Sunday Soup - 3/17/2019

In The Soup This Week: Katy Regnery, Alyssa Cole, Cynthia Eden, Stephen Lawhead, Jennifer Estep, Kresley Cole, Book Riot, Reedsy

Soup Dish: on my mind this week
✽ Love this article from Book Riot on why the word "clean" to describe books without explicit sex is problematic, as well as this good-natured response from Delilah Dawson:

✽Emerald City ComicCon is here again, and once again I have failed to take advantage of the lonnnng list of amazing authors who are here. Maybe next year I'll make my children the happiest of teens and set aside my introvert dread of crowds and do the thing.

✽I'm now reviewing for Reedsy, which is a new site that helps indie authors find a production team, and also offers reviews. It launched about two weeks ago, with some good publicity from Forbes, Good e-Reader, and The Digital Reader.  My first review is up, a contemporary by Katy Regnery, and can be viewed here.  I'd love to hear what you think of the site!

On the podcast: the sound of my voice
✽New Shelfbyte (5- minute review) of Kill The Queen, by Jennifer Estep (5 stars!)

✽Have you been following the #3Bloggers1Series podcasts? If not, catch up with us on Kresley Cole's YA post-apocalyptic fantasy series, The Arcana. We spoiler the heck out of these in our discussions so we recommend you read along and listen AFTER you finish the book. We have just gotten started on this series so catch up and join us!  If you like to listen real-time, we are hosting listen-along parties on Facebook for this series.  Join the Shelf Addiction Facebook Group to keep up on details.  Podcast link for Poison Princess by Kresley Cole.

Recent Reads
✽A Hope Divided, by Alyssa Cole. I loved the first in this series and I'm not sure why I waited so long to get going on this one. It's a wonderful story, but at times difficult to read. As a kid I used to enjoy stories of the Underground Railroad; the stories sounded exciting and adventurous, with heroic people along the way, helping slaves find their way to freedom. Cole reframes this narrative, elevating the "passengers" in a way I haven't seen before, and pointing out that by focusing on the "heroes," the escaping slaves are subtly dehumanized. Further dehumanized, that is. I would call this book, more so than the first, uncomfortable and important to read.

✽The Iron Lance and The Black Rood, by Stephen Lawhead.  I've read some of Lawhead's books before, in his Arthurian series.  At some point, I picked up The Iron Lance and while it's a bit of a slower read, hefty with a lot of history, I really enjoyed it. So I grabbed the second in the Celtic Crusades trilogy. The first follows a Scottish noble who chronicles the sacking of Jerusalem, which is surprisingly not something I've read about before. This book pulls no punches about how gruesome and dishonorable the event was.  The second book follows his son, who returns to the Holy Lands because he believes that he's been called to reunite the four pieces of the Holy Cross, which were split up in order to be able to motivate Christian armies in more than one direction.  If that makes sense.  Epic quests, with a touch of supernatural to them. I'll most likely pick up the third this summer. Very enjoyable.

✽Wicked and Wild, by Cynthia Eden. I believe I acquired this book as either a freebie or a 99-cent deal. I'm not sure why else I would have picked up number 7 in a series without reading any of the earlier ones, but I want to tell you all -- it works just fine. Yes, there are characters with history that make you go "oh, I should read their book too!" but not "well crap, I don't get what's happening here." Smart heroine with a great arc; I enjoyed the worldbuilding, and the plot had some good twists. I will most likely go back and start at the beginning of this series. Thumbs up from me.

Sunday Soup - September 4

In The Soup This Week... Book Riot, Kalisha Buckhanon, Kayla Bashe, Sarah MacLean, S.B. Divya, SM Stirling, Jeffe Kennedy, Domino Finn (as you can see, I'm still catching up on reporting out my summer reading!)

Soup Dish:  on my mind/good links

✽Bookish scrapbooking supplies! Woo! OK, they're for planners, I guess that's a thing? But perfect for my book-event scrapbook(s). I am eyeballing these stickers and this washi tape. Thanks to Jessica at Book Riot for the roundup.

✽Found this article on diverse-YA author Kalisha Buckhanon in my alumni magazine: "Fiction can live. The stories can live well past the moment and teach people much later in the future what life was at a certain moment in time for certain people. Nonfiction, besides some of the most powerful treatises or legal decisions that changed the states of the world, or anointed essayists like [James] Baldwin and [Joan] Didion, is ephemeral. It moves with the times, and time moves very fast. So it must be much more aggressive in its address. Fiction can relax, because we have novels like The Bluest Eye and Their Eyes Were Watching God that leap through time."

✽Given the rise of a fascist, racist, xenophobic, scapegoating presidential candidate in the US, Nazi-sympathizing children's books seem particularly insidious. Commentary on "A Year of Borrowed Men" -- and by "borrowed," the author means "forced labor from POWs." Hat tip to @KaylaBashe.

Saved and Sampled:  titles that caught my eye on social media, samples waiting on my Kindle to be, well, sampled. As you can see, I'm not doing my TBR-reduction plan any good.

