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goldendarter

The Golden Darter

My Life Through Books

 

Middle School was a weird mix of classics and Star Wars. I was obsessed with The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux to the point of the book falling apart. I also discovered that while I love Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters can go hang. As for Star Wars... I've read almost every meta-verse book that was published up until the New Order cannon. I can still go into detail and recite storylines of a few beloved books. Hence, my nerd life began.

 

High school was very paranormal, vampire, scifi, etc. I would literally go online and search for book series that concerned vampires and read everything on the list. We are talking Anita Blake, Charline Harris, Anne Rice, Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Tanya Huff, Steven King, etc. This was before they sparkled, ya'll. Early college was philosophical and political theory for school, and mainstream fiction in my personal time. Wicked, Life of Pi, Memoirs of a Geisha. These are the 3 books that pushed me into my next phase, mostly because of how ambiguous I felt about them, and their questionable endings.

 

Late-mid college I was introduced to LaVyrle Spencer by way of Hummingbird courtesy of a gripe session with my Mom about how depressing the books I had been reading lately were. I've never looked back and have been hooked on the romance genre ever since. I've read and loved a ton of LaVyrle Spencer (who is a little hit and miss), Judith McNaught (of the rapetastic 80s era of romance), and Georgette Heyer (who writes in the vein of Austen). More recently I've discovered the joys of contemporary authors like Susan Elizabeth Phillips.

 

Lately I've been trying to read more non-fiction. I really do enjoy learning about subjects that interest me, but non-fiction can feel like work sometimes. So I fall back to romance. You just can't go wrong with knowing that there will almost always be a happy ending.

Currently reading

Playing Dirty
Jennifer Echols
Searching for Someday
Jennifer Probst
Mara TP
Ming Doyle
The Quest
Susan Kearney
Play by Play (Play Makers #1)
Kate Donovan
Mrs Ronnie The Society Hostess Who Collected Kings
Sian Evans

Passion

Passion - Lisa Valdez This book should have instead been titled "UNNECESSARY ANGST: The Novel". Jez people... I have been told for years to read this, and honestly I should have gone into it with certain expectations considering the time period it was released in. But come on. This was like a teens angsty melodrama, or at least what you think Real Life and True Love is like at that age. I couldn't even laugh at the H/H because they were such awful people, Mark more so than Passion. Seriously, he was a selfish douche-canoe with no redeeming qualities at all. At. All. All of the side characters were either so one-dimensional as to not have even existed in the first place, or such caricatures of "Evil" as to be utterly ridiculous. Ugh... Just... UGH. And all the tears and crying! Some how, this was sexy! And when it wasn't supposed to be sexy it was Moving! I was confused sometimes about which emotion we were being shown, can't lie. And I'm not even going to get into the Heros endowments and all the baggage that came with *that* story point. I, personally, question the physics of most of their sex scenes. Oh god, and then when Mark was getting turned on by the thought of Passion sexually touching her sisters. WTF WAS THAT ABOUT and WHERE THE HELL did that even come from??? I just... I need to stop thinking about this book, like, NOW.I would say that I want to bleach my brain, but I have read this kind of 80s stuff before, and it is always vaguely disturbing to me that people love/ed it. EDIT: HOLY SHIT! This book read EXACTLY like the raptastic 80s roms (not the mention that cover), but low-and-behold it was written in 2005?! WTF?? I am just... All a-sputtering... I need to go lie down... Why? Just... Why???