Confession Time

Ladies and Gentlemen, I have a confession to make.

I love Harlequin romances.

And I am not ashamed to admit it.

*I say this, of course, with the addendum that I am not a fan of Harlequin's business practices; authors are not compensated nearly as well as they should be, particularly for electronic copies of their works, and I hope that's something that Harlequin works to change in the future.

I've read nine Harlequins on my Kindle in the last week.  I've got a few more that I'm dying to get into, but which I'm making myself wait on, because the beach is in my very near future, and my idea of a perfect vacation is sun, sand, surf, and a romance novel. 

And I've been pondering the idea why.  This is coming from someone who spends a great deal of her time buried in dry academic texts (right now, I have a volume of Tennyson, William Paley's Natural Theology, Robert Chambers' Vestiges of the Natural Creation and Arthur Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being on the desk next to me).    Harlequins often feature implausible plots with characters, who, in the real world, would be candidates for institutionaliztion.

And I love every minute of it.

It's easy. It's fun. The good guys always win. The girl always gets Mr. Right. For 50,000 words, everything goes perfectly. 

And yet some people make fun of other people who read these.  Book snobs will look down on them and say that there's no value in this kind of cultural commodity.

Well, screw it. You know what? If I can escape into a world where everything goes right for a couple of hours, why not?  Isn't that something of value right there?  It makes me happy.  One can get into the philosophical utilitarian arguments, but popular culture studies tell us that this kind of cultural consumption means we're looking for something as a society.  So what is it that these romance novels, whether Harlequin or longer works, give us that makes them stay in the best-selling lists?

Book Review: Scotsmen Prefer Blondes

Ramsey, Sara. Scotsmen Prefer Blondes. Spencerhill Associates, 2012. Paperback. +326 pages. $11.99. Release Date: 30 March 2012.

Full Disclosure: I received an ebook copy of this book for reviewing purposes.

I hate reading a bad romance novel, and I'm afraid this qualifies.  Granted, I'm being a little nitpicky here, and granted, I have to admit, once again, that I judge all Regency romances by Stephanie Laurens, which probably isn't fair.  But I didn't find this book, the second in Ramsey's Muses of Mayfair series terribly compelling.

The general plot is that two friends go to Scotland to meet Malcolm, our hero, who intends to marry one of them, but who promptly falls in love with Amelia, her best friend.  The expected hijinks ensue, though in a reversal of most romance novel tropes, Prudence, who hadn't wanted to marry Malcolm in the first place, is quite angry with Amelia for "stealing" her man.

There is one further complication--Malcolm has political tendencies, and Amelia, unbeknownst to most, writes Gothic novels and satires, a la Ann Radcliffe.  This inevitably causes a lot of problems.

So what's wrong with this book?  It does follow the general pattern of a romance novel well enough, after all.  But the main problem is that I never really connected with the characters.  Prudence's anger with Amelia was so unexpected that it threw me somewhat.  Amelia's concern for Prudence, while mentioned often, almost seemed like an afterthought.

Now, generally, I don't discuss the sex scenes of these novels.  This is partly because I know that my dad reads my blog occasionally, and I'd rather not embarrass him too much.  But this is just completely astonishing here, as Ramsey uses certain phrases in the scene that would make the gals at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books facepalm.

First, Ramsey refers to a certain portion of the male anatomy as a "manroot."  While this does bring to mind certain images of tubers, I don't think that vegetation is necessarily the way you want your reader to think about a man.

It really sucked to be him after he had a lucky shot
that took out the U.S.S. Grissom. Both he and his manroot were
disintegrated by Captain Kruge.

.

The other part that bothered me came only two paragraphs later, when Ramsey notes that our heroine's "body disintegrated."  First, I heard Darth Vader warn Boba Fett not to disintegrate the crew of the Millennium Falcon.  Then I thought about Star Trek III.

I suppose that it's not that Scotsmen Prefer Blondes is a bad book, necessarily.  It's just not very good, and it's certainly not worth the $11.99 price point that Amazon currently has on the paperback.  If you're inclined to read it, go for the Kindle edition, which is selling for $3.99, because I wouldn't pay more than that for this book.

Scotsmen Prefer Blondes: D+

RAACK

Well, it's been a while since I posted anything here.  Part of that has been because I've been spending a fair amount of time over at Tosche Station, where I'm one of the bloggers for the site, bringing an academic point of view to Star Wars and geek culture. 

The other part is that I've been doing nothing but reading brain candy for the last week, and it has been glorious.  Last week was finals, but my students had all their stuff in before finals, so all I had to do was administrative work last week.  I took the rest of the week to read whatever I wanted, and it was wonderful.  I've been working through some of Kresley Cole's novels, as well as Christine Feehan--I do love getting hold of a new series.

But today, I would like to talk about a recent disturbing trend I've noticed in some of the books I've been reading, and to announce the formation of a new organization: RAACK (Readers Against Awesome Car Killing).

Let me explain.

Fans of Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum novels know that bad things happen to cars in those books.  Generally speaking, they get blown up.  Ranger, one of the love interests, has cars for Stephanie as a line item under entertainment for the guys who work for him, as they all start up a book every time Stephanie gets a new car to bet on how long it will take before something happens to it.

Okay, that's fine and funny.  But if you know something's going to happen, why would you give her a new car?  Or, in what really caused me to wince, in Smokin' Seventeen was, well, a Shelby GT350.

This means this was one of two possible cars.  The first is the new 45th anniversary edition of the Shelby GT350 that was announced in 2010.  This picture of a 2012 Shelby GT--well, it makes me drool, and not just because I've watched far too much Top Gear with my husband.  I mean, just look at it.  It's a thing of beauty.

