Sunday Soup - February 22

Sunday Soup is... a little of this, a little of that, not too much work, and hopefully a tasty result.

Soup Dish:  book people are talking about...
✽I'm getting all revved about RT14! I confess, I've been stalking the hashtag a bit.  Are you a Karina Cooper fan? I thought I had reviewed her ... but I guess that's another one that never made it out of the "thinking about" stage and onto the actual blog.  Anyway, if you're going to RT, check out the plan Ms. Cooper is hatching, if for no other reason than that she always has the most FABULOUS boots.  And either way, if you haven't sampled her St. Croix series, you really should. Creepy and dark; it really brings the horror element.

✽A friend posted this article about women's voices and it's kind of amazing.  [Ironically] I can't really articulate my response to it, but it has me thinking thinking thinking.

✽Adventures in Reading! I had lunch at Panera the other day, with my book of course, and I kept sort of eavesdropping on these two women sitting near me.  I can hardly be blamed though, because they kept dropping tantalizing words like "genre" and "literary" and "urban fantasy" and I couldn't quite catch what they were actually talking about, but it was clearly a business conversation.  Finally I couldn't stand it any more and butted in. We talked books and genre and social media for at least half an hour before I had to run and tend to the rest of my real life schedule. In the process, I learned about Curiosity Quills, a very cool new(ish) publishing house. It's always a great day when I can nerd out with someone new!


What I'm reading
✽I finished the Alexa Egan title I mentioned last week.  I think I liked the second one a little bit better, but it's definitely a series I'll stick with.

✽Blazed through Thea Harrison's Lord's Fall.  I know, I'm way behind.  I've already started Kinked.  I love this stuff.  I'm probably due for a contemporary pretty soon though; I'm thinking probably something from Victoria Dahl.

Outlander Watch... Och. I canna wait for Jamie and Claire onscreen.

✽Interview with Ron Moore; nice chunk of discussion about adapting the book to film.

One of the very first notes that [Starz CEO] Chris Albrecht told me was to trust the book. He said, "We love the book. Make the show for the fans of the book and believe that anyone who doesn't know this material, when they see it, they'll be swept into the story like everyone else is.

What a great thing to hear!

✽Ron Moore and Sam Heughan in kilts.  Although I searched diligently, out of the generosity of my heart for you, my readers, all for you... the photographic evidence is sadly minimal AND owned by Getty Images, so you'll need to click through for a look.

Sunday Soup - February 16

Sunday Soup is... a little of this, a little of that, not too much work, and hopefully a tasty result.

Soup Dish:  book people are talking about...
✽Although I don't really consider myself a writer, I have squeezed myself into a corner of the world of writing and publishing, and have read a lot of essays by writers, about writing. None have moved me quite as much as this from Kelly Gregory.

✽Given that my specific corner of this writing and publishing world is particularly focused on women's fiction, it shouldn't be surprising that I find myself following conversations about women's issues, about women in media, and diversity in general. It's too bad that a project like this is needed, but on the other hand, really great that it exists: 44 Stock Photos That Hope To Change The Way We Look At Women.

✽Arranging Your Books by Color Is Not a Moral Failure: an article that caught my eye and took me on a fun little link-hop through half a dozen articles on the topic proper, as well as a side trip about what the physical aspects of a book bring to the literary experience. The implications of this question and the range of answers of course, is undergoing a massive change with the advent of ebooks, but I was not really aware of the debates that have gone before - the Slate article, What Will Become of the Paper Book was a fascinating glimpse into that topic.  I'm a bad bibliophile because I never knew any of that before.

In the Observer article The Taming of the Hue: Ailing Hardcovers Find a Fashion-Fun Niche, one designer says:

“I have too much respect for books,” said interior designer and author of Fifth Avenue Style Howard Slatkin. “There is nothing that gives a house more warmth and personality. But when people take books and arrange them by color or stack them and put objects on top and treat them as mere decoration, I find it offensive.”

