Sunday Soup - August 28

In The Soup This Week... Some Pacific Northwest book events, romance books in Nigeria, Cecilia Tan, Alisha Rai

Soup Dish:  on my mind/good links

✽Dang, you know it's been a busy-- and fleeting-- summer and here I am again saying "I can't believe it's been so long since my last Soup post!  Truth is, I got a big wave of RustCity authors taking me up on my profile offer and that kept me way busier than I expected.  The conference was a ton of fun, and I want to do a small debrief, but it's still on the list.  So far, "laundry" and "back to school prep" have rated higher and I'm still not completely happy with the status quo on those to-do items... so there we are.

--addendum: I really, really tried to get this done last night but my eyes just glazed over around 11. Soup: delayed, but better late than never.

✽Romance is subversive. I never knew that, really, until I joined conversations online with other romance readers, but I believe it to be true. This article is further proof.

✽ I caught wind of a local-ish romance event in Portland, but can't make it work with my schedule. Anyone else going? (warning, the youtube video launches when you land there).  And I gotta say, it kinda hurts to give up on the Historical Romance Retreat, because I really wanted to go, but alas, my travel days/budget are all accounted for otherwise. I hope they have it next year! Finally, I'm super-excited to see that Courtney Milan is making an appearance at the Greater Seattle RWA conference this year! I won't be at the con proper, since it is really for serious authors, but I am putting the Reader Appreciation Event into my calendar right now.  Some of the names that are making me squee are Darynda Jones, Eva Leigh, and Margaret Mallory. Eeeee!  Anyone else going?  Would love to get together!

✽Unrelated to romance/reading, but the mind-stretching exercise of the moment for me is parsing through the amazing content at the Gapminder Foundation. It's truly a breath of fresh air in gaining real understanding of global issues.

What I'm reading
So my reading volume is down quite a bit, and probably half is for RTBookReviews.com. But since it's been such a long time since I've done a Soup post, I have a backlog I can talk about.   

✽Wild Licks, Cecilia Tan. Wow. Whew. Hot. Am reduced to monosyllables.  Well, almost. Anyway, I really liked it, even though I wasn't wild about the first Tan novel I picked up a couple years ago.  I will be reading the rest of this series. Angsty rock star hero, not-as-innocent-as-she-looks society sweetheart heroine.

✽Play With Me, Alisha Rai -- this is currently free, which might be why I picked it up, but I'm also a fan of Alisha Rai even when she's not giving it away. Ahem.  Reunion fantasy between two well-matched protagonists who know what they want and aren't afraid to talk about it like grown-ups. Awesome.

✽Hell Breaks Loose, a Devil's Rock Novel, by Sophie Jordan.  This wasn't my favorite read. The premise is that the POTUS's daughter is kidnapped by a gang of criminals. Meanwhile, the hero coincidentally breaks out of prison and reunites with his skeevy brother, who, you guessed it, is part of this gang. I think if you like gritty kidnap scenarios, you'll like it fine; it's tightly written with a lot of action and good characters, but it was a bit tooooo gritty for me. So more personal taste than problematic book.

✽Cast in Hellfire, SM Reine.  I was pretty disappointed in this one, it wasn't much like Cast in Angelfire, which I thought had a lot of interesting world-building and politicking. This one was set in an alternate dimension that pretty much aligns with the western concept of Hell, with the protagonists questing for Marion's memories. It was meant to be twisty and surprising, but it seemed rambly and confusing to me, with some gratuitous gruesomeness thrown in.

2016 Book Goals
✽Stash reduction - man, this is such a fail. Maybe it's the review of Hellfire above, but for some reason my mind is going to the question of Is Hell Exothermic or Endothermic? If I were more creative, I would try to re-write it with books entering my house, but I don't think it would be nearly as entertaining.  Basically, sometime between now and 2030, expect a news report of a house in the Seattle area exploding due to jusssst... one... more... book being squeezed into a bookcase.

✽Nonfiction. Nope. Zero progress since April. I will shoot for one or two more books this year but 1 per month was clearly over-ambitious.

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That's it for this week. Happy reading!

Sunday Soup - April 24

In The Soup This Week... SM Reine, Pepper Winters, Amber Belldene, Alexa Riley, Rachel Aaron/Bach, Jeffe Kennedy.

Soup Dish:  on my mind/good links

✽The Word Whores are seeking a new blog name, plus a link to the snarkiest review that never made it to Amazon.

✽Book Riot's debrief of RT16: less sex, more Vikings?

✽Really liked this blog post on character development - it's a great framework for reviewing too.

What I'm reading
The great irony of going to the big RT Convention is that there is zero time to read. I didn't even read on the plane on the way, because it was a short flight and early! But I have finished a few books since the last time I wrote a Soup post.

✽I kept seeing Facebook ads for books by Alexa Riley, so I downloaded a freebie. I got about 2/3s through it and stopped, but when I went looking to find the correct name for the blogger I'd hung with in NOLA, I discovered that her blog was gone and she is now one half of the Alexa Riley writing team. I have to say, I didn't love this title, and several of them look even less appealing. The team has landed on a new-to-me trope: the hero is SO dominant and SO possessive that he needs to impregnate the heroine so she can never be free of him; Romlandia is calling this a "breeder" trope (ugh). Well, everyone's line between alpha and alph-hole is a little different, but that's way over for me. I read Guarding His Obsession, which only included that trope as a side note in the secondary romance. The heroine in this book is apparently on the Asberger/Autism spectrum, although this is never called out by name.  Her dialog reads a little bit like a kindergartner in the body of a 24-year-old-woman discovering sex for the first time. So while I adore Melissa K and her snark, these books are not for me.

✽Not A Mistake, by Amber Belldene. I do plan a full review, but I confess that I didn't realize the release date was in March. Short answer -- liked it a lot, really wonderful heroine, angsty hero, and church politics. Christian but not inspy.

✽Debt Inheritance, by Pepper Winters. This one is a super-dark captive/slave fantasy. I did finish it, but it's a serial and I won't be continuing. Competently written and emotional, but much too dark for me; it's a tale of a 5-century family feud that involves some incident so heinous back in the 1600s that king granted one family "the life of the firstborn female" of each generation of the other family to do with as they wish, up to and including murder -- which this heroic family has availed themselves of right up to the hero's father killing the heroine's mother. Includes a scene of non-consensual violation of the heroine by ~20 men including the hero. Not for me.

✽Cast in Angelfire, by SM Reine. This is one of those authors that I mentioned, that was at RT but I didn't realize until too late. I enjoyed this book quite a lot, as the beginning of a UF series about an extremely powerful woman who has been mysteriously stripped of her memory. The romantic interest is reclusive and powerful, but secretive and reclusive. The worldbuilding is intriguing, borrowing equally from biblical references and popular fae, were-beast and witchy mythology. Currently 99 cents, give it a shot.

2016 Book Goals
My physical-book stash keeps growing! My stash reading is not keeping up. I guess it will stop when I die or my house explodes, whichever comes first. I got some advice from Jeffe Kennedy about tracking my TBR inventory in a spreadsheet, which I might try. Because you know I love a good spreadsheet.

I am sadly behind on my non-fiction goals. I'm consistently running at about half-goal: instead of 1 per month, I've read 2 and here we are at the end of April.

That's it for this week. Happy reading!