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Book Review

Review: Be Careful What You Wish For by CP Santi

Ana is in a rut.

For years, she had been focused on trying to carve out a niche for herself in a competitive, male-dominated, scientific world. On her 32nd birthday, she finally takes a step back and realises her life is . . . boring. With a little prodding from her friends, she decides to shake things up. She vows that this is the year she’ll finally capture the heart of Daniel Sato, the research associate she’s secretly loved for ages.

So she makes a birthday wish—to finally fall in love with someone (‘with’ being the operative word). But then, she hadn’t counted on crossing paths with hunky and opinionated actor Ken Nakamura.

Be careful what you wish for—Fate always answers—even if it isn’t exactly the answer that we were hoping for. Find out how even the best-laid plans go awry when the paths of two very different people suddenly collide.

I was J-dorama starved when I first read the blurb for this book. I still am (God knows 24 hours is not enough for all the wonderful things in life), but this book quelled my hunger for feels that only a good fast-paced drama plot and an ikemen lead can give. And although my favorite girl-next-door meets superstar story will always be Rain and Song Hyekyo‘s Full House, CP Santi‘s take on the trope was refreshing and sweet.

Maybe because I’ve never read about anyone like a Ana Madrigal, an independent, strong-willed woman who makes lab coats sexy like no one’s business. I am seriously deficient in science (that branch of knowledge and I just don’t get along) so it was fun to read about a lead who actually had a microscope on her desk and truly owned it. It was like a sneaky little science lesson hiding inside my fiction.

Maybe because I fell for Ken Nakamura right off the bat (the author cheated here, because she mentioned somewhere that Ken was based on Oguri Shun. I couldn’t one-click fast enough). Handsome, aloof, but truly fluffy on the inside, it felt natural to root for him and Ana to have their happily ever after. Maybe it was also Ken’s fault that it was easy for me to ignore Daniel Sato, the third spoke in this love triangle. Make no mistake, I have a very gorgeous mental picture of Dr. Sato, but his belated efforts to win Ana’s heart were just too small compared to Ken’s sweet gestures.

The story wraps up with pages upon pages of swoon-worthy feels, and a bonus Nihongo lesson at that. Definitely puts author CP Santi in my reading list.

#BuwanNgMgaAkdangPinoy #TeamKen

Be Careful What You Wish For is available on Amazon.

About the Author

C.P. Santi is a Filipina writer based in Tokyo, Japan. She is a wife to an engineer / musician / jokester and a full-time mom to two energetic boys. She loves cooking and feeding people, gorging on chocolate, watching J-doramas, belting it out in the karaoke box, and running around the house playing tickle tag. She also loves dreaming up stories about the people she meets.

In another life, she is also an architect and academic.

C. P. Santi blogs about writing and creative stuff athttp://thejapayukichronicles.blogspot.jp. You can also view her other works in progress athttp://www.wattpad.com/user/cpsanti

Book Review Writing Now

August is #BuwanNgMgaAkdangPinoy

I write this as I take a break from #StrangeLit duties (Activity 2 achievement unlocked!), and because I was super excited to find out that this month, August, is Buwan ng mga Akdang Pinoy. I’m thrilled to join this campaign, mostly because of two things. Firstly, these past few months I’ve been binging on works of Filipino authors, and secondly, I am also struggling to be a successful one myself (the struggle is fun and tiring and very real, guys).

This month, despite my own writing goals, I aim to finish reading the following works of super awesome Filipino authors: Continue Reading

Book Review Maj Guanzon

The Fault in Our Stars

This is not so much as a review as it is a short contemplation. So I’m not going to officially call it a book review.

For one, John Green‘s the Fault in Our Stars is no book to be typically on the Christmas Recommended Reading short list. It was tragedy from the first page. Anybody who knows cancer would know that a story that includes it could never end well. It was always a matter of time. To be precise: how much time remains, and how you live through it, and then after.

Continue Reading

Book Review

19 out of 100 as of 9/2013

Mia-Wasikowska-Jane-Eyre Michael Fassbender

Mr Rochester pleads his damned cause with Jane Eyre, breaking the good reader’s heart in the process.

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. I don’t think I will be able to finish this list. A lot of the material honestly seem to be beyond my depth and (to be completely frank) my interests. But I’ve gotten through 19 as of this month, so I guess at the very least I am not most people 🙂

Besides, I also feel that other worthy books are not included in the 100 must-reads. To be fair though, the literary world is an ever changing, evolving space and no list will ever be complete. The magic of books, I daresay, is that the story never quite ends.

Check the list and see how you fare.

1 Pride and Prejudice – 1 

2 The Lord of the Rings –

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte – 2

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling – 3

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee -4

6 The Bible – 5

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte –

8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell –

9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman –

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens –

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott –

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy –

13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller –

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare –

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier –

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien –

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk –

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger – 6

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger – 7

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot –

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell –

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald –

23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens –

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy –

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams –

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky –

28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck –

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll –

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame –

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy –

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens –

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis –

34 Emma – Jane Austen – 8

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen – 9

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis –

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini –

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres –

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden –

40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne –

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell – 10

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown – 11

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – 17

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving –

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins –

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery –

47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy –

48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood –

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding – 12

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan –

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel –

52 Dune – Frank Herbert –

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons –

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen – 13

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth –

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon –

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens –

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley –

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night – Mark Haddon –

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez –

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck –

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov –

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt –

64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold –

65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas –

66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac –

67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy –

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding – 14

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie –

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville –

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens –

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker –

73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett –

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson –

75 Ulysses – James Joyce –

76 The Inferno – Dante- 15

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome –

78 Germinal – Emile Zola –

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray –

80 Possession – AS Byatt –

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens –

82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell –

83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker –

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro –

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert –

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry –

87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White –

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom – 18

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle –

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton –

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad –

92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery –

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks –

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams –

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole –

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute –

97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas –

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare –

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – 16

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo – <photo id=”1″ />

Book Review

Dear Charlaine Harris

dead-ever-after-by-charlaine-harris-cover-spoiler

In this last book, Sookie potentially goes back to the beginning, after basically wasting all our time.

I know you have artistic freedom and license as an author, and I respect that. These are, after all your characters and your created world. I too, however, as a reader of all 12 Sookie Stackhouse books,  have freedom of my own. And from what I have read from the leaked ending of your latest and last book Dead Ever After–due to no other’s fault but my own–I’m afraid you have lost one book sale. It might not matter in the grand scheme of your current success and riches, but it is a right I choose to exercise.

I warily look forward to your next endeavor, and pray you will no longer create a character as magnetic as Eric Northman. For our mutual sakes.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Sunk Shipper

P.S. Bright side: one book of my long post-Strama reading list. Le sigh.

Book Review

5 Books on My Reading List

The-Casual-Vacancy

To ‘Casual Vacancy’, the right time will come for you and I.

The holy week holiday is usually the perfect time for me to catch up on my reading. Alas, this year I have other less fun (but more important) things on my to-do list. The most I can do is look at my growing unread pile and lovingly dust off the covers. Here is my short list, just so I don’t forget:

1. Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald

2. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

3. Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling (the Mexican standoff persists)

4. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

5. I am Number Four: The Lost Files by Pittacus Lore

Dear titles, I hope to be with you by June-July. Until then.