Bookish Rants or Raves: I {Don’t} Feel Like It!

Hey everyone! Recently I have been thinking a lot about the act of reading. It looks like something so simple and innocuous, but I feel it is anything but.

As a reader I tend to give a lot of myself to any book or book series I am reading and if it doesn’t connect with me, it will be a uphill battle to get to finish it.

One of the most important aspects of reading is the mood. I can have a ton of amazing books in my TBR, but if I am not in the mood to read a certain genre, I will avoid it as much as I can.

Take YA for example. For the last few months I haven’t been able to feel almost any excitement about YA novels and have only been able to read a couple. I don’t …

Bookish Rants or Raves: Getting To Meet Your Favorite Authors in Person!

When my reading addition started, meeting one of the authors I so loved to read was something I never even considered within my realm of possibilities.

Then, when I started book blogging, I was well aware how hard and almost impossible it would be to meet my literary idols, but I started to get the craving for it.

Difficulty with meeting authors I love and attending signings and conferences is just one of the obstacles we face as international book bloggers. However, September this year I got the chance to go to a Book Conference in The U.S. (I talked about it HERE) and since my 10-day trip turned into a 3-month one, I had the chance to go to The New York Comic Con in NYC and meet some of my favorite authors ever!

It was so much …

Bookish Rants or Raves: To meme or Not To meme!

Hey Everyone! Ok, so today I wanted to talk about something that us bloggers have to deal with, the memes. What is a meme? A meme is usually a post that be edited or just a theme that spreads around the blogosphere.

Us, book bloggers, have a lot of specific memes going around, like: In My Mailbox, Teaser Tuesday, Book Blogger Hop and so on… I myself have come up with a couple memes, some more successful than others.

Why do we meme? Well, I can only speak for myself and I believe that if I am being honest, one of the reasons I created a meme was so it would hopefully spread around, become popular and I’d have more traffic and followers on my blog. That was not the main reason, but it did cross my mind. The main reason was that there was some …

Bookish Rants or Raves: My Issue With Prequels!

Ok, so here’s the thing, I love a good book series and if the series has captured my heart I will be a fan for life and buy each and every book out.

The thing is that some authors like to put out a prequel to the series sometimes, midway through it, or even earlier and I for one don’t really care for it. If I love the books, I’ll probably read it when or if I feel like it, but I’ll probably not wait for it in pins and needles.  
Finding out about a character’s or a set of character’s beginning can be interesting at times, but if I have already seen said characters find their happily ever after, what do I care about reading a book with them alone again?

I won’t generalize and say I don’t like …

Bookish Rants or Raves: My First Book Conference!

When I first started book blogging at the end of last year, I never thought I would have gotten as far as actually going overseas to attend a book conference.

Well, here I am, a Brazilian staying at a friend’s house in Upstate New York fresh out of the Authors After Dark Romance Unlimited Conference.

One of the first people I met online was author Stella Price. We became online buddies and she started talking about this conference she was organizing and right away my ears perked up and I felt like this was something I’d love to go to.

At the time I was living in Israel, but I had already started making plans. By April I had moved back to Brazil, but the plans kept on building and as fate would have it, it all turned out great.

Going to The …

Bookish Rants or Raves: My Love/Hate Relationship with Blurbs!

I have this sort of ritual whenever I’m going to start reading a new book. I find the book on GoodReads and LibraryThing, read it’s blurb, mark as Currently Reading, add the image to my Blog Sidebar and start reading.

I have this obsession with book blurbs that cannot be healthy. Even during the book reading I tend to check back to the book’s Goodreads page and read and re-read it’s blurb. 

The thing is, one of my biggest pet peeves are book blurbs that don’t match the book or have outright lies in them. I cannot stand that, it irritates me to no end and I can’t understand how publishers allow that to happen.

Sometimes it is pretty clear that whoever wrote the blurb did not read the book, and I find that a bit hard to swallow =/

On …

Bookish Rants or Raves: Bookish Distractions!

I have been thinking about things that distract and bother me when I’m reading. I’ve come to realize that there are two types of distractions that can get on my nerves:

1 – Environmental Distractions
2 – In-Book Distractions

1 – I really need silence when it comes to reading. i can’t have music on the TV on and if my dad is watching TV in the next room, I have to close my door to avoid the sound to bother me.

I also need to feel comfortable when reading. I read mostly laying down on my bed, but I can also deal with reading on my desk from time to time.

2 – Now, these are more subtle distractions. I’m talking about things in a book that just make you scratch your head and that most of the time you have to …

Bookish Rants or Raves: Bookish OCD

Ok, so I have a confession to make. I have a bit of OCD when it comes to numbers and even though nowadays it’s much more controlled, there was a point in my life when it was seriously annoying to my friends.

I love odd numbers and don’t really care for even ones. So for example when the volume (in the car radio, doesn’t matter the car) is at an even number it bothers me! A Lot! There was a point in my life when I had to ask the car owner if I could turn it up or down one point so it could be an odd number. I did that even in Taxis LOL. Well, nowadays it still bothers me, but I do my best to ignore it, I promise.

All this got me thinking about some OCD habits related to books. Alphabetizing your shelves, organizing …

Bookish Rants or Raves: Let’s Talk About Clichés!

As a book lover and avid reader, I am quite proud to say that I have read a lot of books. I have never hid the fact that my favorite genres are Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance and that I am an absolute sucker for anything Supernatural.

However, as with addiction there is always a downside and the one that I have found after reading so many books and following over 100 book series (and adding to that daily), are the clichés.

How many times can you read about Sexy Vampires with magnetic eyes, werewolves with possessive behaviors, kick-ass heroine, the girl next door that gets caught up in the paranormal or the half-human / half-faerie (vamp, shifter, etc)?

Don’t get me wrong, I still love to read about all of the above and now and then, a book or series comes along …

Bookish Rants or Raves: It’s Raining Kick-Ass Men!?!?

I read a post on Wicked Little Pixie’s blog by the Queen B (you can check out the post  HERE) where she talks about Urban Fantasy, more specifically about the scarce number of Male protagonists in UF. She also mentions that the word on the grapevine is that, and I quote: “writers writing male leads in UF are not being picked up by publishers. Even if the stories are good. What I’m hearing is that they don’t really want men, and they especially don’t want the male protagonist to be bisexual or gay.”

I couldn’t help but take advantage of my little bi-weekly feature and put on my two cents in this whole deal.

I have to admit that I am very ambivalent in this whole thing. On one side I am all for the Kick-Ass men of Urban Fantasy, bring on Dresden, Felix Castor, Simon Canderous and any …