I can't say I find it actually offensive... but I might judge you a bit. I might assume that your books are a pretense and you might actually have no idea what their titles or contents are. And I might be wrong! but that is the impression that I might get, particularly if I didn't know you much before I was introduced to your rainbow bookshelf. I just think it reduces a book to its-- very, extremely-- most superficial aspect.

The Paris Book Review is a fun read on books as decor in upscale mens' clothing stores.

Apartment Therapy raises one good point:

For the visual thinkers out there, organizing their books by color might just be the easiest way to find what they're looking for. You might not remember who wrote that great novel you read last summer, but the bright blue cover could easily stick in your mind.

But then reveals the true motivation:

Admit it: it looks good.  The whole point of this look is to make a visual impact with your books; to make art out of everyday items.

which I have to admit, I judge. I don't think it constitutes good art to reduce a literary work to the color of its jacket.

Now this notion, When Books Become Art Objects, is a whole different idea.  To have the physicality of the book enhance the theme or emotion of the book... that I can get behind. I don't see this as the same thing at all though -- it's the very opposite of going to Half Price Books and buying classics by the yard.

At any rate, thanks to  Mary Beth Williams for sending me down this little jaunt via her twitter feed.

What I'm reading
✽In the middle of Alexa Egan's Demon Curse. This is the first book of the Imnada series.  I managed to read the second one first but either way, I'm enjoying the series.  Really creative and dark mythology.

✽I finished Lexi Blake's "The Dom Who Loved Me" -- her offering in a 6-book set that I picked up a little while ago. I did get all the way through it but I can't recommend it. I find her narrative choppy and "telling" rather than "showing."

✽Sped through Kit Rocha's novella Beyond Temptation. I love this world. There were a few places where I really wanted a bit more characterization for Noah, but it is the nature of a wonderful novella to wish there was more of it. I'm a fan, what can I say.

Outlander Watch... Och. I canna wait for Jamie and Claire onscreen.
✽A delightful analysis from USA Today's Heroes and Heartbreakers column on why exactly, Outlander is so compelling.

✽The photo of the week was posted by Starz as a Valentine's gift to fans. THANK YOU STARZ.

Sunday Soup - February 9

Sunday Soup is... a little of this, a little of that, not too much work, and hopefully a tasty result.

I haven't been keeping up too much lately.  Have I missed all the kerfuffles?

Soup Dish:  book people are talking about...
✽18 Bookstores Every Book Lover Must Visit At Least Once - spotted via Anne Rice's Twitter feed. Although I'm pretty unlikely to make it to the more exotic locales, I have been to the Strand and Powell's. I'd happily work a vacation itinerary around some of these bookstores. Have you visited any on the list?


Gone Missing: my suspenders of disbelief

Image credit: By Sara-Paceni via Wikimedia Commons

I've struggled through two historicals recently that I just couldn't really get into. I DNF'd Sarah MacLean's One Good Earl because I just could not believe the Regency heroine who thought she needed to have sex with someone in order to take her oath of matrimony (so she would understand what she's swearing, you see).  And Jennifer Haymore's Confessions of an Improper Bride had an identical twin swap that just seemed to me could never possibly succeed anyway.  I also had trouble with the hero's redemption - the couple was caught in flagrante delicto at a ball, no less, and he later cut her dead and pretended not to know who she was.  It's odd that I've seen rapist heroes redeemed but that one seemed impossible to me.  I got all the way through that one, but the premise made me grumpy.

I like both of these authors a lot and I'm not giving up on them.  I suspect that my issues are more a function of the February blahs than of the books themselves.

✽Based on Pamela's rec and some other buzz, I finished Cecilia Tan's first book in the Struck by Lightning trio (Slow Surrender) and while I didn't really have the disbelief problem, I didn't think it was that great. Perhaps the literary allegory is just over my head, but the characters didn't really grab me, and I dislike the cliff-hanger ending.

✽I'm doing better with paranormals.  I blazed through Chloe Neill's latest Chicagoland Vampires novel (Wild Things) and loved it.  I haven't grabbed the novella that came out last month, but it's on my list.

✽I was in the mood for a contemp and kind of stuck without wireless/download access, so instead of a new Victoria Dahl that I wanted, I started up a Lexi Blake title yesterday (The Dom Who Loved Me). I'm having a few issues with it but so far I'm still reading.