But the destruction of this car, while sad, could be sadder.  You see, the original Shelby GT350 was only made between 1965 and 1970.  That's right.  It means that Stephanie Plum could have managed to destroy this beauty (the picture here is a 1967).

This hurts my soul.  A lot.  I mean, just look at it!  How do you look at this car and say, "Yup, I'm going to write a book where one of these gets blown up!"

It's enough to make someone weep.

In any case, I thought that surely, I wouldn't come across anymore awesome cars being destroyed as I made my way through my romance novel foray as I caught up with the book series I'd fallen behind on over the school year.  Oh, but I was wrong.

I picked up Kresley Cole's Dark Desires After Dusk.  (Shut up about the name.)  The characters escape a variety of interesting bad guys in a Bugatti Veyron.  Want to know why it's awesome?  Well, I'll let Jeremy Clarkson tell you from the AutoVista section of Forza 4:

For those of you not wanting to listen to a pedantic Brit talk about how awesome this car is, I'll make it brief.  The Veyron is the fastest road legal production car in the world, the super sport topping out at 267 miles per hour, supported by an 8 liter, W16 engine which produces 1200 brake horsepower.  At top speed, it burns through an entire tank of gas in 12 minutes, and can shred a set of tires in about the same amount of time.  The base price is 1.7 million dollars (US).

And they wrecked it.

Apparently, I made a squeaky noise when that happened.

I will give this--Cole spends a good bit of time talking about how awesome the car is.  And then she kills it.  It folds in on itself like it's made from aluminum foil.  A Veyron.

So.  I would like to announce the formation of a new organization known as RAACK: Readers Against Awesome Car Killing.  Ladies and gentlemen, authors of the world, please, we beg you: if you're going to have your character wreck a car, do us a favor and wreck a Gremlin.  Anything else just hurts our feelings.

Update and Copper Beach Review

1. Dear Google, I hate Blogger's new dashboard.  It sucks.

2. Well, as to where I've been the last few weeks, I've either been obsessively studying for prelims, taking prelims, or obsessively checking my email waiting for preliminary exam results.  The good news is that I passed the written exams!  I take my 18th Century oral exam on 19 April, and am still waiting for the Victorian exam to be scheduled, but I feel much more confident going into orals than I did going into the written exams.  It's one last hurdle.

3. In the meantime, I've really got to get cracking on my dissertation prospectus, as it's due at the end of the month, but let's face it, I kick ass when it comes to deadlines.

4. In other news this week, I was also awarded the McDaniel Award for Excellence in Teaching by my department, which recognizes excellence in teaching by graduate students.  This was a huge honor, and I was blessed to have a good friend and mentor present me with the award at the Liberal Arts Award Ceremony yesterday.  I certainly could not have asked for a better role model as either a grad student or a teacher.  Love you, A.T.!

5. I have so many reviews to catch up on.  In the next few weeks, I have several galley reviews to post for the following books:

Gravity: How the Weakest Force in the Universe Shaped Our Lives by Brian Clegg
Leaving Mundania: Inside the Transformative World of Live Action Role-Playing Games by Lizzie Stark
Star Trek FAQ: Everything Left to Know About the First Voyages of the Starship Enterprise by Mark Clark
Scotsmen Prefer Blondes by Sara Ramsay

So those are on the immediate to-do list for the next few weeks, starting with Brian Clegg's Gravity.

6. I've been able to take some really good advantage of the used bookstore and the used book section at Hastings recently.  I've come up with the first novels in some series by Christine Feehan and Kresley Cole, I managed to find my own copy of The Help, which I've been dying to read.  I got an awesome book called Star Trek and Philosophy: The Wrath of Kant (yes, it was the pun that won me over).  And I found one of Stephanie Lauren's Cynster novels that I've NEVER read.  I didn't think there was one out there I hadn't read, but I have a copy of it now too!

Plus, the university library has opened a new popular reading collection for new books that come in, which makes just browsing the shelves looking for something to read much easier.  Right now, I checked out Sherrilyn Kenyon's Retribution (again, since I didn't get to it last time) and Charlene Harris' Dead Reckoning.  Oh, and did I mention that I finally found a used paperback copy of Janet Evanovich's Smokin' Seventeen?  I realize that a lot of time my reviews are way behind the publication dates of novels, but there you go.

And--let's not forget that I've read Copper Beach by Jayne Ann Krentz recently too, and I need to review that as well.

7. Well, on that note, there's no time like the present.  So, Copper Beach!  I borrowed this from the library's popular reading collection as well, and I did enjoy it.  It's the first book in Krentz's Dark Legacy Trilogy and the plot is fairly standard--Abby is a rare book seller with psychic powers, Sam Coppersmith is after a book to help his family understand/keep bad guys from getting the power to unlock the psychic power in certain rocks his family owns.  The characters are your stock romance novel characters, and that's just fine--after all, that's what we read romance novels for--the feisty female who needs protection but doesn't want it, and the alpha male who is determined to provide that protection, be it from physical or emotional bad stuff.

What was difficult was transitioning from Krentz's Arcane Society series to this one, as this one doesn't seem to fit into the Arcane Society universe.  There is no mention of the aforementioned Arcane Society or Jones and Jones.  But Krentz seems to still be using a lot of the same ideas about psychic phenomenon that she developed while writing the Arcane Society books, such as dreamlight energy.  This makes me wonder if this will intersect back in with Arcane Society or if she's working on creating a new universe here.

