesday's reviews, I took last week off because there were other things happening (as said before, it was a special day!) and now I return with a MAMMOTH of a thing.

 

There's no way it's not going to be.

 

Not with the show being 40 episodes long, and each episode covering so much ground it sometimes feels like they're trying to shove a book into 40 minutes, each.

 

And in all honesty I fell into the hole completely by accident!

 

Netflix kept shoving the promo for it right on the front page. Eventually, I decided you know what? FINE, I'll watch.

 

I've since already breezed through twice. And the rest, as they say, is history.

 

So let's take a look at it together in Pursuit of Jade!

 

Tome Thursday: Beneath the Gods' Tree

 

Hello everyone!

 

And welcome to the second book in a row which features living in a desert.

 

It looks like that's a bit of a trend when it comes to recent releases, or upcoming releases I suppose, and I can't say I'm upset about it.

 

There's always things to find more and more interesting the more you read books like this!

 

And tonight's choice is no exception.

 

After meeting an empire that rose after the world was left in shambles, we venture into a totally different fantasy situation today in a world that has nothing to do with our own.

 

It's just sort of ... worse? If that's even possible.

 

So I guess what I'm trying to say is, there's always more after rock bottom, even if you think there isn't.

 

S. Kaeth's book, Beneath the Gods' Tree, is well worth the read.

 

Talkie Tuesday: Queen Charlotte, a Bridgerton Story

 

"What matters madness when true love flourishes?"

 

Hello everyone!

 

Or should I say, dearest gentle reader?

 

That's right, a month after the release on Netflix, I finally sat down to watch this show over the weekend.

 

See I'm REASONABLY on time for this merry-go-round.

 

I'll admit that I was a little bit apprehensive, because my past experiences with anything coming out of Shondaland have been ... skewed, really.

 

Because while most of the time it's OKAY, it then starts to deviate a little from what you'd expect, and not in the best way possible.

 

To my intense surprise, however, I truly, deeply loved this one. Loved it to the point I'm actually considering re-watching it, which hasn't happened with any of the regular seasons thus far.

 

If that isn't an endorsement I don't know what is!

 

So let's find our best manners, and have a look at Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story.

 

Tome Thursday: Graveyard Waltz

 

Hello everyone!

 

For the first choice of my 2022 book blog entries, I picked one that I actually needed to finish and submit the review of during the holiday season, but I was a bit busy with holiday entries at that time.

 

Besides, I need something pretty epic for the start, right?

 

Like with the Talkie one!

 

And this one IS epic.

 

I mean to be fair, the first volume of this series was already pretty darn epic all on its own, and I reviewed it back in the summer of last year. I almost completely forgot about the fact that there was supposed to be a sequel until BookSirens kindly reminded me of that little bit of information.

 

Once I had it, though, I also had to nab the book ARC from the site as well.

 

Ain't nothing funnier than a necromancer and a vampire, let me tell you, although if we're being fair what's funnier might be the fact that there is a tear-inducing cliffhanger at the end!

 

Graveyard Waltz is up next.

 

Tome Thursday: Kiss Me Deadly

 

Hello everyone!

 

This week's book is one that I consider to be incredibly funny and entertaining, and one that I loved when I sat down to read the ARC copy I picked up from BookSirens.

 

Yep, it's that annoying time when I advertise the heck out of this site haha!

 

BookSirens, if you don't yet know, is an online community for book lovers and writers alike where you can find TONS of great reads for free, sign up to get the ARCs, and then read them by a due date that's generated by the site.

 

The only thing you need to do is leave a review after you've finished.

 

I mean, can it get any better than that?!?

 

Nope.

 

I tend to have one or two in the works all the time from there because the choices are excellent, and this month's really wasn't an exception either.

 

Kiss Me Deadly grabbed hold of me with the first sentence and didn't let go.

 

The Thorn Birds (Booktober)

 

"When we press the thorn to our chest we know, we understand, and still we do it."

 

 

 

If you DON'T know The Thorn Birds, then you've been living under a rock. Colleen McCullough basically created a masterpiece spanning three generations of women who come to work on a sheep farm in Australia, but the world doesn't end there since we also travel to exotic locations, the Vatican, and we got to see the television show with Richard Chamberlain. Honestly, the love story between the woman and the priest is one you can pick up at any time and you'll probably love it, but it has some added benefits during the fall season, like images of scorching sun and blue, blue sea.