Based on this rundown here, perhaps I should stick to paranormals for a bit.  It's not like I don't have a stack of those waiting for me too!

Outlander Watch... Och. I canna wait for Jamie and Claire onscreen.

Those EYES:

Sunday Soup - January 26

Sunday Soup is... a little of this, a little of that, not too much work, and hopefully a tasty result.

Soup Dish:  book people are talking about...
✽The most interesting articles I saw this week were again on the topic of niceness in reviews.  I think about this a lot. In What Do We Even Want From Book Reviews Anymore?  Jason Diamond makes a compelling argument against "niceness:"

Amid all the discussion about what critics should or shouldn’t do, it’s rare to hear any substantive debate over what criticism actually is — and, specifically, what function it currently serves for readers. There are plenty of talented book critics whose work we should be talking about, many of whose jobs are in constant peril, yet we seem more interested in arguing about what tone or approach the profession as a whole should take than these writers’ specific reviews and the books considered within them. This is what’s so troubling about the level of abstractness with which we approach book criticism these days. Not only is it weakening the already shaky position of the book review, but it’s making us forget why the form is so important in the first place.

And I think he has some good points. I would far rather hear about a specific post that made well- or poorly- supported comments about a book, than generalized complaining about "online tone."  He references this Slate article, which strikes me as a bit more whiny about the good old days, but makes the point:

Reviewers shouldn't be recommendation machines, yet we have settled for that role, in part because the solicitous communalism of Twitter encourages it. Our virtue over the algorithms of Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and the amateurism (some of it quite good and useful) of sites like GoodReads, is that we are professionals with shaded, informed opinions. We are paid to be skeptical, even pugilistic, so that our enthusiasms count for more when they’re well earned.

Which I agree with, but I am mostly happy to cede that responsibility to professional critics and stay mainly in the role of recommending stuff I love. Tackling hard questions and fixing problems is something I do in my professional life, but I am not obligated to take that on for a hobby I love.  I will say that I would be sorry to see the role of a professional critic go the way of the buggy whip. It's a brave new world in publishing and it's disrupting so many elements-- I hope the professional critic makes it through to the other side.

✽This review of Why I Read, by Wendy Lesser, is reviewing a book which is about how to read books, so it's a bit recursive in nature. I found the quotes from the book intriguing and enticing and they made me want to read it.  The swooning editorialization about the book was everything that Jason Diamond and Jacob Silverman bemoan, including the supercilious quote:

Lesser has nothing to say about social media, because for the true bibliophile there’s nothing to say about social media.

Pretty much all the quotes made me want to read the book, and all the original material in the article made me want to slap the writer of the article.

✽Loved this post from Kaetrin on the default characters in our heads, and what it takes for an author to put their own character there.

✽I saw a tweet linking to this article, filled with righteous outrage, and followed it to the source.  To be honest I don't really understand all the outrage. C S Lakin (a pseudonym) discusses how she analyzed the construction and marketing of a niche genre e-book.  And seems to have met with pretty good success.  I didn't see condescension or lack of respect-- but maybe it's distressing to hear about an author who can succeed at writing a genre that she herself doesn't love?  Interestingly (to me, anyway), Lakin doesn't seem to understand that the key to her success is more about how she managed the keywords and the Amazon positioning than how she wrote the book.  I read a page or two from the preview and wasn't particularly impressed (it sounded a lot like my own attempt to write an historical romance, and you'll just have to take my word for it that that is NOT a compliment). Seems to me that there is good stuff to learn there, and if you don't like the "attitude" of the writer, then you don't have to take on the attitude to see what she's done to succeed in marketing.  I think it might be interesting to read the book, and then read the Catherine Anderson title that she says she used to analyze the structure... but I'm not sure I can be bothered; it's two genres I don't love (sweet and western) in one package. 

What I'm reading

✽Blazed through Kresley Cole's MacRieve this week. I thought the plot twists were a little bit pat, but the characters made up for it, for me. I wouldn't say it's my favorite title in the series, but a solid addition.

