
Still continuing on with my reread of the Black Dagger Brotherhood series. On the fourth, I finished reading Lover Mine. I love Xhex as a character. She is so much more fleshed out, unlike the other shellans. They have some personality, but there isn’t the depth there like there is with Xhex. I really liked this book, although I got bored with the Lash stuff. But, there were so many things that came together in this book, SO much. This was another five-star rating for me.

Next up was the second book in the Fallen Angels series. I basically put together a list of where these fall by publication date so that I know where they go in the BDB timeline. When I started this one, I just could not get into it. I found myself rereading the same paragraph over and over. Crave dragged for me. I don’t like these as much as the BDB books. And I think the first one, Covet, was better than this one. This one just felt like it was taking a ton of time for not much story. It took me way longer to read than it should have (15 days). I wasn’t even sure when I would get to the end because it just seemed to drag out. I was ready to move on by the time I finished it.

I took a side detour in the middle of reading Crave to read this erotic romance by Tessa Bailey, Protecting What’s His. This was another rec from Heather. She described Tessa’s books as “hot cop alpha males”. Yes, please. This was good. Not great. Not terrible. I enjoyed it but it left me feeling a little flat at the end.

I was so glad to finally finish Crave on the 20th so that I could move on to Payne’s book, Lover Unleashed. I was soooo happy to be back to the Brotherhood. Annette and I were back to reading the same book at the same time. I’d gotten ahead of her, but then fell way behind when I got bogged down with Crave. Reading these hardbacks makes me think of a friend I had (sadly, we are no longer friends) and it brings me back to these days when we used to get so excited about the new BDB book release every spring. I think when I initially read these, I read them so fast that they didn’t completely sink in. I had forgotten this whole book. It was so good though, I zipped through it in less than a week.

I treated myself to two more books for my library – The Book of Life by Deborah Harkness (book 3 in the All Souls trilogy), and Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas (the first book in the Throne of Glass series. I’m really excited to read the Throne of Glass series finally, since SJM has quickly become one of my favorite authors. But, ToG will have to wait a bit as the new Crescent City book is cutting in line as soon as it arrives (I pre-ordered it).

Since it had arrived, I decided to take a break from my BDB reread in order to read Book of Life so that I can watch season 3 of Discovery of Witches. I started it on the 27th, and I’m carrying it over into February.
January was kind of a slow start from a reading perspective, but I’m hoping I can pick up the pace a bit in February. I set myself a goal of reading 50 books this year, so we’ll see how that goes.