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*my numbers were a little out of date.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! 

Sunday Soup - August 16

Sunday Soup is... Summer activities, a contemporary hit-list, and a dash of Outlander debrief.

Soup Dish:  on my mind this week...
✽Last Sunday's Soup was pre-empted by a very hot, very dusty day at the local Renaissance festival.  Although we don't go all out with costume and accessories and fake accents, as a family we make it a point to go every year, have a bottle of sarsaparilla soda, buy a trinket or two, and watch the spectacles.

✽I've also been doing a bit of handyman stuff around our house this summer-- painting rooms and installing dimmer switches and new outlets.  Stuff like that.  I'm feeling very pleased with myself, but the blog has been part of the time tradeoff there.

✽I've also been in the midst of changing some things up personally, nothing bad, but it's had me unsettled and distracted.  All of which is not to be defensive about not posting more, but just chatting about what I've been doing instead.


What I'm reading
There is a lot to catch up on, given my negligent posting, but I think the theme for this week's reading is FABULOUS CONTEMPS! Some really good stuff here:
 
✽Currently in the middle of Skinny Dipping, from Connie Brockway's backlist.  So funny. I wish she had done (or would do) more contemporaries.

✽If I Stay, by Tamara Morgan. I got this one from Carina Press at RT.  I think I saw a mention of the author on Twitter, and that was enough to tip me into trying out the title, and I'm really glad I did.  I'm always interested in finding new contemporary authors, and I really loved this one.  The style reminds me a little bit of Kristan Higgins, without the dogs.  I'll absolutely be reading more from Morgan.

✽When I heard Victoria Dahl's latest Jackson Hole title, Looking for Trouble, was out, I hit it like it owed me money (or something like that.)  Dahl's contemporaries are getting hotter and hotter and this one scorches.  I love how she takes a near-fantasy encounter for both of them and pushes it into a Happily Ever After.

✽I picked up Beauty from Pain by Georgia Cates, based entirely on the title (make of that what you will).  Well, that and the freebie pricing, I suppose.  It turned out to be not quite what I expected.  Overall I didn't love it, but it had some good moments.  It had a cliff-hanger ending which annoyed me, a la 50SoG, and I probably won't pick up the follow-up.

In non-contemp reading...

✽The Sekhmet Bed, by L.M. Ironside. I picked this up because a friend of mine knows the author, and told me, "she writes your kind of books."  I was sort of expecting a romance, which this wasn't, exactly, but I did like it quite a lot.  There are three more books in the series, but this one chronicles the marriage and rise to power of a particular Pharoah's wife.  I am not at all an expert on Egyptology, but the author writes convincingly of everyday life in 1500 BC Egypt. 

✽ Beyond Addiction. Kit Rocha delivers again.  I can't say enough good things about this series.  If I gave ratings, I'd give the whole series six out of five stars.

Outlander Watch... Och. Jamie and Claire onscreen-- it's here, it's here!!
Would you laugh at me if I told you that part of my home-improvement spate this summer is about getting the TV room into a condition that I can stand, so that I could watch this show?  Well, go ahead and laugh. ;-)

I've fixed up the lighting, cleaned up a mess of accumulated junk, done a long-overdue update/swap of our cable boxes, added a console table behind the sofa (because the configuration of the room doesn't really allow for a coffee table, and bought a rug. We have a wire storage shelf in the room with a collection of things with no better home, and I very cleverly attached a pretty shower curtain all around the edges with S-hooks.  It sort of looks like we have a shower stall in the corner of the room now, but at least the junk is hidden.  Also I stole the matching ottoman back out of my husband's office. Next up, is a good scrub of the floor, adding in the rug pad (it arrived 4 days after the rug), and putting up some art on the wall.

I'm finding that I don't really need to dissect and analyze and share about watching this show.  I'm enjoying it tremendously.  I'm glad I re-read the book last month and I think the casting and the chemistry is amazing.  I don't want to dissect it and nitpick it. I don't want to argue with people who aren't enjoying it; I'm sure there are faults to be found, but DON'T CARE. I'm not interested in rational, measured discussion and really, I'm not particularly interested in OMG SQUEEEE DON'T YOU LOVE IT TOO!?

So if you've been wondering what I think of the show, now you know.  And you know where I'll be at 9:00 pm on Saturdays for the next few weeks.