To be honest, I'm not upset that Krentz is moving away from the Arcane Society.  The last few novels have been somewhat disappointing: you can see my reviews of Quicksilver and In Too Deep and  Canyons of the Night at the links provided.  But especially after reading In Too Deep and Canyons of the Night, I had really started to wonder if the Arcane Society stories were kind of played out, especially after In Too Deep, which just fell kind of flat for me.  Copper Beach was much more--I keep wanting to type flavorful here.  Flavorful in that you got lots of stuff besides the romance and mystery.  Sam had to come and help rescue Abby from her insane family, for example.  There was much more depth to this novel than there has been to the last few Arcane Society books, and that's a definite improvement in my view.

Copper Beach - B+

ETA: I should also note that I need to review Laurie King's Pirate King, but that'll have to wait until later.  :D

Austen-ites

It may be a cliche for English majors to say, but I've always loved Austen. Pride and Prejudice is one of my favorite books--there is no romantic hero quite like Mr. Darcy. My love for Austen may be even more cliche, considering my level of academic engagement. Since my specialties are in the long 18th and 19th centuries and Austen rather deftly fits into the turn of the century, her books encompass everything I love about reading.

So it was with great delight that I read Frances Burney's Evelina this afternoon. Published in 1778, with no small indebtedness on her part to Dr. Johnson, it's the story of a country mouse making her way into society and surviving the attempts to regain her fortune which has been wrongfully taken from her. Lord Orville, the hero, is very much like Mr. Darcy, but perhaps even better, because Lord Orville knows when to laugh. Darcy is solemn all the time, but Orville is able to laugh in genuine delight when something warrants it.

Many of the concerns are the same. Both Evelina and Elizabeth Bennet are concerned with the impact their families will have in how they are seen by society, and both have an acute awareness of their own particular social failures. To be honest, as I think about it, perhaps the reason these novels were successful, and in Austen's case, remain so, is because so many teenage girls recognize the situations.

For example. I love my dad. He is, without a doubt, quirky, and it took a long time before I came to love and embrace (and in some cases, emulate) that quirkiness. But for a good portion of my teenage years, he was also a source of some embarrassment, usually caused by his sartorial choices when going to the grocery store (and the tendency to sing "If I Were King of the Forest" from The Wizard of Oz in the parking lot).

But at the tender age of thirteen, at my first boy-girl dance, after which my father was taking several friends of mine home (including the boy I liked), my father came to pick me up wearing the following outfit: red and black checked pajama pants, a maroon t-shirt with a paint stain across the front, a gray zip-up sweatjacket, a Cincinnati Reds ballcap, and topsiders with no socks. More to the point, he came inside. Where everyone could see him.

I was mortified. (So was my mother.)

While this has, in the ensuing years, become a memory that spawns laughter for all involved (and yes, some of those friends do remember my dad's wild pajama pants--and some still see him in them when he goes to the grocery store on the weekends, though the red and black checked have been replaced by pairs printed with the Grinch, Oscar the Grouch, DC Comics and Pink Floyd), at the time, it was positively horrifying. I could generally deal with the outfits going to the grocery store, because as I well knew, I was really the only teenager who actively liked going to the grocery store with her dad, and opportunities for embarrassment in front of my peers were minimal.

My point in relating this story has been that we all recognize that feeling of being embarrassed in front of someone we really want to impress by someone we know and love for their own quirky attributes, and at some particularly socially important time. For Evelina, it's as she's being presented to society and moving out in the world. Being thirteen and growing up in small-town Kentucky, the first boy-girl dance is about as similar to late 18th century Britain social situations as I can get.

But the beauty of these books is that the hero always sees past the embarrassment to the true inner beauty of the heroine and accepts her no matter what. That's the love story in these books and the part that I think every person who reads them resonates with--the simple idea that one person can love another without any judgments....and then live happily ever after.

*clunk*

So, I've been doing a lot of reading lately, and I do not have time or inclination to go into major reviews of what I've been reading. This is partly because it's late and I need to go get in the shower, partly because my head is so full of dissertation stuff that I can barely think, partly because I am frustrated with emails that have been coming in the last day and a half, and partly because for some strange reason I am hearing what sounds like muted guitar-thrashing solos in my right ear which is clearly either a sign of my impending mental breakdown or aliens trying to contact me through my teeth, both of which are equally likely.

So what does that mean? Quick and dirty book reviews!

Devil in Winter by Lisa Kleypas. Entertaining and witty. B+

A Duke of Her Own by Eloisa James. I remember this being entertaining enough at the time, but for the life of me, I can't remember--oh, wait, it was about Villiers. Okay, so it was actually pretty good, though it obviously didn't stick with me as well as her others. B-

Bitten by Kelley Armstrong. I almost didn't stick with this one as it started out so slow, but it was intriguing enough a take on werewolves and enough of a train wreck that I couldn't stop reading and have since started (but not finished) Stolen and have borrowed more/obtained more from Snarky Writer. B-

The Capture of the Earl of Glencrae by Stephanie Laurens. Oh, Stephanie Laurens, my love for you knows no bounds, and you have continued to blow me away in yet more of the best romance novels there are. The book just came out today, and my ever-patient and loving husband took me to Hastings to get it and then put up with my effectively ignoring him the rest of the evening and delving into the last book in the Cynster sisters trilogy where we finally get to meet the mysterious laird and learn why he's been so determined to kidnap one of the Cynster girls. And of course, it all turns out happily ever after. In Pursuit of Eliza Cynster might have my favorite hero in Jeremy Carling (because he reminds me so much of my own Prince Charming), but The Capture of the Earl of Glencrae hits every romance reader with one of the best stories I've read in a while. A+ (Yes, I'm a fangirl. Get over it.)

