Sunday Soup: December 2, 2018

In The Soup This Week... Oliver Willis, Chuck Wendig, Sam Sykes, Rachel Caine, JR Ward, Ilona Andrews

Soup Dish:  personal dish; on my mind; good links
It's been a while since I dished, so I'll take a few minutes to catch you up on what's going on with me...

✽ I'm in the midst of a temporary health challenge that has me off work for several months. I have lots of time for reading and reviewing, though the illness comes with some challenges to energy and focus. So far I think I can say the blog is coming out a little bit ahead on the equation. 

✽ If you've been reading here for awhile, you might recall that I've been trying to get myself to read a bit more (some? any?) non-fiction, and it's been quite the uphill road. I've figured out the solution: audiobooks. Generally I do not like listening to talk radio, or talking-head TV. I never thought I'd like audiobooks, but it turns out that a good narrator is able to bring non-fiction to life in a way that my inner reader-voice cannot. I don't really want to dilute my brand here on the blog so when I choose to review those, I'm putting them over on Goodreads.

✽ So I mentioned before, I had been reviewing for the last few years for RT Book Reviews.  With their closing,   I'm selectively choosing a few books off of Netgalley and other sources for review, but my self-discipline has never been great.  I am forcing myself to review everything I have open there before picking new ones.  So you're going to occasionally see reviews for older releases, but hey, why not.

✽I wrote this bit (slightly updated) almost a year ago and never posted, but the links are worth checking out if you haven't seen them: Twitter is evolving. There have been threadrolls and Storifications and so on before but I've never seen anything quite like what Oliver Willis has done, and it is insanely good (the whole project is available as a novella on Amazon - I recommend it, assuming your politics align). However, before Willis launched this masterpiece, we had Yo Can You Help Me Out from Sam Sykes and Chuck Wendig, which I 100% adore. I was not the only one, so there have been a few more of these epic dialogs unfold, like the Lovecraftian Hey How's It Going; a hellish goat pyramid scheme in "Yo Hey You Busy."


What I'm reading
I just can't get enough Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance lately. Having some trouble getting into historical or contemporary-- bring on the werewolves, vampires, witches and magic! 

✽Rachel Caine's Weather Warden series. I've had a number of these paperbacks around for a couple years now and I decided to get serious. I binged the first 5 books but got a little stuck on the 6th. Probably just needed a wee break. I'm enjoying them and hoping to write up a series review when I finish them.

✽Jeffe Kennedy's Dasnaria Chronicles. The third in the trilogy, Warrior of the World, is due out in early January. Look for a rave review from me as we get closer, but I've enjoyed the whole trilogy (oh hey, looks like the first in the trilogy, Prisoner of the Crown, is on sale for $0.99 -- do yourself a favor and snap it up), as well as the latest in the Uncharted Realms series, Arrows of the Heart.

✽I went back to my PNR roots and grabbed the most recent Black Dagger Brotherhood book, The Thief (when I noticed the price had come down). I liked it, but I felt a little let down with Sola's character. I liked her so much in the early parts of their arc but she didn't quite hit the high notes for me overall. The Jane and V arc worked fine for me, though I'm finding these original-brothers'-marriages-in-crises arcs to be getting a little stale/repetitive.

✽Last but definitely not least, I grabbed the latest Hidden Legacy (Ilona Andrews) book, a novella titled Diamond Fire, about Nevada's younger sister Catalina. Predictably, I loved it a lot and it inspired a re-read of the whole preceding trilogy. These are so, so good.


That's it for this week. Happy reading!

ps -- apologies for the wonky font situation. My HTML is befuckered and I have run out of patience trying to deal with it.  Sigh.

Happy New Year!

Yeah, so I haven't written a blog post since the election.  Social media has been nearly unbearable for me, and my reading has been divided between diving into my favorite escape, reading think-pieces on politics, and mindlessly playing solitaire puzzle games on my phone.

So I've been reading, a lot, but I have not been very present in the online community.  Ramping back into that always takes a bit of energy. But I'm going to try!

A few highlights - my favorites from the last couple months:

✽I have a big (for me) home project in process: I'm switching my office for my daughter's bedroom. That might not sound like much, but my office is packed full of 10 years worth of partially finished craft projects, girl scout projects, scrapbooking and quilting supplies. Both rooms needed painting, and finding space to hold all the STUFF while the swap is in progress has been painful. Bottom line is, I figured it was a good time to try audio books. I went with a YA series, thinking my daughter might like to listen along, and chose Kresley Cole's Arcana series. OMG this is good. I started it around Thanksgiving and yeah, something post-apocalyptic seemed just right. It verges on too violent for me, with some really f*cked-up torture scenes, but the story is like, steel bear-trap gripping, and I love the characters. I'm caught up in the series; the next isn't due out until next summer, and I can't get it out of my head. It's a very compelling love-triangle premise, so if you hate those, this is going to be a conundrum for you.

✽I figured that I owed it to myself to read a few sure things, so I grabbed books in Chloe Neill's Chicagoland Vampires, and Ilona Andrews' Kate Daniels series. I am not caught up there yet which makes me happy in a weird sort of way, because I can pick up another EXCELLENT book any time I want.

✽Last year about this time, I got my first taste of a Rachel Caine series, and it was awesome, so I decided to dive into the Weather Wardens. Well, I read the first book and loved it. Hmm, picking up the next book in that series might be just the thing for my first 2017 read.

✽Amid my towering stacks of book swag from RT16 and other cons, I found two Rebecca Zanetti titles, from two different series. I am on a bit of a post-apocalyptic kick right now, so I gotta say, the Scorpius series is hitting all the right notes for me. Forgotten Sins was also really good, but I have to say the hero skirted the alph-hole line pretty close for me.

✽Last for today, J. R. Ward's Blood Vow lived up to all my expectations. I'm really happy with the spinoff series.

Look at that -- all my favorites were paranormals. I do have a few contemps and historicals I could talk about, but I'll save those for another time.