Today’s post is our first ever guest post at Book Thingo, written by Keira, who runs Love Romance Passion, a romance book review blog for readers by readers. She’s been reading romance since she was a teenager and began blogging about romance so she could share her passion for her favourite genre. She loves reading paranormal, Regency, historical America, and highlander most of all, and completely adores blind and wounded heroes.

Kat asked me to tell her about my top 10 books from September (so far anyway) to go with the Books Alive 2009 Reading Challenge. These books are not all romance—some are young adult—but they’re all new to me.

1–5. Artemis Fowl (Books One, Two, Three, Four, Five)

Listening Library and Random House are my heroes. Love Nathaniel Parker’s voice. He’s so amazing. The story fairly leaps out of the speakers. Book 5 shows a hint of future romance as Artemis hits puberty, but it’s not a main feature of the series at all.

6. Lucky in Love by Carolyn Brown

Very funny contemporary Western romance. I loved the phrases and sayings (more)

In the spirit of the Books Alive Reading Challenge, I present to you, from my neverending TBR pile, my must-reads (I swear) by the end of the year.

As I also review non-romance books, I’ve listed 5 romances and 5 non-romances (in no particular order):

1. Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

Shantaram is the story of a man known as Lindsay, who made his way to Bombay from Australia. Throughout his life he’s been a prisoner, a slum doctor, a forger, gun runner, mafia guerilla, among other things. This massive novel has received rave reviews and has a possible movie adaptation, featuring Johnny Depp, in the works. Everyone that I know who has read this autobiography (yes, it’s based on a true story) has been totally sucked in and hasn’t been able to put it down, despite it being 944 pages. (Maybe I’ll read this one last!)

This book is listed in The Guide. If you buy it from a participating bookshop during the Books Alive campaign, you can get a free book with your purchase. (more)

The Last Stormlord by Glenda Larke (Watergivers, Book 1)

It’s been a long time since I read a fantasy novel in which everything about the world felt original and so utterly fascinating that even 640 pages didn’t seem enough. I suppose wishing for a stronger love story would be asking for too much.

When water is scarce and rationed to the last drop, the ability to sense and manipulate water is to wield power. Granthon, the Cloudmaster, is dying, and there’s no stormlord to take over the responsibility of summoning water out of the sea, forming them into clouds, and directing the rain to fall where it’s needed. In an effort to avert an ecological and political disaster, he sends his most powerful rainlords to scour the land for any children with water sensitivity.

Their search brings together forces that will change the land forever. Shale, a dirty, uneducated Gibber boy who displays remarkable water talent may be their best hope for survival. Terelle, a runaway girl, discovers a talent that not even the rainlords understand, but which can alter their destiny. The changing political climate (more)

Tomorrow is the start of our Books Alive Reading Challenge. It’s not too late to join! You can read the rules and sign up here. You can join any time until the end of the challenge—the more the merrier!

Participants
Susan at Reading Upside Down
Michelle at Torch Under The Blanket Books
Jen at eveninghour.org (The Books I’ve Bought Ages Ago But Haven’t Yet Read Challenge)
Charlie at bookbook blog
SonomaLass at SonomaLass’ blog
Christina via Goodreads
gnomeangel at her blog
Tez at Tez Says (Just Read, Bitch! Challenge)
Edie (Books By New-To-Me Authors)
Marg at Reading Aventures
Bronwyn Parry at her blog (All-rounder Challenge)
Becky at Becky et al
mirvettium at mirgraphy
Decadence at Book Thingo (Books I’ve Bought Ages Ago But Haven’t Yet Read Challenge–Just Read, Bitch! Combo Challenge)
Bon (Just Read, Bitch! Challenge)
Kat at Book Thingo (more)

September is book month in Australia as the book industry gets behind the the Books Alive campaign, which runs from August 26 to September 30. And what better way to celebrate reading than … a reading challenge!

Books Alive Reading Challenge

1. Read as many books as you can from Sept 7 to 30. (This gives us a weekend to buy or borrow books for the challenge.)

2. On Oct 1, post a list of the books you read. If you don’t have a blog or website, you can post your results as a comment to our challenge round-up in October.

3. The list should either link to your reviews of the books  or include short comments saying what you thought of each book.