In other news, I've been doing a ridiculous amount of reading for my dissertation, but I am (obviously) trying to read something a little more light-hearted than discourse on Browning (though I'm so oddly excited by the prospect of dissertation research that I have determined, incontrovertibly, that I am the biggest nerd EVER). To that effect, I've checked out Sherrilyn Kenyon's Retribution and Richard Castle's Heat Rises (though I've not read Naked Heat yet either, but let's face it, they're basically episodes of Castle, so I think I can manage). I have already renewed them once, as I can't help feeling a little guilty for reading non-dissertation stuff. With the exception of The Capture of the Earl of Glencrae, which, let's face it, I would have started reading in the car on the way home if it a) hadn't been dark already and b) I didn't get carsick.

Anyway. Time for the shower and hopefully the guitar to stop shredding in my ear. It's so weird.

Year-End Wrap-Up

It's that time again--the time of year to review what's gone on in the reading world as it revolves around me. The official book total for the year: 68 new books read. (I don't count the number of books I read over and over again, otherwise Terry Pratchett's Guards! Guards! would be on the list a hundred and fifty times by now). Most of these books were for school, and since I had to transfer from LivingSocial to Good Reads, I can only accurately describe the books that I read from July as books from this year. In any case, the best books (that I read) of 2011 (in no particular order except for the first one):

1. Snuff - Terry Pratchett. As I said in my review before, while this is not the funniest or my favorite Terry Pratchett book, it is, without a doubt, the best book he's ever written.

2. Heir to the Empire - 20th Anniversary Edition - Timothy Zahn. Okay, so I realize that this kind of skirts my rules on books, but you know what? There's so much new stuff in this edition that it qualifies. It's amazing to go behind the scenes and get a glimpse of Zahn's thought process as he relaunched Star Wars for the next generation--and I'd like to point out that it's a sight better than anything else that has come out of Del Rey for Star Wars in a long time. I've quit reading the Fate of the Jedi series, as I discussed with a friend via texting today.

3. Choices of One - Timothy Zahn. The above statement, of course, does not apply to anything Tim Zahn writes. Thrawn being badass? Yes, please.

4. Ghost Story- Jim Butcher. It's not my favorite Dresden book--and things have gotten a whole lot darker. But it was still great and I'm still panting for more.

5. Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin. I read this for my American expatriate novel class, and I'm still struck by how hauntingly beautiful it is.

6. Gabriel's Ghost - Linnea Sinclair. I'm continually disappointed that I can't find more of her books in the bookstore. Though this is a romance novel, I'm amazing at her world-building ability.

7. Twilight's Dawn - Anne Bishop. Black Jewels' verse short stories. This is one that I've kept coming back to since I got it--especially the last story, set after Janelle's death.


On the other end of the spectrum, books I hated this year:

1. Knockout - Catherine Coulter. STOP WRITING PARANORMAL NOVELS WHEN THE SERIES HASN'T BEEN PARANORMAL BEFORE.

2. Death Echo - Elizabeth Lowell. I usually love Elizabeth Lowell, but this was just painful to read.

3. Just Like Heaven - Julia Quinn. It's not that this book was bad, necessarily. But when I look back, it really was one of the biggest disappointments--I had much higher hopes for this book than there was material to fulfill it.

Lastly, the discovery of the year? Eloisa James. I can't wait to read more of her stuff.

What's that? I'm posting before the end of the year? I have time to read a book tomorrow?

Buahaha. My husband bought me a WoW subscription for Christmas and my sister-in-law updated my subscription to Just Cross Stitch magazine. Yeah, right, I'm going to read anything but cross stitch patterns tomorrow.

*clunk*

The last few weeks have been...interesting, to say the least. Lots of reading, lots of writing, lots of teaching, and enough cross-stitching to take up the rest of the time. (I finally learned how to do a French knot!)

Anyway. So what has happened of academic import since my last post?

1. I was nominated for the highest award our department gives out. Waiting to hear back on that one.
2. I have a second member for my dissertation committee!
3. Despite the fact that I have not yet taken preliminary exams (I'm taking them in the spring), I was granted permission to go ahead and start my dissertation hours. So I'm signed up for a directed reading (which is going to help my dissertation research) and should soon be signed up for dissertation hours.
4. This means I AM DONE WITH COURSE WORK, Y'ALL. This in and of itself is a terrifying thing, because in the last ten years I have spent all of six months out of the classroom (as a student). And now...well, as I've told others, I see the light at the end of the tunnel. It may be the light of the oncoming train of my dissertation, but it's a light, damn it!

Not that I haven't done some reading. I managed to pick up Liz Carlyle's Tempted All Night and Eloisa James' Duchess by Night, both on clearance (and hey, a romance novel for three bucks? I'm all about that). I'd never read anything by either of them before, and they were decent examples of the genre.

Eloisa James is of particular interest. Her real name is Mary Bly (according to Wikipedia), and she's a tenured professor of English at Fordham University. I can't help but wonder how this translates to different problems, and reading through her Wikipedia entry, I came across the following:

"For several years Bly's second career remained a secret, and she disguised herself by wearing contacts instead of her normal glasses when she attended functions as Eloisa James.^[4] After her first New York Times Bestseller in 2005, Bly realized that her readers liked her writing regardless of its genre, and that by keeping her identity a secret she was implying that she was ashamed of her work and of her readers.^[9] At a February 16, 2005 faculty meeting, Bly outed herself to her colleagues, revealing her alter ago and offering copies of her novels to her fellow professors. Once she had officially "come out", she submitted an op-ed to The New York Times defending the romance genre."

