Free on Amazon – Brute by Eve Adams

Eve Adams first full length Romance novel is available free on Amazon Saturday 1st July and Sunday 2nd July. This is the first book in the ‘Pine Point’ series. Also available in paperback.

Description:

“Brute,” by Eve Adams is the first steamy romance novel in the “Pine Point” series.

Welcome to Pine Point, North Carolina, where the summers aren’t the only thing that are too hot to handle.

Heathe Campbell is a sexy, hardworking mountain man. Good with his hands, bad with his manners—at least in the beginning.

Bianca Stone is a big city girl from Los Angeles, with a quick tongue and a no-nonsense attitude.

When she comes to Pine Point to help her very pregnant sister get ready for the baby’s arrival, she will get more than she bargained for. Surely this thing she has for Heathe is just a passing attraction, they’re like night and day. How could it ever work between them when they’re so different? They do say opposites attract…but that isn’t the only hurdle standing in their way. When a secret is revealed, it might just change things for them forever.

If you like your romance steamy and emotional, where true love matters, this is the perfect book for you.

*This is a 60k word novel that contains steamy, descriptive love scenes.

Available here:

Amazon U.S

Amazon U.K

Is the Amazon Green?

Well, I am pretty sure that the jungle is, and no doubt the river itself in places. But that is not the Amazon I am referring to here. I will explain further.

With all the recent build up to St Patrick’s Day on the 17^th day of the month of March, in the year of our Lord Two Thousand, One Hundred and Sixteen, and the prominence of the green with which these festivities abound, I got to thinking. Whoah! Careful now, I hear you say. Don’t strain yourself. Okay! Okay! So, I got to thinking about green of a different nature. Here goes.

So why is it that when I order a single book, let’s say 8” x 8” and less than an inch deep, that it arrives in a box 30” x 24” x 8” or so. Stuffed with brown paper, or bubble wrap. This seems to be extremely wasteful, environmentally unfriendly, and economically unsound. This would not seem to make any sort of corporate sense either. If this were a one off I could perhaps understand, but it seems to be the norm, rather than the exception.

In this current age of ‘going green’, caring for the environment and packaging reduction requirements hitting many businesses, it seems a little ethically irresponsible that one of the biggest companies in the world appears to be neglecting a large section of their Corporate Social Responsibility, CSR. Still, I like to get my packages as quickly and easily as the next person, and love the convenience of shopping online with Amazon. I am sure they have their reasons.

Just some food for thought, I guess.

Adult Coloring Books

No! Not Adult in ‘that’ way. But a whole lot of fun all the same.

Description

Coloring is not just for kids. It has been proven to be an excellent way for adults to destress, create mindfulness and slow down from daily life, all while enjoying an activity that you can truly make your own.

There is no right or wrong way to color in the images in this book, and you are free to choose the tools you wish to work with. Markers, paint, colored pencils, pens – the choices are unlimited.

Sit back and unwind and let your stress melt away while you spread color across the page. All pages are single sided to avoid bleed through.

Relax and enjoy the books in this calming series

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Beginning of a Hero – Legends of Windemere by Charles E Yallowitz

I recently finished reading ‘Beginning of a Hero’, first part of the Legends of Windemere series by Charles Yallowitz. As it happens, I read this very quickly, for one simple reason. It was enthralling. I felt compelled to keep going, constantly wanting to know what happened next. Unfortunately I had to stop to leave for work, and with only a few pages remaining, it was extremely difficult to put it down. I kept saying to myself just one more paragraph, just one more page. Then I was very nearly late for work and spent the rest of the day waiting to get the chance to complete it.

Please do not be deceived by the title of this post however. It is not my intention to write a review of this wonderful book. There have been a number of reviews written about this book recently that have done the job far better than I could. In particular Ionias review is excellent, albeit with an insanely long title and is well worth reading. I do intend to add a quick review and recommendation to Amazon, and probably to Goodreads too.

I did want to make it known to everyone how much I enjoyed this book though. I thought that this book was great and I really liked many of the characters finding myself heavily invested in them from the beginning of the book.

The ending leaves a lot of unanswered questions for me and a real desire to know what happens next. I am eager for the sequel. So Charles, fantastic job, and when is the sequel likely to be out? I am waiting in anticipation.

Holiday Reading

I have a week’s holiday planned for next week and I have been deciding what I want to read. I say read rather than do since I like to make maximum use of holiday time from work to catch up on my reading. In fact, as I did just today, I usually end up ordering a new batch of books from Amazon, despite the rather large piles already sitting about the house.

