Monday Soup - February 22

In The Soup This Week... Lilith Saintcrow, Kris Kennedy, Book Riot, and bookcases...

Soup Dish:  on my mind -- the Soup's a little late this week, but hey, better late than never...
✽Bookcases! One of my favorite design/decor blogs is Emily Henderson's. She recently posted some tips on styling bookcases "for bookworms" and I just had to shake my head. Emily, you may know mid-century mod and you may know style, but you do not know bookworms.  Check out her post, with some very beautiful examples of styled shelves -- the bookworm example contains perhaps 25% more books than her normal styled/pretty/decorative options. It's adorable, there are at least 8 color-coordinated books on every shelf.  Go check it out.  Then come back here and I'll just leave you with this completely unstaged shot of my bookcases:

This represents perhaps 75% of my physical books. I have a full Ikea case in my bedroom, mostly double-stuffed, and a couple of other shelves here and there around the house. Now granted, I could probably do something about that top shelf. Over the years that was one of the few places I could stash something where my children could not get at it. For better or worse, those days are over... so I could tidy that up and make it prettier. Honestly though, if you look closely you'll see that the top of the shelf on the right has family photos, and almost HALF of one of the top shelves there has non-book items on it.  And also, I could have gone full height with those two on the end, but no, I got short ones and made space for Art. That is the height of my decorative restraint, my friends (literally, even).

✽Trope Anatomy 101 at The Book Smugglers - a new regular column by Carlie St. George. Her inaugural column is pretty hard on some beloved hero types. She definitely makes some good points, and I've often said that the line between alpha-hero and "alph-hole" is a little different for everyone -- hers is pretty restrictive, it seems.  It's always good to get different perspectives.

✽Brews and Books: Beer and Book Pairing Recommendations at Book Riot. Very clever and sounds delicious.  Book Riot is kind of my favorite bookish place on the net right now. For the record, I'm drinking Full Sail Amber right now  -- slightly hoppier than my norm but sufficiently balanced that I like it.

What I'm reading
Not too much, sadly...
✽I finished Lilith Saintcrow's Devil's Right Hand, the third in the Dante Valentine series. They are on sale now, all 5 books for I think $19.95? which is a good deal but I'm somehow finding resistible. I've been buying them individually because I want to kind of draw out the experience (also, I kind of hate how my kindle works with "boxed sets"). I bought the first one used for maybe a buck, so it pretty much balances out. Very happy with the series though. Liking it a lot.

✽I spotted a good deal on an anthology called, cheesily, Captured by a Celtic Warrior. SUPER-cheese! but the first story is by Kris Kennedy and I love her and I loved her short in the anthology. She has a way of drawing out those moments in her narrative, where the characters connect or an epiphany is realized... like the chime of a bell, she has a writes in these pauses, suspensions in time almost, stretching out a moment and letting it really resonate through the reader. Cannot get enough.

✽Just now I'm working on a third-party review read. And that's it!