I do know that she's been extremely kind to a friend of mine who is planning on writing her dissertation on romance novels, which is enough to endear an author to me. And her writing is entertaining. Is she the queen of Regency romances? Well, no, and that's partly because her books are written a little before the Regency era, and I came to the conclusion that there's a very good reason that most historical novels are written in the Regency era--it's easier to get the heroine's clothes off. In the Georgian era that James is writing in, the heroines wear clothes like this:

This involves a lot of petticoats, corsets, panniers, and some rather heavy, uncomfortable wigs, often powdered (and quite nasty). By the time you get through all of the layers, I imagine that the romantic mood is pretty much over. So it's no wonder that James' heroine spends most of her time in male dress. On the other hand, Regency era dress looks like all of those you see in adaptations of Austen movies.

And I still like Stephanie Laurens better, despite feeling like I need to be holding some kind of solidarity with my colleagues.

It's Fall Break!

And what have I done? Approximately nothing. I turned my Fulbright into the State Department on Friday, and now I have nothing to do but wait until January. So I've nothing since then.

That's not entirely true. I finished one cross stitch project and have moved on to this one. I have no real idea why I've wanted to cross stitch this rooster so badly, but I have, and therefore, I have started, thanks partly to my sister-in-law who gave me my subscription for Christmas last year (which has been delightful), and thanks partly to Snarky Writer who toted me around town Friday, since I'd not had enough sleep the night before to be driving (and who also very kindly not only dragged me around town, but hit three craft stores with me, looking for the proper fabric for this project in a reasonable price range, because I refuse to pay $20 for a piece of 32 count linen).

---

In other news, I hate AT&T. My phone broke the other night, and then AT&T, in attempting to fix it, broke it more--it now won't turn on it on. Their solution after that was for me to go buy a new phone. Fortunately, I have a very kind friend who is more than generous and who is sending me his old iPhone, though it won't be here until next week. In the meantime, I've been contemplating a response to AT&T. Though it's for bad PR, I thought about sending them a picture of Wil Wheaton collating papers. Still, it's not quite appropriate. I wonder if I could get a ragequit picture of Wil Wheaton shouting into his iPhone.

Actually...*goes running to Twitter for a minute* I should point out that while Wesley Crusher was an annoying little prick, Wil Wheaton is a nerd god.

---

I noticed something odd when I went to the library to tutor a client of mine. I was looking around and saw some new books that just came out that I would have liked to have checked out. However, the library here does something odd: they charge two dollars to check a new fiction book out for a week.

Being a cheap-ass, and only having made ten dollars tutoring, I didn't come away with any of them, because if I've waited long enough for them not to buy them, then I can wait long enough for it to be free at the library. And Lord knows I have no problem with a library trying to raise some revenue for themselves, especially since I know that the great state of Tennessee is just so incredibly devoted to education and literacy. But something about that seemed just a little bit wrong to me. I did manage to get Kim Harrison's Pale Demon without having to pay extra for it. It joins the stack with Joanna Lindsey's That Perfect Someone. In the meantime this week, I've also got to work on Boswell's London Journal, and some poetry for 18th century and work on studying for a midterm.

--

Anyway. I'm really behind on reviews, so here is a quick and dirty review of three books I just recently read, and then one really detailed review:

In Pursuit of Eliza Cynster: Fantastic. Generally speaking, Stephanie Laurens follows a certain pattern in her books where the heroine refuses to marry the hero until she gets a declaration of love from him. There is nothing like this here--it's real. They gradually fall in love. The hero is not just a warrior alpha male. He's also a scholar, but one who can kick butt when he needs to. In some ways, he reminded me very much of my husband. I have to say, this truly is my favorite of all of Laurens' novels that I've read, and I've read a good number of them. A+

When Strangers Marry: I've never read any of Lisa Kleypas' work before, and I was very entertained by this novel, in particular because while it's set during the early 19th century, it's not set in Regency England; instead, she sets the novel in a newly American New Orleans. That alone is incredibly interesting, because there are a whole other different set of conventions. Is it the best written novel? No, probably not. To be fair, it was a rewrite of her first novel, Only In Your Arms. B-

Wildest Hearts: This goes under the oldie but goodie category. It was a Jayne Ann Krentz paperback I scored from my mom, and I've read it before. It's really interesting to see something from the early 90s from her; the male character is very different from some of her other heroes. Something about her male characters in her earlier books are rather stuck-up. This one, Oliver, focuses on two things: business and ferns. That does seem to be one thing I remember from her earlier work: the heroes have some odd enthusiasms. Now that I've gone back to it: C.

---

Now, on to the most important bit of this blog post. Terry Pratchett's Snuff was just released last Thursday, and in our jaunt around town, Snarky Writer took me to Barnes and Noble where I obtained said Discworld book. This one is especially important to me. Not only is it a new Discworld book, but it's a new Watch book, and given that I wrote my master's thesis on the Watch books, you can imagine just how excited I was.

So to my review. SPOILER ALERT. (That means close your browser, Dad, I'll bring it to you the next time I'm home.)



Sam Vimes has been forced to take a vacation, and when the Vimeses go out to Ramkin Hall, trouble invariably ensues when Vimes discovers a murder scene on the property--a young goblin woman. He's out of his jurisdiction, but that has never stopped him before and won't stop him now. We get a interesting look into a new society that Pratchett has put into the Disc, and the goblins are demanding justice--not just for the dead girl, but also for the way that other goblins have been rounded up and taken off.

Vimes, of course, won't let anything like this stand. He discovers that Lord Rust's son is involved, and this brings up one of the main themes of the book: rich versus poor. It's fairly obvious that this was written during the middle of the recession, because the struggle between rich and poor and what someone in Vimes' position--as the Duke of Ankh-Morpork--does to help out those less fortunate. It becomes part of what both Vimes and Carrot term "the terrible algebra of necessity." Goblin mothers, when they cannot feed their children, eat them instead. Then they build a pot, put the soul of the baby in it, and wait for it to return at a better time.

