Soup Dish:
✽Be a peach. Love this from Alison Tyler. (Warning: clicking through to Alison's site may be dangerous to your TBR pile. I almost never leave there without spotting something in the sidebar that I MUST HAVE RIGHT NOW.)
✽Who knew that romance readers would read so darn much? Um, errbody? I don't see this as disrespect for romance authors so much as a flagrant lack of due diligence on the part of those who set up Scribd's initial business model.
✽I'm a Jessica fan from way back, and I loved this article of hers.
What I'm reading
✽I've been feeling really meh about a lot of my reading lately. In desperation, last weekend I turned to a re-read, and chose one of my all time favorite books, Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey. I immersed myself in Terre D'Ange, and it was delightful. I've never re-read it before, and now I can say it holds up wonderfully.
✽A Lush Betrayal, by Selena Laurence. I'm gearing up for RUDCon, and Laurence is a featured author. I'm going to do my best to read something from each of the authors before October. I'll do a bit more of a feature on Laurence, uh, SOON, but I'll say I did enjoy this rock & roll contemp (that might be redundant, I suppose?). The titular Betrayal, and the conflicts addressed in this book are pretty dark, but I really liked the heroine and they way she came through the Black Moment.
✽I tried Bella Andre for the first time this week. There was a ton of buzz about Andre's Sullivan books a couple of years ago but I never got around to sampling them. I picked up The Way You Look Tonight, which apparently begins a Seattle spinoff to the northern California original series. I thought it was OK, but it didn't knock my socks off. A nice, sweet contemp without a ton of conflict; a little predictable but not a bad read.
✽Special Interests, by Emma Barry. It seems like this one should've been better than it was. I had a little trouble getting into it, but it had some really unique elements. Set in the nation's capital, with a jaded hero and an idealistic heroine, the politics made for a fresh backdrop, and the heroine's recent backstory about having been in a highly publicized hostage situation was also really different. I got a little frustrated with the "come closer, back off" dance that both characters were doing, but there is a really good chance that my problems with it are a me thing, rather than a this-book thing. If the premise is interesting to you, I'd love to hear what others thought. This book was included on the Smashwords thumbdrive from RT14.
✽I DNF'd another Smashwords entry, Stripping Her Defenses, by Jessie Lane at 25%. The minute the author switched into the hero's viewpoint it became a wallbanger. I couldn't stand the hero and the first person viewpoint turned into the ultimate "telling not showing."
That's it for this week. Hope you're having a lovely summer, and that nothing you love caught on fire last night.
