Soup Dish: book people are talking about...
✽Yet more deletions -- apparently, several online retailers are freezing up their self-publishing offerings to try to scrub them for porn, while also somehow attempting to not appear to be censoring. Good article at Gigaom, and an interesting personal slant from a successful author who also happens to have a deep technical understanding of what's being attempted.
✽The Last Hour of Gann by R. Lee Smith has readers stirred up. Mandi loved it, Jane Litte loved it, Brie abandoned it. These sorts of reactions make me pretty curious, but at the moment I'm holding off. Doesn't sound like my kind of story, but you never know.
✽I absolutely loved this piece about the reader experience, and how authors craft it: Romantic Attractions: The Thrills and Spills of the Reader’s Theme Park. Great fun, and you have to love an extended, well-sustained metaphor.
✽I really enjoyed this highly personal piece from John Scalzi about the books that influenced him. There's no bloviating about how these are The Best or The Most Important, just ones that matter a lot to him, personally, and a few words on the how and the why.
Titles That Caught My Eye ...
A new ingredient for the soup-- books I might read; I'd love to hear what you think about them if you've read any of them or are also anticipating them.
✽Sarah Antonelli is on my radar now, due to Jessica's review over at Radish. With a tagline like "Quirky Romance Novels for Grown Ups…and Smart Asses," I feel I have to give it a shot, even though the premise of a quantum physicist who is also an undercover spy gives me a bit of pause.
✽Couldn't help but nab Coreene Callahan's latest Fury novel: Fury of Desire. Looks like special pricing for this week too; a nice price at $3.99 for a full-length book.
✽Amy over at Unwrapping Romance reviewed a book this week that made my eyebrows go way way up: The Sheik Retold, giving authorial credit to both Victoria Vane, a modern author, and the original author, Edith Maude Hull. I read the original over a year ago now and just have not been able to put my thoughts about it into any coherent order. As to the re-telling, I believe the book is now public domain but I have all kinds of questions about the ethics of putting both names on that, and whether any contact was made with Hull's heirs to use her name. Still, I am pretty interested in reading it.
What I'm reading
✽Just finished up Nora Roberts' The Last Boyfriend. I love her books so much. I love the way she writes kisses, especially first kisses, and the way her characters' professions inform their points of view. I love the way she chooses professions that are about doing, and making. You don't see cubicle jockeys in these worlds; there's a physicality to the characters' lives that I just... well... love. OK, I'm repeating myself. But honestly, nobody does it like Nora.
✽I'm working my way through Jill Shalvis' Blue Flame, which was a special bonus on top of It Had to Be You. I'm finding it a bit slow, but I'm also having an extremely interrupt-driven week at home, so it may or may not be any fault of the text. I want to see the characters through, so it's got that going for it. The hero is an injured firefighter, and it seems unusual to me that the injury is bad enough that he keeps attempting to do romance-hero-typical-physical things, and well, kinda failing. So the heroine just does them for him. It's interestingly off-kilter that way.
✽I finished of the Kat Richardson SeaWitch that I mentioned last week. Shivery-creepy and delicious. Great ghost story and another new twist in the mythology.
On Tap... what soup isn't a little better with a slosh or two?
I haven't really tried anything new this week. I'm enjoying more of the Abita Pecan and Sam Adams Cherry Wheat. I guess I'm kind of over the pumpkin ales, although I actually did quite like the ones I tried. Since it is still October, and the pumpkin ales still abound, I did a bit of research on "best of" articles, and I liked HuffPo's list the best -- it includes broadly-available beers and based on 5 or 6 articles, I think they caught most everybody's top favorites in this list. The one I'm most interested in trying now is the Elysian Night Owl Pumpkin Ale -- it's local, and highly regarded in quite a number of these "best of" lists.
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