It turns out that Gravid Rust is transporting goblins away to work as slaves on tobacco plantations in Howondaland, where they are all dying, assisted by one rather awful character known as Stratford. One pot makes its way into a cigar, picked up by Fred Colon, who then becomes possessed, as if a goblin. Vimes, through all of this, is assisted by the quasi-demon that he picked up in Thud!, The Summoning Dark, which has left its mark on him and who he can interact with in his own head, Feeney, the somewhat inept country constable who is still learning how to be a policeman, and Willikins, his gentleman's gentleman who grew up in a street gang only a few lanes down from Vimes and who still retains all of his skills.

Stratford, though, is crazy, and does something that no man should ever do if he wants to live--try to kill Young Sam Vimes. But the elder Sam Vimes is a good man and simply would have taken him to jail. Willkins, though, is not a good man, and takes very unkindly to someone trying to hurt his family.

There are a couple of things that I really liked, small things. Vetinari is frustrated as hell with the Ankh-Morpork Times' crossword compiler. Willikins and Vimes have real conversations that are very friendly, even though Willikins works for Vimes. For the first time, it seems like Vimes has a real friend. Fred Colon and Nobby Nobbs have been his friends, but he can't talk to them about everything; they don't understand his position between the street and the aristocracy; Willikins does.

I was glad to see that Angua's promotion to Captain has finally taken hold permanently. Wee Mad Arthur's reappearance was fantastic and wonderful. I liked seeing that Vimes is really in love with Sibyl. I would have liked to have seen more of Carrot--the question of what Carrot will actually do as far as the kingship goes remains unanswered. But that's the only criticism that I have of this book.

The last two books, Making Money and Unseen Academicals, had a couple of problems. They weren't tightly plotted, and they relied far too much on poop jokes. That's not to say that there aren't some of those in Snuff, but they're reserved for Young Sam, who at six years old, is interested in very little else, which makes sense. This novel is so tightly put together that you can't see Pratchett's Alzheimer's at all.

At the same time, this is not a light novel. While there are some really great funny lines, the way that there are in all Pratchett novels, this is far more serious than any of his other novels. It's darker than Night Watch, even. It's dark, it's serious, and it's good. While Men at Arms will always be my favorite Discworld novel, I think Snuff has just become the best. This book is an A+, hands down.

One of those huge updates

First of all, I have good news.

I actually have outstanding news, and it occurred to me (via my husband) that it ought to go in this blog, and the more I thought about, the more it seems, he's right. After all, this blog is about the trials, tribulations and triumphs of being a graduate student in English. Lately, it's been mostly about the romance novels I read to escape all of that. Part of the reason is also that I don't want to complain. First of all, I really don't have much to complain about, and second, it's never a good idea to complain in a public forum.

But when I have awesome news, I have to share. I went to meet with Dr. K yesterday to see if she would be willing to, well, basically, do me several favors in a row, starting with being the director for my dissertation. I posited the idea to her that we might begin with a directed reading next semester that would have two goals--the first to help me prepare for the preliminary exam in Victorian literature, and the second being to help me do quite a bit of preliminary research for my dissertation. My idea was to focus the first part of the semester on what I needed for the exam, the second my half more on dissertation, and do several short exploratory papers throughout the semester to help me focus my ideas for my dissertation, with the end goal of the semester being to have a dissertation proposal completed.

She thought this was a great idea. Then I mentioned how I was working on applying for the Fulbright scholarship, and she was also ecstatic about the prospect. As I noted I was still having difficulty coming up with an affiliation, she suggested the Tennyson Research Centre in Lincolnshire. I hadn't considered that (it was a fantastic idea), and she sent off an email to them right then.

I ended up sending a text to Snarky Writer with the message "My dissertation director is cooler than yours."

The day only got better, as we discovered that my husband had been hired for a temporary position at a local party store to get them through Halloween! This is great, and it gives him retail experience to put on his resume as well. So he's been off to work today (!), and I'm waiting for him to get home right now. I'm planning a ham steak, green beans, mac and cheese and biscuits for dinner. I'd thought about chicken and dumplings, but trying to get the recipe out of my mom was a little difficult, and she doesn't put chicken in hers anyway. As I didn't want to give my husband salmonella poisoning his first week of work (or, you know, ever), I figured I'd stick to something I couldn't screw up!

--

Book review! I just finished Julia Quinn's Just Like Heaven, the first in her Smythe-Smith quartet, and anyone who has ever read her Bridgerton series knows exactly just how disastrous the Smythe-Smith musicales are. The poor four girls who take part in the musicale are the heroines of this quartet. Our heroine, Honoria, desperately does not want to take part, to the point where she digs a hole in the garden, hoping that she can get out of rehearsal by "tripping" in a mole-hole. What she doesn't plan on is Marcus, our hero, accidentally tripping in it instead, badly turning his ankle.

Quinn uses a quirk of Regency fashion as the hinge for her plot. Men's boots at the time required assistance to take on and off without a sprained and swollen ankle, and Marcus' boot actually has to be cut off his foot. He comes down with pneumonia from sitting out in the rain for a while (since Honoria can't carry him home), but what no one realizes is that his leg was cut when the boot came off and is now infected.