 

 

 

 

The Thorn Birds is a robust, romantic saga of a singular family, the Clearys. It begins in the early part of this century, when Paddy Cleary moves his wife, Fiona, and their seven children to Drogheda, the vast Australian sheep station owned by his autocratic and childless older sister; and it ends more than half a century later, when the only survivor of the third generation, the brilliant actress Justine O'Neill, sets a course of life and love halfway around the world from her roots. The central figures in this enthralling story are the indomitable Meggie, the only Cleary daughter, and the one man she truly loves, the stunningly handsome and ambitious priest Ralph de Bricassart. And the land itself; stark, relentless in its demands, brilliant in its flowering, prey to gigantic cycles of drought and flood, rich when nature is bountiful, surreal like no other place on earth.

(from Goodreads)

 

xx

*image not mine

 

The Bourbon Kings (Booktober)

Cop of the Year (Booktober)

Nefertiti (Booktober)

Timeline (Booktober)

The Murder at the Vicarage (Booktober)

Persuasion (Booktober)

The Longest Ride (Booktober)

Midnight Sun (Booktober)

Percy Jackson & the Olympians (Booktober)

The Chronicles of Narnia (Booktober)

Atlantis (Booktober)

Origin (Booktober)

Quo Vadis (Booktober)

Death on the Nile (Booktober)

The Little White Horse (Booktober)

The Sign of Four (Booktober)

Harry Potter #2 (Booktober)

Troublemaker (Booktober)

The Lord of the Rings (Booktober)

The Kommandant's Girl (Booktober)

"I had become a foreigner in the place I had always called home."

 

What do you do when your home country is invaded? When your way of life is threatened? When your very existence is about to be erased from the face of the Earth? Those are exactly the kind of questions that Pam Jenoff asks in The Kommandant's Girl, a book that tells the story of how a Jewish girl joined the resistance, pretended to be someone else so that she could get close to a high-ranking Nazi official ... and ended up having feelings for the man other than the hatred she was supposed to feel.

Because in the end, emotions aren't all black and white.

September 1939. Overnight, Jewish nineteen-year-old Emma Bau's world is turned upside down when Germany invades Poland. And after only six weeks of marriage, her husband Jacob, a member of the Resistance, is forced to flee. Escaping the ghetto, Emma assumes a new, Christian identity and finds work at Nazi headquarters. As secretary to the charismatic Kommandant Richwalder, Emma vows to use her unique position to gather intelligence for the Resistance - by any means necessary ...

(from book jacket)

xx

*image not mine

Nemesis (Booktober)

Outlander series (Booktober)

The Conqueror Series (Booktober)

The Lost Symbol (Booktober)

The Host (Booktober)

The Bridgertons (Booktober)

The Hound of the Baskervilles (Booktober)

The Infernal Devices (Booktober)

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter (Booktober)

Daughter of Smoke & Bone (Booktober)
Broken Sky (Booktober)

The Shadow of the Wind (Booktober)

Dracula (Booktober)

Life and Death (Booktober)

ACOTAR series (Booktober)

Assassin's Creed: Odyssey (Booktober)

Sepulchre (Booktober)

Pride and Prejudice (Booktober)

Tempting Autumn (Booktober)

Harry Potter (Booktober)

The Hobbit (Booktober)

Tome Thursday: Persuading Spring

Hello everyone!

The weather has been amazingly fine this week which has certainly contributed to my almost perpetual good mood, so I've been out and about and getting things done, mostly.

I suppose making sure I can do some more damage on BookDepository is one of those things, right?

Right.

Anyway, I'm back with another Serenity Woods book, but this time I feel extra accomplished because it's the LAST of her Four Seasons series, which brings the total up to four and makes me feel special since I managed to actually write the lot out up here. Aren't I neat?

If you recall, the seasons we covered went summer, autumn, winter, and now finally spring, which confused me to begin with since, you know, usually people start with spring.

But after reading Persuading Spring I can't help but agree with the succession. Spring, and new beginnings, is the perfect place to finish.

Talkie Tuesday: The Spirit of Christmas

"Twelve days isn't nearly enough."

Hello everyone!

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

Meaning, I'm overdoing it with Christmas movies this week. Tonight on the menu is one of my all-time favourites, How the Grinch Stole Christmas (and coincidentally the only Jim Carrey movie I can actually watch), but yesterday I was watching something else. 

You know this season is one of those when ALL the cheesiness comes out in spades, but then again this is probably one of the only times per year when it's actually allowed.

So yeah, I watched a semi-cheesy movie. Actually, talking to a friend of mine, we classified it as 'medium cheese' because, why not.

If I hadn't known any better I would have immediately said Hallmark was the one who produced it, but then Hallmark goes overboard with the cheese most of the time, and this one wasn't exactly there yet, though it was close.

All in all, however, it had a fairly reasonable female lead, a VERY good-looking male lead + glasses, and mystery!

I'm talking about The Spirit of Christmas.