Samples:
Death Becomes Her (the Kurtherian Gambit), by Michael Anderle
NEXT! The Search for My Last First Date, by Robert James
The Dark Knight's Captive Bride, by Natasha Wild
Surrendering (Regent Vampire Lords Vol 1), by K.L. Krieg

Saved/Marked for Later
Loved by the Dragon by Vivienne Savage
All for a Rose (The Blood Realm Series Book 1), by Jennifer Blackstream
Fish Out of Water, by Hailey Edwards

What I'm reading
Some from the last week or so, some from earlier this summer:

✽A Scot in the Dark, by Sara MacLean. A lovely historical with the most brave, vulnerable heroine and amazing Scottish hero. Look for a full review this week, released last Tuesday.

✽Runtime, by S. B. Divya. Great futuristic novella about an underdog in a cybernetic-enhanced race. The world-building was really fun and layered. There were some bits that didn't seem important for this story but could play into a longer series. The author says a sequel is in the works but not sold yet. Here's hoping the world gets to read it. A little YA, a little post-apocalyptic, but to my mind, basically a classic speculative sci-fi story. Diverse characters & author, if you're tracking that.

✽Prince of Outcasts, by S. M. Stirling. Another installment of a favorite series. In the ongoing re-building of civilization, the new generation of adventurers from Montival face the latest incarnation of the supernatural "Big Bad." Cliffhanger ending. Also will get the full review treatment soon; title releases this Tuesday.

✽Pages of the Mind, by Jeffe Kennedy. I read this quite a bit earlier in the summer.  I always think the Tala books are shorter than they really are; the pages just fly by while I'm immersed in the world and the characters. This story kicks off a possible spinoff series from The Mark of the Tala series (that I loved), starring a familiar character who had the feel of a sidekick for the heroines of the first trilogy. In this book, the sidekick steps up to a starring role, and it's incredibly satisfying. It's the "always the bridesmaid, never a bride" character who gets her own hero -- and wooo, what a hero. Set on an island with an active volcano, language barriers, and very blurry lines between allies and enemies, Dafne the librarian must leave her comfort zone behind the scenes. I loved it.

✽Dead Man, by Domino Finn. I saw this one on a Facebook ad, and I thought the premise was really interesting (great cover, too). I've been looking for some new UF to try, and this was pretty good.  The Latino main character, Cisco Suarez, wakes up in the midst of danger, to an unfamiliar world and an unfamiliar body. It's a bit of a spoiler to tell you that it turns out he's been an undead zombie for 10 years. The story of how he regains his life is pretty interesting. Lots of voodoo-flavored magic paired with gangland violence, set in Miami. Three book series, I need to look into getting the next one. When my TBR permits...

I have a few more in the backlog, but I'll save them for next week...


That's it for this week. Happy reading!

Monday Soup - February 22

In The Soup This Week... Lilith Saintcrow, Kris Kennedy, Book Riot, and bookcases...

Soup Dish:  on my mind -- the Soup's a little late this week, but hey, better late than never...
✽Bookcases! One of my favorite design/decor blogs is Emily Henderson's. She recently posted some tips on styling bookcases "for bookworms" and I just had to shake my head. Emily, you may know mid-century mod and you may know style, but you do not know bookworms.  Check out her post, with some very beautiful examples of styled shelves -- the bookworm example contains perhaps 25% more books than her normal styled/pretty/decorative options. It's adorable, there are at least 8 color-coordinated books on every shelf.  Go check it out.  Then come back here and I'll just leave you with this completely unstaged shot of my bookcases:

This represents perhaps 75% of my physical books. I have a full Ikea case in my bedroom, mostly double-stuffed, and a couple of other shelves here and there around the house. Now granted, I could probably do something about that top shelf. Over the years that was one of the few places I could stash something where my children could not get at it. For better or worse, those days are over... so I could tidy that up and make it prettier. Honestly though, if you look closely you'll see that the top of the shelf on the right has family photos, and almost HALF of one of the top shelves there has non-book items on it.  And also, I could have gone full height with those two on the end, but no, I got short ones and made space for Art. That is the height of my decorative restraint, my friends (literally, even).

✽Trope Anatomy 101 at The Book Smugglers - a new regular column by Carlie St. George. Her inaugural column is pretty hard on some beloved hero types. She definitely makes some good points, and I've often said that the line between alpha-hero and "alph-hole" is a little different for everyone -- hers is pretty restrictive, it seems.  It's always good to get different perspectives.

✽Brews and Books: Beer and Book Pairing Recommendations at Book Riot. Very clever and sounds delicious.  Book Riot is kind of my favorite bookish place on the net right now. For the record, I'm drinking Full Sail Amber right now  -- slightly hoppier than my norm but sufficiently balanced that I like it.

What I'm reading
Not too much, sadly...
✽I finished Lilith Saintcrow's Devil's Right Hand, the third in the Dante Valentine series. They are on sale now, all 5 books for I think $19.95? which is a good deal but I'm somehow finding resistible. I've been buying them individually because I want to kind of draw out the experience (also, I kind of hate how my kindle works with "boxed sets"). I bought the first one used for maybe a buck, so it pretty much balances out. Very happy with the series though. Liking it a lot.

✽I spotted a good deal on an anthology called, cheesily, Captured by a Celtic Warrior. SUPER-cheese! but the first story is by Kris Kennedy and I love her and I loved her short in the anthology. She has a way of drawing out those moments in her narrative, where the characters connect or an epiphany is realized... like the chime of a bell, she has a writes in these pauses, suspensions in time almost, stretching out a moment and letting it really resonate through the reader. Cannot get enough.

✽Just now I'm working on a third-party review read. And that's it!