✽See, writing stuff down sometimes helps. I was browsing my stash for something to read, and after my Thursday Thirteen on historicals, I grabbed up a Jennifer Haymore title, Twice Tempted, to nibble on.  First in a series! Identical twin, lost at sea! But, no body found, so we know what that means, right soap opera fans? Am I right? Pretty sure I'm right.

✽And then sometimes I'm just in the mood for something a little grittier, so I'm also reading Beyond Pain, by Kit Rocha. Hot damn, I love this series.


Outlander Watch... Och. I canna wait for Jamie and Claire onscreen.

✽Nice article with the latest gossip and the second version of the official series trailer, with a bit more of Jamie and Claire together.

Jamie pic of the week:

Sunday Soup - January 19

Sunday Soup is... a little of this, a little of that, not too much work, and hopefully a tasty result.
I know many of you have been dealing with extreme weather, so I almost feel bad mentioning this, but last Saturday, we lost power for pretty much the entire day.  I must be getting old, because dealing with that pretty much exhausted me for getting anything normal done on Sunday.  So once again, we're looking at a two-week soup.

In other personal news, I've been cramming for a professional certification exam, so some of my usual Twitter, blog-browsing, and reading time has been occupied with flash cards and practice quizzes.  What have I missed?

Soup Dish:  book people are talking about...
✽My favorite thing from recent happenings:  Smart Bitch Sarah acquires Romance Novel Barbie and Ken. An epic photojournal you just cannot miss.

✽#Hashtags in your #blogpost titles? Never even occurred to me.  Some pros and cons by super-star blogger Parajunkee

✽I thought this was an interesting article about how significant your marketing/packaging choices can affect your sales.  Yay math!

Over at Wonkomance, Ruthie Knox talks about what is "okay" in romance and what isn't:

It is the readers, we are told, who don’t want small penises or capacious vaginas or expired condoms or crying heroes or functional humans who have been sexually assaulted and are not healed by magical sex. But I am a reader, too, and I want all of these things. I want everything. I want, as a baseline, fiction that is about humans.

I'm a little bit divided in my thoughts about this. Yes, I think there is room for less soft-focus in romance. But I do think there is a fantasy element, and I'm not sure I want the pore-magnifying realism of an HDTV close-up, either.

✽I find the discussion around copyright rules and how they benefit authors and the public, and how they are evolving to be fascinating. This latest development though, seems pretty clearly a play by Disney. I'm not sure how I feel about copyrights expiring when they are clearly still in heavy use... then again, this mainly benefits corporations, which I don't think does very much to inspire creativity.

✽Phyl is one of my original and most loyal readers -- so I'm super happy to see her popping up in my feed again lately, talking about reading challenges.

What I'm reading
I've been awfully "meh" about my recent reading... which means it really might be me. So, grain of salt, and all that. 
✽I recently finished up Sandra Antonelli's A Basic Renovation, a full length contemporary featuring a forty-something professional house-flipping heroine.  To be honest, I wanted to like this more. I liked the heroine, but the hero's character was kind of muddled and there were times when I really just didn't want them to be together.  I should do a review.  I have Some Things to Say.

✽I still haven't finished Sarah MacLean's One Good Earl Deserves a Lover. I'm just finding the heroine too, well, ridiculous, and it doesn't seem to be getting better.

✽I also read The Dom Project, after seeing some interesting buzz on Twitter and my RSS feed. And it was OK, but fell a little short of expectations. The thing I think is most interesting is that despite a focus on BDSM in the premise, it felt more like a romance and less like an erotic romance to me. The heat level was high, but not too high for a contemporary romance, IMO. Although the premise was locked into exploring BDSM, the real conflict to the relationship was pure-vanilla emotional stuff. There is a lot to like about this book, but the characters just fell a little flat, especially the heroine.

✽On the upside, I just started MacRieve by Kresley Cole and I'm gobbling that one up.  Fabulous stuff.

