Sunday Soup - August 9

In The Soup This Week... Cynthia St. Aubin, Holley Trent, Sunil Patel.

Soup Dish:  on my mind
✽Summer is flying by, but we've had a quiet week or two, recovering from two weeks of travel.  I think we're all just appreciating the comforts of home right now.  I have my hotel booked for #RUDC15 in Denver, and I think I'm going to give up the idea of carpooling and book a flight this coming week. Wheeeeee!

✽I might be the last romance blogger to comment on the NPR Top 100 romances, but it's always fun to comb through lists like these and see what I've read, where I agree, if I disagree, and of course, build my never-ending TBR even higher.  The classics were unsurprising: Gaffney's To Have and To Hold; London's The Windflower; Kinsale's Flowers from the Storm.  Lots of my personal favorites were on the list too: Outlander by Gabaldon; Lord of Scoundrels by Loretta Chase, Julia Quinn's Bridgertons, The Beast by Judith Ivory, newer faves like the Pennyroyal Green series by Julie Ann Long, AND my all-time favorite LaVyrle Spencer, Morning Glory.  And that only goes through the historicals.  So many books!  Being a listmaker, I'm feeling compelled to print it out and score myself on what I've read.

✽This was a fun article, although I take ISSUE with Rhett as an alpha-hole. That is a total oversimplification and does not take into account Scarlett's personality.

✽Apparently it's National Book Lovers Day.  Which is awesome and everything. My problem is, I can't really see how I should do anything differently from  any other day.

✽Also this is kind of cool:  StoryCorps roving reporter...

What I'm reading
✽As mentioned last week, I finished the last full-length novel in Wen Spencer's Elfhome series, but I was happy to find out that there are at least 2 more books in the pipeline, Project Elfhome and Harbinger (titles may change).  Plus there are a couple of short stories I haven't read yet.

✽In my ongoing support of the Reading Until Dawn conference, I nabbed a title by Cynthia St. Aubin called Unloveable: the Case Files of Dr. Matilda Schmidt. At just over 100 pages, it's a fast-paced farce, drawing from familiar Greek mythology characters. The humor worked for me and it was pretty sexy too, although it's a light touch and not a focus. Not a romance, but the beginning of a fun-looking series about a "paranormal psychologist." This title is currently free on Amazon, so grab it now and see for yourself. And of course, you could always come to the Reading Until Dawn conference and meet St. Aubin herself. Personally I'm hoping to see a short story sometime next year inspired by #RUDC15 shenanigans...

✽Similarly, I finished Beast, a Norseton Wolves novella by Holley Trent (another #RUDC15 author). Really enjoyed it, and I liked the setup. I found the heroine to be pretty unusual personality-wise; she's uneducated and sort of... beaten-down at the beginning, but she jumps at the chance to be essentially a mail-order bride, and leave West Virginia for remote New Mexico. She has some behaviors you'd expect from an abused woman, but enough spark to get her own story burning, and a cheer-worthy refusal to stay down. As a prologue to a series it's just right: there's definitely some unfinished business between Anton and Christina, which left the story feeling a little unresolved but makes you want to read more in the series. For 99 cents, why not give it a whirl?

✽Finally, I want to give a huge shout out to Sunil Patel.  I've been following him on Twitter for awhile and he's delightful there - funny, and humble, and has this ability to deliver a surprise skewer, and what's more endearing that that?  I read his new short story, The Merger, first over at The BookSmugglers (cannot find the link now?) but I bought it on Amazon for the deleted scenes.  It's really just an opportunity to make fun of corporate-speak which I can never, ever resist.  The intergalactic/alien components have a strong Douglas Adams influence, so BAM, sold.  Favorite quote:

"We are pleased to see that the termination of your appendix has been successful.  We do wish it the best and thank it for it's many years of service.

"The appendix doesn't do anything," said Sita, taking Paresh's hand again.

"We thank it for its many years of service," the blob repeated.