Sunday Soup - April 13 Edition

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...
I'm not actually sure what people are talking about this week, but here are some links that caught my eye.

✽Stupid Lies About Vaginas, from Victoria Dahl. I do love this woman.
✽Roving Auto-Article Generator.

The press will print each PDF, which will be saddle stitched on the spot before being distributed for free.

I can't help but feel like this has to be a hoax.  I hope. The saddle-stitching detail seems like it puts it over the top.

✽Amazon is dead-freaking serious about drone deliveries. I find this kind of bemusing, and the sheer scope of the logistics on the ridiculous side, but then that's what everyone thought about building cell phone towers every 5 miles (give or take) in the 80s. So who knows?

✽The concept of peak content.  Hmmm. It is true that there seems to be a more viable business model as a content aggregator than a content producer... but what happens if everyone is aggregating and no one is producing? Could that even happen?

✽Newest blog on my radar: The Passionate Reader.  I love this blogger's voice and I'm looking forward to meeting her at RT!


What I'm reading
I've been on a great roll this week, catching up on some authors that have been on my list forever, plus finishing up this one by Victoria Dahl:

✽Too Hot to Handle. I don't know if I'm getting old or what, but I cannot for the life of me keep the titles of this mini-series straight. I finally figured out which one to read next and finished this contemporary Western.  I pretty much always likes me some Dahl, but I will say there were a few times with this heroine's awkwardness was almost off-putting, like I could almost see the author's hand cranking up the discomfort.  But since she has one of the best "I am woman, hear me roar" speeches ever, I can forgive:

"You think I'm someone sweet and nice and sunny? You look at me and you see someone who wants an apology? Someone who'll forgive you?

"That's what I hope, yes. I'm sorry, Merry. You're special. I know we don't have a permanent thing, but--

"I'm *special*?" she snarled. "Am I cute, too? And funny and kind?

"Um..." He finally seemed to recognize that his smile may have been premature. "Yes?"

Merry poked a finger into his chest, hard. "You don't know me. You don't know anything about me. You know *nothing, do you understand?"

He stepped backwards, hands raised.

"If I'm sweet, it's because I choose to be. If I'm ridiculously positive, it's because life is easier that way. A *hard* life is easier that way. I am not stupid, Shane."

She goes on to pretty much tear him a new one and give him a Black Moment to be remembered.  It is an EPIC scene.

✽Red-Headed Stepchild, by Jaye Wells. Unsurprisingly, I loved this kick-ass half-breed vampire/mage heroine. And yes, I know that "half-breed" is an offensive term with regards to real humans of mixed race parentage, but in a paranormal trope, I am using it deliberately. The "half-breed" is a classic romance device, posing a huge amount of potential conflict and character development. I actually got quite tired of it in the 80s, as every other hero of the American Western historical seemed to be either half Native American or half Mexican - "a foot in each camp, respected by the opposing societies, but belonging to neither." It was like a stock line on the blurb. But more recently, I've seen some much more nuanced treatments and I'm rather enjoying the new twists on this old theme.  Here, it's an important element to the story as Sabina is marginalized by the family that raised her because of her mixed parentage. At the end of the first book, it remains to be seen if her other heritage will treat her better.

✽A Perfect Darkness, by Jaime Rush. I first got wind of this author via the Avon Addict program, but I was reluctant to start in the middle of the series, and I never got around to tracking down the first book. Until now, and I'm very glad I did.  I found the paranormal elements here quite plausible and the suspense really kept me turning the pages. I won't say there weren't a few flaws -- the three protagonists basically take out a CIA operation which seemed a little bit unlikely, and the villain here is disappointingly one-dimensional, but the world is intriguing and I love the characters, so I'll be going back for more.

Outlander Watch... Och. I canna wait for Jamie and Claire onscreen.

✽I really want to dive into a re-read of Outlander, but I'm holding off until after RT. I'll keep you posted.


✽New eye candy, er, I mean, casting news-- Deadline.com says:

[Steven] Cree, repped by Tom Reed at Lou Coulson Associates, will play Ian Murray, Jenny’s husband and Jamie’s best friend since childhood, who lost part of his leg during battle with the English. Cree’s film credits include 300: Rise Of An Empire and The Awakening. He also will be seen opposite Angelina Jolie in Maleficent.