Outlander Watch... Och.
I am surely not the most dedicated Outlander fan out there; I only read any of the books once and I cannot recite quotes or even sigh much over specific favorite scenes.  The original book though was an extraordinary reading experience as a whole, and I am really enjoying the buzz around the Starz production, due to begin airing this summer.  So I thought I'd use this space to throw a few tidbits in, since the beer-tasting has gotten a bit-- well, I don't want to say stale, because that's sort of a bad pun, but it's more or less accurate.

✽An Interview with Diana Gabaldon: "They Want to Lick Him."

✽And if you didn't want to lick him before, you might, after watching this-- bearing in mind that "Sassenach" is Jamie's pet name for Claire...


Mmmm, those eyes.  Time for a re-read, I think.

Thursday Thirteen - Edition 31: Catching up on History

Been awhile since I've done a T-13! So let's kick of 2014 with a good one.

Sometimes, the allure of the new and shiny distracts me from the tried and true.  For this and other reasons, I've gotten a bit disconnected from some of my old favorite authors. So here are 13 historical romance authors whose backlists I keep meaning to check out.  In no particular order:

1. Mary Balogh
2. Mary Jo Putney
3. Madeline Hunter
4. Anne Gracie
5. Sherry Thomas
6. Courtney Milan
7. Katherine Ashe
8. Cathy Maxwell
9. Sabrina Jeffries
10. Sophia Nash
11. Julie Ann Long
12. Jennifer Haymore
13. Lecia Cornwell


This post is as much for me as for my readers! Hopefully I can check in later in the year and see how I've done...

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Find more Thirteeners at Thursday-13. Participants are welcome and encouraged to leave links in comments.

The Obligatory 2013 Round Up Post

Photo Credit: Colm Britton via Flickr Creative Commons

Happy New Year!
I hope everyone had a happy and safe celebration last night, and that if you are having a quiet day today, you have a great book to curl up with.

My post today offers some highlights of my 2013 reading. I never claim to offer "best of" advice, because there are so many wonderful books that I haven't gotten to yet.  But I can offer some personal highlights and suggestions.

Favorite Series Continue...
Kim Harrison's Ever After came out in late January and appears to have been my first new-book kindle purchase of 2013. After a couple of books that seemed a little slow in the series, I think it has taken a turn for the AMAZING. I really liked Ever After and need to go pre-order Undead Pool, out late next month.

I totally dig Coreene Callahan's Fury series about dragon shifters. Fury of Seduction was a late 2012 release that I read in 2013, and Fury of Desire came out in October of 2013.  Good stuff.

Chloe Neill's House Rules and Biting Bad.  Unff. Love this series. Wild Things is due out in a few short weeks, and there is a novella coming out on January 7 if you need an appetizer.

JR Ward's highly anticipated Lover at Last. I did enjoy this installment, as much for the setup of the Band of Brothers arcs as the possibly somewhat overhyped, possibly somewhat anti-climatic  m/m romance. Although, I might need to go re-read Qhuinn's induction scene.

Meljean Brook's Guardian Demon. I am a little embarrassed to admit that I haven't read this yet. In a backward sort of way, this is a compliment - it's one of those books that I want to really savor, so I've been waiting for a perfect moment, a quiet weekend. Perhaps it says something about my 2013 that I'm still waiting for that. I do love this series and looking forward so much to this book that I haven't wanted it to end... I know, I'm weird.

Magic Rises by Ilona Andrews - the latest in the Kate Daniels saga. Very nice addition. I liked the change of venue and the introduction of a charming, attractive, charismatic, profoundly evil villain.

Nalini Singh's Heart of Obsidian. I loved this story. Loved it. Definitely one of my top reads of 2013. Possibly THE top read. Fantastic.

Historicals
Crooked Hearts, by Patricia Gaffney. This was a digital re-release of an older title. I found it really adorable - set in the west, about two con artists.  I have a weakness for con artists (and jewel thieves), it seems.  Go figure.

The Kadin, by Bertrice Small. I still want to do a harem/sheik feature. I'm having trouble with the Nike part of blogging: Just Do It. I'm so glad I re-read this book, though. I read it when it first came out and loved it then, and I think it truly holds up. It's more of a biography or a "saga" than a romance by stricter standards though; there is no single focal relationship and it's not exactly an HEA.  It's really, really good though.

