Sunday Soup - Valentines' Day!

In The Soup This Week... More from old favorites, some predictions, plus SCIENCE.

Soup Dish:  on my mind
✽I thought this was a great article about the evolution of publishing following the trajectory of television -- a few networks who catered to the broadest possible audience fragmenting into hundreds or even thousands (think YouTube) of niche channels, and all that goes along with that, particularly the monetization model.  Good stuff.

✽There have been lots and lots of articles about e-reading versus "p" (physical book)-reading, but it continues to fascinate me. We all have our opinions and theories-- it's always good to get a re-set on what has been supported by science: The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens. Plus, I think that the baseline is going to change as time goes on and e-readers evolve.

✽Think you know what's going on and what's coming up for the romance world? I can't think of anyone better-positioned to opine on this than Angela James.  Love this post.

✽Since it's all over the news today in the US, and I'm sure rippling outward, I will say that as a woman, a supporter of gay rights and legalized abortion, I am very pleased that President Obama will have a chance to name the next member of the Supreme Court. I have no doubt that the political drama around the remainder of his presidency will escalate to new heights of hysteria. I will not enjoy that. This is one of the reasons I read fiction.

What I'm reading
✽Okay, okay, I broke my stash resolution. I bought two new books in the last couple weeks AND I'M NOT SORRY.  One of them is the third in Lilith Saintcrow's Dante Valentine series, The Devil's Right Hand, which is in progress and getting quite good.

✽I finally got around to reading Penny Watson's A Taste of Heaven. It's on sale right now for 99 cents, if you haven't picked it up yet, you should. This is a quick read with unexpected substance. Watson has charmed me before with evocative writing about food and dedicated foodie characters-- the bakers in her Christmas series comes to mind-- and it's unleashed fully in this book. You can almost taste the food she describes. But as always, it's the characters that do it for me.  A little quote that made me fall hard for Sophia - one of those pivotal character moments:

He took one step...

One step.

And suddenly, she wanted to win.

She wanted to beat the giant. She wanted to beat everyone.

She wanted to sneak into the game like a quiet little mouse and crush them all.

She was tired of being someone's wife. Good little wife, with the sweet little garden and charming parties and so self-sacrificing."

Yeah, Sophia! You go! and she does. I love how she holds up against the blustery, bullyish demeanor of the hero. Romance fans are well-accustomed to the arrogant, egotistical hero, which is not necessarily my favorite flavor of alpha, but I love the way the trope is executed here. I love the way the heroine sees through it, not just to puncture the hot air, but to leverage the strength underneath it while bolstering the vulnerabilities it hides. This is one of the important elements of a great romance, IMO.

✽I was in sort of a reading slump so I decided I need a sure thing. I looked at a handful of my favorite PNR/UF authors whose series I'm behind on and chose Nalini Singh's Shards of Hope. I know all the Nalini fans out there read it long ago; it's been out for a year or so, but I got stubborn about paying hardback prices for an e-book, and it finally came down to $7.99.  I have to say though, it was worth far more. I am completely stunned by how much I loved this book, and that's comparing it to other Nalini Singh work. It's pretty staggering for the 14th book in a series to deliver such a powerful story. It was so, so, good. 6 stars out of 5. It goes to 11. It's amazing.

February Stash Reads: 0
February Bought Reads: 1.5
February Non-Fiction Reads: 0.5
February Other Reads:  2

Sunday Soup - December 13

In The Soup This Week... Penny Watson, AM Arthur, and a splash of McSweeneys

Soup Dish:  on my mind
✽McSweeney's had a cool rant about Jane Austen interpretations. Hat tip to Julia Quinn's Facebook feed for source.

✽Pretty much everything I marked over the last week or two has been a list of some sort, and I think I'm going to post a list of lists later this month, so I'm saving them up. 

What I'm reading
✽I never did any kind of announcement, but I have dipped a toe into reviewing elsewhere, for RT Book Reviews. I'm reviewing under my own name, so a quick search on "Onychuk" will show you what I've been up to. To see the most current stuff, you can subscribe to RT! What this means for the blog is that some of the reading I do, I can't really talk about here. So if it it seems like my reading week is pretty thin sometimes, that might be why. This week I spent quite a bit of my reading time on a chunky fantasy romance for a March review, so the rest of the Soup is about short pieces.

✽My main read for the week was Penny Watson's Klaus Brothers series. I bought the 'boxed set' of the first three (still on sale!). I've been posting with Penny for a long time (Facebook tells me we became friends 6 years ago!), but I wasn't too sure about the appeal of a romance hero in the context of Santa, the North pole, and magic elves. It's definitely a little quirky. In Penny's world, Santa trains for the Ironman triathlons in the off-season, and has a bit of a sharp temper along with five hunky sons who function as the executive staff, running the whole toymaking and distribution enterprise. The Klaus family expectations contribute to some of the conflict, but the warm family relations add much to the feel-good nature of the series. At times I found the juxtaposition of hot romance in the context of magical children's mythology to be a little jarring: you have to suspend disbelief around the fact that a) not all children get toys for Christmas because poverty, and b) not all people celebrate Christmas -- so in that sense, it has that simplistic children's world-building; but the romances themselves were really lovely. The characters and their chemistry are everything you want in a romance. Romance fans who also love movies like Elf and The Santa Clause should enjoy these tremendously.