The dedication to the book is, as always, dedicated to Quinn's husband, who apparently told her under no circumstances that there was no way Marcus could survive such an injury. But miracles do happen, and Honoria and her mother nurse him back to health, just in time for him to hear their genuinely disastrous musicale. Those who've read Quinn before might remember in one of the Bridgerton novels, Lady Danbury knocks a Smythe-Smith violin off a piano, shattering it and insists on buying a new one (that might take up to a year to come in). Honoria, it seems, is the owner of that violin, which ties this story nicely into the greater universe Quinn has created.

Is it a great novel? No, probably not. Quinn is certainly not the queen of Regency romance--I maintain that crown very firmly belongs to Stephanie Laurens (and I'm sure others would argue Georgette Heyer, but I've not read any of hers). If I'm judging against Laurens, Quinn simply can't compare. She's good enough that I'll continue reading her books, but not so good that her books are a must have the day they come out.

Just Like Heaven - C+

---

Hastings had another sale on, and in celebration of employment, my husband and I went out last night. Speaking of Stephanie Laurens and books that I desperately want the day they're released, I now have obtained a copy of In Pursuit of Miss Eliza Cynster. (I do want to know what is up with her titles these days, though. Viscount Breckenridge to the Rescue? This? Are the Harlequin editors--those responsible for, I kid you not, Pregnesia--titling her novels?) In any case, I am very much looking forward for that.

I also bought, since it was again 2 paperbacks for $10, Lisa Kleypas' When Strangers Marry. It was originally her first novel ever published with Avon Romance, as Only In Your Arms, and she has since revised and retitled it. I figure this way I'm getting it the way she wants it. It's the first Kleypas book I've ever had, so I'm looking forward to reading it.

But first, I have some 18th century drama to get through, and I have to start Maria Edgeworth's Belinda. I think I'd rather read romance.

---

On one final note: Amazon has just begun taking preorders for the Kindle Fire. Why is this important? Well, first, here are some of the details from Mashable regarding the Fire.

Then there's the part where Barnes and Noble's stock fell 9% on the announcement of the Fire, the fact that the original Kindle just dropped dramatically in price, and the fact that Amazon is also taking orders for the new Kindle Touch, to be released not quite two weeks after the Fire.

What bothers me about this is that Amazon, essentially, is copying Barnes and Noble. Barnes and Noble gives us the Nook Color--Amazon comes along and makes the Kindle Fire, which is meant less to compete with the Nook and more with the iPad. Barnes and Noble gives us the new version of the Nook, completely e-ink and touch based. Amazon ends up with the Kindle Touch. And yet, it's the company that's innovating--Barnes and Noble--that's suffering.

Here's an idea--and the companies can keep it. Give me a tablet computer that can switch between a backlit display for computer work and an e-ink display (for reading books). Do that, and you'll have me hooked.

Read read read read read

I have spent quite a bit of time reading in the last week--more so, in fact, that I have in quite a while. To a certain extent, I've felt of late that I've been doing absolutely nothing but reading. I realize that's not true, but when your eyes are burning from too many words, it's hard to figure out otherwise.

So what has the roundup been? First off, Humphry Clinker, an 18th century epistolary and picaresque novel by Tobias Smollett. In case you don't know what picaresque means (as I did not until it was explained to me), it's an example of a novel, following the Spanish example, where you have at lot of noteworthy events following each other again and again and again, with the only real connection between them being that they happen to the same (or same set) of character(s). It was entertaining enough, but I wouldn't recommend reading an un-annotated version, as Smollett's novels tend to be extremely contemporary and reference a lot of things that aren't easily understandable without a degree in history. I recommend the authoritative version published by the University of Georgia.

I have, fortunately, had time to read my two new romance novels that I picked up at Hastings. The first one I read was by Stephanie Laurens, the first in her new Cynster sister trilogy, Viscount Breckenridge to the Rescue. (Incidentally, another piece of information I picked up--the 's' in viscount isn't pronounced. It's vy-count. Don't look at me like that, I'm American, I've never heard the word said aloud.) The rather simplistic title aside, the book was wonderful. Heather Cynster (one of Gabriel and Lucifer's younger sisters) decides to follow her cousin Amanda's example from On a Wild Night and seek out a husband in the less socially acceptable venues frequented by the ton. Instead, she is kidnapped by someone who simply has an order to kidnap one of the Cynster sisters, and Breckenridge follows in hot pursuit. She stays with her captors a while to get as much information as possible, in order to protect her sisters, and eventually escapes with Breckenridge, walking across parts of Scotland to the Vale where her cousin Richard and his wife live, and adventures ensue forthwith.

It's an excellent addition to the Cynster series, even though I'd had a moment at the beginning where I thought this was going to be far too similar to On a Wild Night, and I was pleasantly surprised. It really was a good adventure, and in true Cynster fashion, Breckenridge has to admit that he loves Heather before she'll marry him. A- on Viscount Breckenridge to the Rescue.

I also read Jayne Castle's Canyons of Night, and was unfortunately somewhat disappointed in it. It didn't have nearly the connection with the rest of the Looking Glass trilogy (already reviewed here) that I was hoping for--in fact, you could barely tell that there was a connection, other than the fact that one of Mrs. Bridewell's clockwork curiosities was at the center of the mystery. Heroine Charlotte has taken over her aunt's antique store near Rainshadow Preserve, and old friend Slade has taken the job of sheriff while he recovers from a potentially psychically crippling injury. He's actually coming into a new Arcane talent (or strengthening of the old one) which isn't explained well. One of Charlotte's old clients is after a snow globe in her possession (that she doesn't know she has), and it turns out that one of the people on the island is in with him on it (which is the only part of this that we really didn't see coming). The snow globe is what Bridewell used to infuse her curiosities with the psychic power to make them weapons, but it's not explained any more than that. In fact, the book centers more on something strange happening in the preserve which isn't explained. Canyons of Night serves more as a setup for something to come than it does a conclusion to the Looking Glass trilogy. There was, however, one saving grace. It's what makes all of Krentz's Harmony novels so wonderfully humorous and charming--a dust bunny. Rex is cute, steals anything shiny, including a purse he decides to carry around with him, and he's overprotective of Slade. And he's adorable, as always. Don't believe me? Go watch the trailer for Silver Master again. Rex, I give an A. The novel gets a C.

