Sunday Soup - Happy Spring!

In The Soup This Week... Nalini Singh, Lynsay Sands, Jayne Ann Krentz -- some big hitters this week.

Soup Dish:
Hey guys, sorry about the silence there.  Shortly after my last post I came down with a cruddy cough that I'm still trying to kick. I've been doing the bare-minimum function thing to keep my job and maintain some level of civilization in my house just slightly above "feral". On the plus side, I did a bunch of reading, and a fair amount of wardrobe-planning for RT, which takes up a rather ridiculous amount of brain space for me. Related, I started this post last week and am just now finishing.
  
✽A nice write-up on the new Romance documentary, Love Between the Covers. I missed the Seattle screening a couple weeks ago because I was so sick. I'm hoping to get another chance to see it, maybe at RT.

✽Last week there was some buzz about RWA's stance with Pocket Books regarding diversity in their romance line.  RWA published an update on the issue, and Pocket responded. The interesting thing is that Pocket did not seem to respond meaningfully until RWA basically said, "Do you want to sever ties with RWA? because that could happen." I wish I had caught more of the discussion online, if anyone has good links or a Storyfy on it, I'd be interested.

✽#RT16 is less than 3 weeks away! Eeee! I have no plan this year. I have a few things picked out on the agenda but right now I'm just showing up and que sera, sera.

What I'm reading


✽Jayne Ann Krentz's Trust No One was really good. Creepy and believable, and no, I did not think that the hero was the bad guy at any point, which is implied a little bit by the blurb, I think. It's classic Krentz romantic suspense, and by now you probably know if you like her style or not. I do, and this was a great read.

✽Avon was kind enough to send me a copy of the recently-released Runaway Vampire by Lynsay Sands. I've read and enjoyed a few books from this series, but it's not one of my "must-read" series, if you know what I mean. Even so, this was a fun, satisfying vampire romance. There's a larger series arc going on, some bad guys that the hero was escaping from in the first scene, but this book is perhaps a bit of a detour on that arc. I thought the book stood alone just fine, relying on some basic, familiar vampire tropes which the reader is easily caught up on. The only thing that I thought was weird, that my my fellow Avon readers assured me is just normal for the series, is that the erotic scenes included the vampires sucking blood out of plastic bags. I don't know if this is supposed to be tongue in cheek or funny but it was written pretty straight, as though the characters were getting a sexual charge out of consuming blood from the bag, and it definitely threw me out of the erotic moment more than a little bit. Otherwise, a solid read.

✽I also got an email entitled "DROP EVERYTHING..." and I TOTALLY DID because it was an ARC for Nalini Singh's most recent Psy-Changeling book, Allegiance of Honor. I will be doing a full-length review for it closer to release date, but here's a spoiler: IT WAS AMAZING. So good. So incredibly good. Go ahead and pre-order right now, you won't be sorry.

✽Just before I came down with the coughing crud, I attended the Microsoft Women's conference, which was a pretty big deal. One of the best talks I went to was on "GenderSpeak" by Tammy Hughes. I got a copy of her book and zoomed through about 90% of it while I was hopped up on cough medicine. Much of the material was covered in her talk, perhaps more charismatically, but I'm glad to have the book on my shelf -- it has some really good insights. Hardball for Women: Winning at Business.

✽Otherwise, in reading,  I've started a few things that haven't really caught fire for me, but that could be the fact that I'm not feeling 100%.  I haven't declared anything a DNF, I just keep starting things and moving on to other things.  Meh.