Last Word
That's all for this week!  If you haven't registered for Reading Until Dawn, I really hope you will.  It's going to be all fun and no stress.  Oh! and there's a tee-shirt!  You should order one, because it's funny, even if you're not going to the conference:

Sunday Soup - August 2

In The Soup This Week... Reading Until Dawn Con, another indie bookstore, Wen Spencer, Codi Gary and Victoria Dahl

Soup Dish:  on my mind
✽Tessa Dare starts a hashtag and Twitter hilarity ensues:  If Men's Fitness Magazine were a Regency publication.  When writers start playing with words, it's no-holds-barred.

✽Bloom County is back!  This makes me so, so happy.  Facebook seems to be the best place to catch the new stuff.

✽Somewhere back in time, I found or put together a list of the "best" (whatever that means) independent bookstores.  And while in my experience, indies are not necessarily romance-friendly, I still sort of want to bucket-list the big ones.  So when I found myself traveling between Des Moines, IA and Chicago a couple weeks ago, it was just a short side trip to stop in at Prairie Lights bookstore in Iowa City.  I'm pretty sure it was this fellow that, when I asked if they carried romance, gave me a one word answer: "NO," spun on his heel, and stalked across the store as fast as he could get away from me.  I bought a fantasy novel for my daughter and the clerk, who was trapped into an actual conversation with me by virtue of needing to process my payment, was slightly more polite:

Me: I'm surprised you don't carry any romance.
Clerk: Uhhhhh, I think that was a choice of the previous management.
Me: Considering that it outsells every other genre, it seems strange to me.
Clerk: I think mystery is actually bigger than romance.
Me: Nope, romance outsells mystery by volume almost two to one*.
Clerk: Uhhh, I'm pretty sure that I see more mysteries on the NYT best seller list.
Me: *side-eye* Well anyway, thanks for ringing this up.

Prairie Lights is an apparently very successful indie bookstore with a lit-fic niche, which fits very well with Iowa City's claim to literary fame, the U of Iowa Writer's Workshop. But they clearly don't want my money, which I guess works out ok, since I live 2000 miles from there.
__________________
*my numbers were a little out of date.  According to Publishers' Weekly, in 2014, Romance sold 30.9 million books compared to Suspense/Thriller at 20.1 million.  So only a 1.5:1 rate, rather than the 2:1 I had remembered.

✽And of course, you can see by the activity on the blog that the Reading Until Dawn Conference is occupying more and more of my brain space in general, and particularly of my reading and blogging brainspace.  You could buy a tee-shirt!

What I'm reading
✽I am currently SO engrossed in Wen Spencer's Elfhome series.  I just downloaded the last book and I'm dragging my feet a little bit about starting it because when I finish that book, the series will be all over for me.  I've even been good about taking a breath between books and reading a couple of other things here and there, just to stretch out the experience. The world-building is a crazy mix of quantum physics, bio-engineering, multi-dimensional sci-fi, and (literally) fairy tales: it's completely irresistible.

✽Just for a total contrast, I've been looking forward to Victoria Dahl's Taking the Heat since I saw a few provocative tweets from reviewers with ARCs.  It released last Tuesday, so I downloaded and gobbled that up.  Worth the wait! I love how Dahl can take down-home characters and give them so much dimension.  Snap it up if you like hot-- and I do mean SCORCHING HOT-- contemps.  (sidenote, I was SURE I wrote a review here on the blog for either Talk Me Down or Start Me Up, but what the hell, now I can't find it... arg, #bloggerwoe).
 
✽If you like Dahl's Jackson Hole books, I would suggest you give Codi Gary's Rock Canyon series a try. I picked up Bad for Me before I left on vacation, and it was a very nice read. They share a western/country feel that is a little different than the small-town subgenre. The outdoors and countryside plays a certain role, and the characters have a down-to-earth-ness about them that I like a lot. This particular title involved two characters with a lot of scars, inside and out, and Gary did a nice job of putting them through the right kind of character growth that they needed in order to be able to come together.

That's all for this week's soup -- hopefully we'll have a few more RUD Con authors for you later this week. Be sure to vote by Twitter or here in comments to see if you can influence the authors to write for your favorite flash fiction story -- #TeamBelle or #TeamCandy!