As many of you will know, I enjoy making use of reading lists. Although I also tend to read a lot of other things as well, I do like the satisfaction of completing a book list. Ticking each title off once it has been read is most enjoyable. I completed the BBC list of ‘100 books that everyone should read’, some time ago, and I moved on to another list, one I had long wanted to attempt. This was the Great Books list that I have discussed before. I have expanded the list of books out so that entries that are listed ‘The works of…’ are detailed more fully, providing me with the nice side effect of more boxes to tick. However I was shocked to see that, even without doing this for all authors, the list has expanded to at least 700 books. Some of them are not easy reads either. I think this may take the next decade or so, especially given my non list reading also.

I have also been putting off getting a ticket to see Audrey Niffenegger speak at Ely next week. I am not sure why I have been putting it off. I will get a ticket soon no doubt. It will be nice to have a cultured evening out, one that doesn’t involve the consumption of alcohol and/or curry!

I also hope to get a decent amount of writing done on my holiday, making a start on my new Writers Bureau course.

I should finally finish Sophocles tonight too. That’s another seven entries off the list.

Book Buying Problem?

Since finishing ‘The Art of Fiction’ I have been progressing nicely with Proust, now that I can devote all of my home reading time to it. I should finish this one by the end of the weekend and be able to start on the next book ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ . I know I said that I was not going to start anything else before I finished ‘The Guermantes Way’ but I have decided to start another book that I will purely read at work. I decided that Proust was too heavy to read at lunchtime, when I invariable get disturbed by other people.  The book that I will be reading is ‘Aspects of the Novel’ by E.M. Forster. I have not read anything by Forster before, although I know of his work. Can anybody recommend any of his novels?

Despite promising myself that I would not buy anymore books for a while I have acquired a few new books. I was happily shopping in Tesco on Sunday for food and somehow a couple of reduced price paperbacks ended up in my trolley. How they got there I do not know! And then later in the day I find myself clicking on buy-now on Amazon and ordering another six titles. I think it is a disease. I have piles of books that I wanted to read before ordering more, ranging from Homer’s Odyssey to some James Patterson thrillers and everything in between. I ended up ordering ‘The Fortune of the Rougons’ by Emile Zola, part of the Rougon Macquart cycle of twenty novels. I have read ‘Germinal’ which is one of them, from a reading list I was following, and I really enjoyed it so thought I would start to work on the whole lot. Apparently each of the novels in the cycle will stand alone although Zola did provide a recommended reading order. Naturally I will need to finish ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ by Proust first before starting ‘Les Rougon Macquart’ by Zola.

Not satisfied with just one book I managed to come away having order seven. I included a couple of books by authors whose blogs I have been looking at recently, and I fully intend to get around to checking out works by more of the bloggers  that I come across, especially those that comment on my posts or follow me, although I do not have access to a kindle so will pretty much always be looking for hard copy versions. To start I have purchased ‘High’ by Corey M.P and ‘Jazz’ by Cristian Mihai. I also bought Sophocles plays and ‘Twenty Three Tales’ by Tolstoy. When I will fit them in I doubt know, but I will get round to all of them eventually. I think I will have to disable my Amazon account and lock myself in the house for a few months to curb my book buying habit.

Book Buying

How do you all go about buying books? Where do you most regularly get books from? Do you spend hours perusing old secondhand book stores, or do you spend a few minutes clicking mouse buttons?

I tend to get books from a number of different sources. Some I prefer to others, however the method which I get the most enjoyment from is the one that I do the least.

I get some books from local auctions. My father inhabits the local auction scene and has been known to pick up the odd six or seven boxes of books for me, usually for 25p a box or something silly. This is obviously cheap, but the quality and type of books can be quite random. It can be interesting searching through the boxes to see whether there is anything of interest or value, but in general my least favourite method.

My favourite method book buying is secondhand book stores. I can spend hours lost in the pleasure of leafing through musty old tomes. I will hopefully be checking out a few of this type of shop on Friday when I go to London. I have plotted a route from the station to the restaurant that should take me past six or so bookshops. I will just have to be careful not to get too engrossed in them and be late for my meeting. That would not be ideal. Although this type of book buying, along with visiting book fairs, is my favourite method, it is not the method that I use the most.

As much as I would like to have the time to buy secondhand editions of books with character from real shops I tend to end up buying most of my books from Amazon purely because of the convenience. The pressures of work tend to mean that I have little time for visiting bookshops and being able to get the books I want online is just too tempting. I actually really love the Amazon wish list as I enjoy adding all of the books that I want to get as I discover a new author or read a review about something. The ability to buy books with one click is also useful, but extremely dangerous in my opinion. I should really disable it, if that is possible. The recommendations that Amazon provide can also be quite useful in pointing you to other books by the same author or stories in a similar to what you have just ordered.

So what is your favourite method of book buying? Comments please.