Challenge variations (more difficult) (more)

Thanks to Twitter, I found out that today is Indigenous Literacy Day (ILD). ILD is the major fundraising event for the Indigenous Literacy Project, which aims to address the literacy crisis in Indigenous communities in remote locations.

You can help just by buying a book today!

Participating booksellers will donate to the ILP at least 5% of today’s takings, and participating publishers will donate at least 5% of their takings from titles invoiced today. Click here for a list of participating booksellers and publishers. The list includes booksellers who’ve been known to support the romance reading community, such as Booktopia and Galaxy. If you haven’t bought your uni textbooks yet, some co-op bookshops are also listed.

Click here to find out what else you can do to help the project. You can also fund a book pack to be sent to isolated communities through the Book Buzz initiative. (more)

Thanks to everyone who entered our contest to win a copy of The White Queen.

Congratulations to the winners, Nikki and Edie!

I’ve sent you an email with instructions on how to claim your prize, but in case you don’t get it, please email me ASAP.

Nikki’s book-to-film choice was The Constant Princess, also by Philippa Gregory, starring:

Scarlett (Johannson) as Katherine, the desperately loving princess ripped from her spanish life who ends up with the wrong brother but spends her life fulfilling a promise to her true love.She’s got the brow, the skin, the cleavage, the tiny waist, the lips and the eyes. Not too many modern actors who’d do well if sucked into a vortex and spat out in Tudor England, but SJ is one of them. She’d be a star there, too.

She’d also excel at the decades long endurance and tragic end. (more)

Night's Cold Kiss by Tracey O'Hara (Dark Brethren, Book 1)

Our obsession with vampires isn’t over, with a new series hitting the shelves this week. Debut author Tracey O’Hara shows us why we love to be seduced by danger and darkness.

Antoinette Petrescu, haunted by her mother’s murder at the hands of a vampire, makes her living tracking down Necrodreniacs—rogue vampires addicted to the death-high that occurs when they drain, and therefore kill, a human. But when a series of murders forces her to work closely with Christian Laroque, an Aeternus vampire, Antoinette discovers that she has a few things left to learn about vampires—they’re not all vicious murderers, and she’s not as immune to their charms as she’d thought.

Humans and parahumans co-exist in this world under a peace treaty that’s beginning to unravel. Not everyone is interested in peace, and resentment has endured long after the end of a bitter and bloody war between vampires, Animalians and humans. Antoinette and Christian suspect there’s a mole within the Council for Human and Paranormal Relations (CHaPR), leaking information and trying to disrupt the tenuous peace (more)

Norse Code by Greg van Eekhout

A reluctant Valkyrie, an exiled god, and a warrior who’s been there and done that set out to get in and out of hell and somehow stop the end of the world. (Did I mention there’s a cute doggy?)

It’s the end of the world as we know it, or at least as decreed by Norse Mythology in an event known as Ragnarok. Inevitably it is meant to end with a great battle, and to even up the odds, DNA testing is used to find the perfect warriors. Mist, a Valkyrie recruited using this method, becomes disheartened after a recruitment that goes terribly wrong. She decides that since the world is ending anyway, she should go and find her sister, who has somehow ended up in Hel. To get to Hel she needs to find the god Hermod, who has actually made it there and back. Hermod is currently wandering the streets of LA (with his Alaskan Malamute!) trying to keep his head down after leaving the realm of the gods many, many years ago. Of course, the last thing he wants is to go back to Hel, but somehow he gets sucked in through a series of unusual events. (more)

Read on for a chance to win a copy of The White Queen. The contest ends midnight on Wednesday, August 26 AEST, and it’s open to anyone, including readers overseas.

It’s time for another non-romance freebie, and this time it’s the latest release from bestselling author Philippa Gregory, who wrote The Other Boleyn Girl.

What the book is about

Here’s the description of the book sent to me by Gregory’s publicist:

The White Queen is the first book in a new series set amid the deadly feuds of England known as the Wars of the Roses.

Brother turns on brother to win the ultimate prize—the throne of England—in this dazzling account of the wars of the Plantagenets. They are the claimants and kings who ruled England before the Tudors, and now Philippa Gregory brings them to life through the dramatic and intimate stories of the secret players: the indomitable women, starting with Elizabeth Woodville, the White Queen. (more)