Sunday Soup, November 1

In The Soup This Week... Jessica Tripler, Lavinia Kent, Richelle Mead, and Jeffe Kennedy (again!).

Soup Dish:  on my mind
✽New York Publishing is starting to understand Twitter: Melville House and Penguin Random House engage in hilarious Twitter brawl. Well worth the short read if you haven't seen it. Twitter brawl! I mean, come on.

✽My favorite thing I've read about romance in a long time: Some Like It Hot, The Literary Function of Sex Scenes in Romance, by Jessica Tripler at BookRiot (that site keeps getting better and better).

We often think about emotions as psychological, but romance fiction recalls us to our lived bodily experience, and nowhere more so than in sex scenes. Emotions in romance aren’t private mental entities that one can choose to share or hide. The body doesn’t “reveal” emotions locked up in the head. Instead, emotions reside within and between bodies, forming the stickiness of our connections with each other.

Damn good stuff.

What I'm reading
✽The Talon of the Hawk, by Jeffe Kennedy. Third in the Twelve Kingdoms trilogy, and very, very good. Ursula is the most controlled and emotionally locked-down of the three heroines, under tremendous pressure from her father the High King. There are political and supernatural threats, and Ursula has to question everything she has based her life's principles on. The hero here is absolutely wonderful. Protective and strong, he loves Ursula's warrior spirit but also wants to be the person she can lean on - something she's never had and 100% does not trust. I love the way he patiently just offered... and waited until she could accept. He is the unmoveable object to her irresistible force.

✽Bound by Bliss, by Lavinia Kent. Historical erotica. I started to say "Regency," by default, but as far as I could tell, it could've been Georgian or Victorian just as easily. (This is not a criticism - I'm just trying to be accurate).  This is essentially a long, slow seduction of a story. The majority of it takes place in a brothel. I quite enjoyed it, but the hero rides the alpha-hole line and may cross it for some; while the heroine has a babbles-when-she's-nervous quirk that was at times actually a bit annoying to read. But I liked how the seduction arc intertwined with the heroine's character arc -- and no complaints about the hottness. I will very likely pick up the others in this trilogy.

✽I'm really excited about Richelle Mead's new-ish futuristic series, "The Age of X." The first two books are out and I blazed through them this week. Beyond the smart backdrop that pits technocracy against theocracy, the main characters are both brilliant and flawed, and it has that thing that I can't resist where the characters bargain with higher powers, and get... unpredictable results. First book: Gameboard of the Gods; second book: The Immortal Crown.  So, so good. There's a title for book three but no pub date yet.

That's it for this week!