Sunday Soup - July 6

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

Soup Dish:  this week I'm dishing about Seattle bookstores...

✽So my big book news of the week was the Diana Gabaldon signing that happened in Seattle.  Over 600 people attended. She was an absolutely delightful speaker, and the Forest Park Third Place Books did a wonderful job accommodating a HUGE number of fans on an unseasonably hot day. If you have a chance to hear her speak I highly recommend it-- but only if you like hearing slightly off-color stories about Scotsmen in (and out) of kilts. I am so looking forward to the Starz production of Outlander this August, and getting a chance at a fan-girl moment was a great way to increase the anticipation:

✽On a side note, Third Place Books has an extensive Romance collection, easily rivaling the local Barnes & Noble stores and my late lamented Redmond Borders {moment of silence, please}.  If you've been reading along at Alpha Heroes since the very beginning, you may remember this very early rant about indie bookstores and romance, specifically Elliott Bay Books, the best-known Seattle indie.

I had this brief interaction on Twitter recently, and decided to give EBB another chance:

Promising, right?

So yesterday, the kids and I made an outing of it, and hit Elliott Bay Books along with other nearby destinations: Molly Moon ice cream, Everyday Music, and the Ghost Gallery.  My kids found plenty of books to tempt them in the huge children and young adult sections, but the romance section was a bit less prominent.  Here's what the Fiction section looks like:

 

Nice space, isn't it? It's beautiful, really, a lovely place for a bibliophile to hang out in.  I compressed the photo (and it was already a little hazy, the lighting was tricky), but if you have a very sharp eye you might see placards directing you to Fiction, Science Fiction, and Mystery, but where's the romance?

Oh. Here it is.

Oh, not that WHOLE case, silly.  Just the bottom three shelves. The two shelves above it are erotic romance.  There are two more shelves above THAT for, I believe, fiction overrun/overstocks. No placard.  At a generous guess, I'd say half the titles were classic romances from the 90s. Crusie, Garfield, Devereaux, McNaught.  Good picks, but not exactly current. The other half were recent releases, across a fair spectrum of historical and contemporary. So, um, "growing." OK. It's bigger than it was in 2008, when it was ZERO. So... sure.  That's growth.  However, I'd say there's a long way to go before Elliott Bay Books convinces me that it wants my business.  In the meantime, I'll be at Barnes & Noble.  Or Amazon. Or Third Place Books.

What I'm reading

✽Downloaded and devoured The Saint, by Tiffany Reisz. I really enjoyed the story, as I do most all of Reisz' work, but I will say -- a lot of the material has already been told from other points of view, I think mostly from The Mistress (don't quote me though, they're starting to blur.)  The flashbacks to Nora and Soren's early days are interspersed with a present-day lover that has a bit of a squick factor.  It mostly didn't bother me, because fiction, but I could've done without it. It feels like Nora cannot relate to anyone unless she's banging them, and that's starting to feel kind of icky. Not to be overly critical though -- there was plenty to like. I particularly liked Nora and Soren's discussions of sex and theology. I think Reisz managed to show the electric connection between the 15-year-old Eleanor and the 29-year-old priest without making it ugly, and that is not easy. Reisz does witty, innuendo-laden banter very well, and I loved how that worked with the cold, serious, uber-self-controlled Soren.

✽I finished The Windflower, and I'm hoping to post some thoughts on it later this week.

✽The Bastard, by Inez Kelley. I picked this up after a random tweet from Mandi, and liked it quite a bit. It's the first in a paranormal series about angels and their fight with Satan himself for supremacy.  The world-building is quite complex, and involves super-good-guys from the historical rolls, but also -- unexpectedly -- some super-bad guys too, who are fighting for personal redemption as well as all of humankind. The theory is that when you've got to fight some ultimate evil, it couldn't hurt to have some warriors who aren't above getting down and dirty.  I will say that my eyebrows went up a little bit on learning who these "heroes" were, and I felt like their human sins were sort of waved away with a bit of "hey, that was then, and I'm really sorry," and also, "oh, you know how history exaggerates," but I'm willing to wait and see how their individual stories go.

✽Heavy Metal Heart, by Nico Rosso. This was another author I wanted to stalk, er, I mean, familiarize myself with before RT.  While I won't say this novella blew me away completely, I did like the world setup and the author's description of the actual magic that is created by the characters' music was incredible. Book 2 came out in March, and I might just pick it up. Maybe I'm just a sucker for a satyr rock star.

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

✽Watch the latest trailer (for Australian TV) here: Den of Geek

✽And a bit of a behind the scenes video at Cinema Blend

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That's it for this week -- hope you had a spectacular 4th, if you go in for that sort of thing, and that one way or another, your July is off to a good start.