✽Looking for some short reads, I browsed through some of the ebooks I got from RT14. The interesting thing about how this goes down is that when I look at it on my kindle list, I have a title, author, and an idea of how long it is -- that's it.  This title, "No Such Thing" said, "probably contemporary," or more accurately, "probably not paranormal," but that's kind of it. I did not recognize the author, A.M. Arthur.  I mean, it's not like I couldn't look these things up, but you know, that would've required moving from the couch.  So I opened this one up and read a few pages, then a few more, and soon I was very much drawn in.  It's an NA/mm romance, between Alessandro, a former foster kid with a bit of an undeserved delinquent reputation, and Jaime, a very sheltered guy who spent his teens surviving a near-fatal heart condition. It's not exactly a coming-out story, but there is some conflict around small-town homophobia and bashing (heartbreaking and still so f*cking common). I don't read much m/m, so I don't have a much in the way of a reference point, but I found these characters engaging and sweet and with personalities vivid enough to leap off the page. Thumbs up from me.

Sunday Soup - March 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...
At my house, March madness doesn't have anything to do with basketball:  it's all about the Girl Scout Cookies. Starting in late February, my house becomes the Cookie Depot for our troop, which is quite large-- we have about 30 girls this year.  I got the last of the cookies out of my house yesterday, and now just need to square up the accounting -- also, super fun!  Anyway, it's all for a good cause.

Then there's St. Patrick's Day.  Our family is not in the least Irish, nor are we in a particularly Irish community, but this year we decided to decorate a little bit, which entailed power tools and spray paint... I'm exhausted just thinking about it.  I put up a little faux mantel on one wall and my younger daughter and I decorated it.  It's probably kind of lame that that took up as much brain-space as it did, but it is what it is.

Anyway, on to Book Things!

✽How Public Libraries Are Solving America's Reading Problem Really good article, with really good news, IMO. How the publishing revolution is offering libraries a new life. Via the twitter feed of Seattle Book News.  

✽Anonymous reviews -- Two items in the news recently; first a petition endorsed by Anne Rice to remove the ability to leave anonymous reviews at Amazon.  Her endorsement can be found on her public Facebook page. Second, a major Australian paper announced that they will be publishing their professional reviews pseudonymously. Good summary article here.

My thoughts are mixed here.  Mostly I do not attempt to keep my reviewing identity secret, because I am just paranoid enough and just tech savvy enough to know that if someone really wanted to out me, it's just not that hard to do so.  Therefore, I started from the very beginning with the decision that I would not put anything online that I am not willing to have my name attached to, for any reason.  (The one place that this really inhibits me--heh-- from posting is discussions about erotica.  I would say things anonymously that I'm not really willing to have out there in front of the world.)

Amazon's review system is troubled, for sure.  I don't pay much attention to reviews or average stars.  I go more by word of mouth and reading an excerpt for myself, but there's no doubt that those ratings and reviews influence sales, for better and for worse.  It's a shame that some people have nothing better to do than to game the system.

✽Do you use photos in your blog? then this is BIG NEWS: Free Use of Images from Getty. If you read the fine print, you may find that once again, there's no such thing as a free lunch:

once the images are embedded, Getty has much more control over the images. The new embeds are built on the same iframe code that lets you embed a tweet or a YouTube video, which means the company can use embeds to plant ads or collect user information.

To be honest, that pretty much seems worth it to me, but your mileage may vary. Via Dear Author's Twitter feed.

Author News
Interesting stuff from some of my favorites!

✽Charlotte Stein's newest release is with a new Avon line -- I'm gonna need to check out both.

✽Ilona Andrews announces new book, new series, and new publisher -- very exciting.

✽Chloe Neill also has a new series beginning.

What I'm reading

✽Apples Should Be Red, a subversive, salty little novella by Penny Watson.  This is a second-chance romance, with characters edging into senior citizen territory. I have more to say about this one, but bottom line is -- I liked it, and you should read it.

✽Clean Sweep, by Ilona Andrews.  I read a little bit of this when it was published as a serial for free, and adored the world premise. Really loved it, and the full book!  Great story, but it felt like the beginning of something that might not get finished.  I'm getting spoiled about long-running series, I guess.

✽Crazy, Stupid Sex by Maisey Yates. How can you resist a title like that?  Another winning nerd-girl heroine.

✽Fury of Desire, by Coreene Callahan.  Book 4 in the Dragonfury series, and not bad on the adventure and series arc fronts.  I found the hero's character resolution to be a little jarring and not quite on target though.

 ✽Kinked, by Thea Harrison.  Good grief, I really, really loved this one. This is the story that I wanted for J.R. Ward's Vishous.  It's the story of two extreme entities, who have waited a long time to meet their matches.  When they do, sparks fly, and nobody has to give up who they are.

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


Delightful photo via Outlander Life's Twitter feed: