Sunday Soup - September 1

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...
✽Glitterland, by Alexis Hall. I'm not a huge fan of gay romance and I don't go out of my way for it. However, the buzz around this title is kind of interesting -- it's not all over my twitter feed like Unbroken by Anna Cowan was, but I've seen three reviews pop up and they all made me sort of sit up and take notice. I have it on order (I can't believe there's no Kindle version! I have really come to rely on the instant gratification of e-books for my impulse reading). When Wonkomance, Kaetrin, and Natalie all gang up like this, I really have no choice. CORRECTION: There is in fact, a Kindle edition.  Of course there is.  I don't know why I failed to find it earlier. (Thanks Jessica!)

✽Flavorwire's 40 Trashy Books. I used to refer to romances as trashy novels, maybe 20 or 25 years ago. A member of RWA very gently set me straight, and suggested that I used the term out of embarrassment. Hey, I wasn't embarrassed! I was just being funny! Anyway, these days, that usage really makes me bristle. What makes a novel "trashy"? The fact that it's popular? Or, in the case of this list, WAS popular, and its readership is like, your mom? That there is sex in it? Bristly. However, look over the article, because there are some wonderful vintage pop culture titles there. I don't know what idiot calls Anaïs Nin "trashy," but I recommend you ignore the smug editorializing and beef up your reading list. From the Simon and Schuster Twitter feed.

✽I'm a bit late with this one. August was declared "Read a Romance Month" (aka, every month for me). I gather it is directed at reasonably open-minded readers who had never read a romance, and a temporary (?) blog was set up to host various featured guests. One of the articles that resonated for me was Lucy March's Rejecting the Premise. Very well said.

✽This lovely little essay on how your frame of mind influences your writing, and what can make you feel powerful and confident. By way of Betsy.

What I'm reading
✽Currently I'm in the middle of a new ARC from Larissa Ione. I didn't care for her demons but so far I'm liking Bound By Night well enough.

✽I finished up The King's Pleasure by Heather Graham, a re-release from Retro Reads. An old-school sprawling historical epic, with attention to historical detail around the fourteenth century Hundred Years' War between the Plantagenets and French house of Valois.  I found it a little slow-going at times but I did finish it and I did enjoy it.

✽I ended up throwing no less than four titles into my DNF category this week (and creating a DNF category on my Kindle), which I rarely do. With e-reading, it's much easier to just... stop reading and kid myself that maybe I'll come back to it. I also spent the last week getting the house cleaned for a visit from my mother-in-law, so it's possible that I'm a wee bit extra cranky this week. It's difficult to say.

On Tap... what soup isn't a little better with a slosh or two?
No time for adventure this week, what with all the housecleaning. Temperatures have hovered in the high 70s all week, which is absolutely perfect for sitting on a breezy deck with a cold anything-you-want, but kind of sweaty for heavy housecleaning when you have no A/C. So anyway, Blue Moon and Sam Adams Blackberry Wit have been on tap this week.

Sometime in the last month or so, I tried a strawberry ale which I really really wanted to like. It started off promising with a light sweet strawberry flavor riding on top of the ale, but by the time I was halfway through it had soured off and I wasn't liking it at all. Could it be that my palate is becoming so refined that it matters whether I pour it into a glass or not? That seems so unlikely. I only bought one bottle and probably won't bother trying again, but I do wonder a little if that would've made a difference.