Sunday Soup - June 29

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..
Changing the focus of this a little - other book people out there do a much better job than I do of reporting the kerfuffles, so this will just be my little editorial corner. Links that caught my eye, and what I think about them, stuff like that... 

✽The Convoluted Calculus of Rating Books My initial reaction to this article was to go all kitty-butt-faced on this and think HOW VERY WRONG it would be to rate books in such ways. It then occurred to me that perhaps this was a tongue-in-cheek article and meant to be funny.  Or possibly both -- ie, the author perhaps does give a book 5 stars if:

“My friend loves this book and if she happens to see my rating, I want her to think I loved it, too, even though maybe under normal circumstances I would’ve given it three stars. Because she cares what I think, obviously, and it super matters that we have exactly the same feelings about everything all the time.”

... and thinks it's a really funny truth about book blogging.  I see comments that are laughing and agreeing. I don't know, maybe I'm having an Asperger moment, but I don't see the humor in it at all.  Of course, it's one of the reasons I don't rate books; I find myself unable to be that objective or consistent.  But I've been thinking about a system that would be something like this:

5- Strong recommend to any fan of the genre, auto-buy author
4- Loved it, will seek out this author again
3- OK, might read this author again but would not go out of my way.
2- Would actively avoid this author.
1- DNF, would recommend everyone avoid this author. (it would be pretty rare for me to say this about a book, but it seems like maybe a useful boundary.)

I feel like this is a scale I could use pretty consistently. I dunno.  I'm in the "musing" phase.

✽I absolutely loved this article about the social and evolutionary value of storytelling.  The neuroscience in there is fascinating, too:  "a story is the only way to activate parts in the brain so that a listener turns the story into their own idea and experience."

✽This came out a couple of weeks ago, but I'm behind, and it's the first time in a long time that an article about romance novels has given me an itch to read up on ancient Greek philosophy: Argue for Your Wonk -- so it needs to be included here.  Will I read Aristotle this summer? I just might!

✽A new to me blog with a nice rundown of some favorite UF series -- everything that's on here that I've tried, I've really liked, so I'm going to have to check out the rest of them, obviously.

What I'm reading
✽The Windflower, by Laura London. You may recall that I went to a certain effort to snag this paperback at RT. I'm three-quarters or more through it as of now, and enjoying it very much. There's nothing at all subtle about this writing; it's just drenched in sexual imagery and tension from page one.  There is a level of descriptive detail in this book that I haven't seen in ages, and I am really loving it. It does make for a slower read, but it adds to my ability to imagine myself inside the story.  Another thing that I love about "old skool" romance-- and this book in particular does it really well-- is the development of complex secondary characters.

✽Having Her, by Jackie Ashenden. I really enjoyed this quirky couple, particularly the heroine. While I'm not a fan of the "desperate to lose my V-card" trope, that was probably the only negative for me. There's a BDSM element in the story, and refreshingly, it doesn't overwhelm the characters or the relationship they build -- it's well-done but it's not the focus.  Kara is a comic book artist, with candy-colored hair, facial piercings, and combat boots, while Vin is overbearing and overburdened. In a tiny way that I didn't care to think about too hard, Kara reminded me a little of my teenaged daughter and her interests and choices of self-expression, and I thought it was nice to see that population represented in romance.

✽Elemental Pleasure, by Lila Dubois. I think this one came on the thumb drive from RT14. It is very hard to keep all of those straight! An interesting fusion of menage and Illuminati-style conspiracy theory, the premise is that a very powerful secret society dictates three-way marriages among its members, using its influence and power to convince really smart and high-potential young individuals to join up.  It's not totally convincing, but I liked the characters and I'd give another book in the series a whirl for the fun of it.

✽Own the Wind, by Kristen Ashley. With Jessica's recent review in the back of my mind, as well as some recs from my book-club ladies, I grabbed this up from my RT14 stack (mass market format). In spite of their current popularity, I think this is the first "MC" (motorcycle club) romance I've read, too.  I liked it OK, and I didn't mind the level of detail that Jessica mentions. The oddest thing that struck me was the structure of the story - brief vignettes from the hero's point of view over the course of several years, until their adult interactions really start, and then most of it from the heroine's point of view, still with jumps in time of weeks and months. Overall, I don't mind Ashley's style, but I don't think I'm up for any more of her MC books. I don't really like the way women are portrayed in this "lifestyle."

That seems to be about it for this week... (let's just assume there are a tidy conclusionary couple of sentences here.  I don't seem to be able to come up with anything right at the moment.)