I feel like I've been reading a lot of Regency historicals but they aren't really standing out to me, with the exception of Anna Cowan's Untamed. Another top read of the year, for sure.

Contemporaries
This isn't a category I read heavily in this year, but I did keep up with a few favorites -- Victoria Dahl, Kristan Higgins, Jill Shalvis, Nora Roberts (Boonsboro Inn series), and Lisa Kleypas. Not a letdown in the bunch.

New Stars
Alexa Egan - I received both of the books in her Imnada series of cursed Regency werewolves with Napoleonic PTSD from a publicist (and managed to read the second one first).  I think it's a series to watch, with great characters and tremendous worldbuilding; Egan combines familiar tropes with dark and surprising twists. I really enjoyed them.

Laura Kaye - Kaye seems to have burst onto the scene in late 2011. She now has no less than 12 titles published in less than three years, with at least three different publishers, including Avon and Entangled. I read the first in her Avon series, Hard As It Gets, and while it was not without flaws, I think Kaye's writing and the series premise fits nicely into the hot special-ops romantic suspense subgenre and will do very well.

Anna Cowan - I'm not sure I need to say more about this new star. Much has been said at Dear Author, Radish Reviews, and many others (but those were my favorites). I liked this book a lot and my advice is: read it, don't overthink it. But that's kind of my philosophy at all times, heh.

Alexis Hall - Hall's m/m romance, Glitterland, was definitely a bit of a venture beyond my personal comfort zone.  To some extent, that fact in itself made the experience a bit of fresh air for me. I don't read a lot of m/m, but what stood out about this book was not the fact that it was a gay romance, but that it was the story of a hero struggling with a mental illness, who achieves, if not exactly a happily-ever-after, a distinct ray of hope. Which can be everything. I loved how this arc was written, though it was brutal reading at times.

Mary Ann Rivers - I've been enjoying her essays at Wonkomance like crazy. Had some mixed feelings about her big debut with novella The Story Guy, but overall looking forward to some full-length work from her.

Late to the Party
I finally glommed onto Darynda Jones' Charley Davidson series and pretty much didn't come up for air the entire time. It's the best part about being late to a party. Love it!

This year, I read Jeaniene Frost's two books in her spinoff Night Prince series, about Vlad and Leila. As I have suspected, I'm going to need to dive into that whole Cat and Bones thing, aren't I? (That was rhetorical. Yeah. I am.)

I was SO THRILLED to find a new series debut from Devon Monk. I absolutely LOVED Hell Bent. Loved it. LOVED. IT.

Similarly, Jocelyn Drake of Dark Days fame has started a new series that I'm pretty into, The Asylum Tales. It's a taut, grown-up Harry Potter-esque world of warlocks, witches, a few dozen paranormal races, and a serious imbalance of power. Loving it. I've been a little worried about the momentum for this series because Drake's home page has said this for a long time:

After placing six different stories in the hands of readers in 2012, I am looking to lay low in 2013.  But that doesn’t mean I won’t be busy this year.  Dead Man’s Deal (Asylum Tales #2) will hit the shelves on May 7, continuing Gage’s fight against the Ivory Towers.  Leading up to the release, I will also be running contests on Goodreads.  Keep an eye on my blog for regular updates on all the fun coming this spring.

After a bit of digging, I found this from mid-December:

I'm currently hard at work on the third book and my fingers are crossed that I'll be able to get it released in 2014. 

So, my fingers are crossed for that too.  And  Angel's Ink is going for $1.99 for Kindle, Kobo, and Nooks, so if you're an e-reader, there's no reason not to give this series a try!

The End
My standout reads for 2013 then are:

• Heart of Obsidian - Nalini Singh
• Unbroken - Anna Cowan
• Ever After - Kim Harrison
• Shadow's Curse - Alexa Egan
• The Kadin - Bertrice Small (not a 2013 release, sorry)
• Hell Bent - Devon Monk

With apologies to Meljean Brook for not getting to Guardian Demon yet *shameface* .

Here's to good reading in 2014!