Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Books Are Life

    
     Hi!  My name is Ali and I confess that I am a book addict.  I have been reading voraciously since I first learned to read and I never see myself stopping.  I have toyed with writing a book and starting a book blog for years but I have always been too chicken.  Here is my attempt at part of that dream and I hope that you enjoy what you find here!  

     Let me introduce myself a little bit.  I married my high school sweet heart 20 years ago and have four beautiful children that are the light of my life.  I love to be crafty (feel free to check out my other blog at craftablesbyali.blogspot.com), hang out with the family, camp, fish, and in my 'me' time I love to read.  Despite the fact that it drives my husband crazy I own my own mini library which continues to constantly grow.  I can't help myself!  I will read almost anything (Not a huge fan of non-fiction and I don't read self-help type books) but my favorite are fantasy.  I am a Mormon so my rules for what books I read are pretty conservative.  I do not read books with explicit content, etc, and I do not allow my children to read them either.  If you are one of the people that think it is ok to read that type of stuff you are welcome to.  Everyone is entitled to their own opinion so please be respectful of mine.

     Years ago I discovered that IMDB (internet movie database, for those that do not know the site) offers a parent's guide to most of the movies on the site.  I use it all the time, since you can't seem to trust the rating system to make the call anymore.  One day as I was looking at the review for the movie we were taking the kids to I was thinking how nice it would be to have a site for books that offered this kind of review.  Nothing irritates me more than getting in to a great book only to find that it is full of questionable scenes and I don't get to finish it!  I was thinking how great this blog idea would be but it was just not a challenge I felt up to at the time.

     Recently I stumbled across something that gave me another reason to think about starting this blog.  I was browsing through Goodreads and found two groups that I was excited to join.  In case you are interested they are  We <3 YA Books and Making Connections.  Both have a program where they offer new ebooks for you to read in exchange for reviewing them.  Of course I couldn't pass this up!  Free books in exchange for reviews?  Sounds good to me!  Since I have to review these books anyway, and post them in as many spots as I can, I figured now would be a great time to start this blog.  That being said I have to make one thing clear. With the way that the program works if we request a book and then do not review it we can loose future opportunities to participate.  This means that I will have to finish reading the book no matter what the content is.  I try to make good decisions on which books I request and try to read the descriptions looking for any clue that it might not be acceptable.  If for some reason the book has inappropriate content I will not post the review here (call it censorship if you want, but my blog, my rules!).  I will still post the reviews elsewhere and link it here but I would prefer to keep the books here what I would consider appropriate for teens or myself, sort of like a PG-13 standard, no nudity/sex, minimal swearing, etc.

     In between reading these books and doing their reviews I plan on trying to review other books that I have read.  There are several (hundred) books that I love and would love to get others reading them also!  There will also be reviews for books by LDS (Mormon) authors here also, since I read several of those.  They will not be doctrinal books but will be fiction books written by authors that happen to be LDS, i.e. Stephenie Meyers of Twilight fame.

   I hope that everyone will enjoy my blog and book reviews and will appreciate my attempt to find and recommend books that fall in line with conservative standards.  Everyone is free to comment but please be respectful!  If this blog is supposed to be 'rated PG-13' then please keep the comments that way also.