Krentz does have a new book coming out in January called Copper Beach. It appears to be paranormal, but not related to the Arcane Society, so I'm curious as to how this will turn out. It claims to be a "Dark Legacy" novel, but I'm not sure what that means. Obviously, we'll find out.

I picked up Just Like Heaven by Julia Quinn at Target for 25% off today. It's a quartet following along with the Bridgerton series, only this time starting to focus on the beleaguered and musically deficient Smythe-Smith girls. Quinn's books are also Regency-era, and while they definitely aren't as good as Stephanie Laurens (and let's face it, very few are), they're charming in their own way. It's also been interesting in places to find that Quinn borrows (with permission, of course) characters from Stephanie Laurens and Lisa Kleypas' Regency novels. I just wish that the characters borrowed would have been like Laurens' Lady Osbaldestone. Putting her in the same room with Quinn's Lady Danbury would frighten the most devilish of rakes.

Checking out Quinn's site, I've found that there are second epilogues for some of her Bridgerton books; however, you have to order them as ebooks. They're about 30 pages apiece, and there are plans to put all eight in a collection and print them as a paperback when all eight are completed. This should be interesting.

All right, I'll stop typing now. I'd probably do better to update more often than update in these sprawling posts. In any case, the next post should be a review of Just Like Heaven. That can wait until tomorrow, though.

Thoughts. I has them.

But they'll have to wait for now. I'm contemplating a post based on something I heard on NPR yesterday and the subsequent conversation I had with my husband about the future of the publishing industry. However, the storm system rumbling in has left me with a blistering headache that renders me incapable of a coherent conversation. I'll get to it though.

More importantly...book roundup!

My reading time of late has been drastically reduced. Let me rephrase that--my pleasure reading time has been drastically reduced, thanks to a directed reading that started off with a lot of reading and is continuing apace (but I am learning SO MUCH and Dr. L has made me feel SO MUCH better about taking my preliminary examinations. I could just sit and listen to him talk about the long 18th century for hours and take notes until my hand fell off because he knows everything, and it's absolutely marvelous!).

Anyway. Book roundup. Stop digressing. Hastings was having a sale this week--any 2 paperbacks priced $7.99 or below were 2 for $10.00. So, naturally, I ended up with two paperbacks I've been waiting excitedly on- Viscount Breckenridge to the Rescue by Stephanie Laurens and Canyons of the Night by Jayne Castle. I've not started either yet, but I can't wait. If I ever have time!

Things got better, as I found part of a gift card to Barnes and Noble in my purse this morning. I had wanted to get Linnea Sinclair's Hope's Folly, but they didn't have it. So I had picked up Joanna Lindsey's That Perfect Someone instead.

But then I found something better. Something that several of my friends had been blogging about.

Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire, 20th Anniversary Edition. Complete with--get this--ANNOTATIONS. And it's so very, very pretty. Here, let me show you it:

Could this get any more perfect? It's so understated. All you have is Star Wars, the title, the announcement of the anniversary edition, his name, and the Imperial cog. It's perfect.

Did I mention that there's a new Thrawn short story in the back? One that partly picks up on things from Choices of One? Did I mention that Grand Admiral Thrawn is badass every day?

So, yeah. I can't wait to get started on that either.

But first up...Humphrey Clinker by Tobias Smollett. Because 18th century literature waits for no woman.

ETA: Well, I was going to add something, but then I forgot. Maybe it will come back to me.

Book Review: No Mercy

Kenyon, Sherrilyn. No Mercy. New York: St. Martin's, 2010. Hardcover. +352 pages. $24.99

I hate it when I feel like I need to start out a review with a disclaimer. But here I am doing so once again.

I really like Sherrilyn Kenyon. I've been reading her Dark-Hunters series for years. I've met her once, and she's a really, really nice person - trust me, it takes a really nice person to deal with her crazy fans. At a small bookstore far enough outside Nashville to no longer be in the metro area, there were some insane women complete with fangs lined up. She's also the author of the Writer's Digest Guide to Character Names, which is an amazingly useful tool.

But this story? Well, I think I've read it before.

Samia is an Amazon who was gifted with psychometry as a Dark-Hunter power. Dev Peltier is a Werebear, who just happens to appear completely blank to Sam. Stryker is after Sam so she can tell him what Apollo's weakness is (intending to kill Apollo, who is his father). There's a chase for Hippolyta's girdle (no joke), which, of course, they find, and all involved kick ass. Except there's a new problem which will probably show up in future books that has to do with the fact that Daimons can now walk in sunlight, which they couldn't do before.

Anyway. To the "I've read this before" point.

This remind anyone just a wee bit of, well, our other favorite vampiresque series? The one written by that other really nice Southern lady and also set in and around New Orleans? The one with the telepathic girl who has problems with relationships until she hooks up with the vampires who she can't hear telepathically? You know, Sookie Stackhouse?

I am not accusing Kenyon of plagiarism here. But I am wondering just a little if perhaps she's beginning to stretch the Dark-Hunter series further than it can keep going. She's got a compelling overarching storyline that keeps getting more and more interesting (and is there going to be an apocalyptic ending one of these days to this series). But she's got to inject something new into it, because it's starting to get old.

I think that's what she's trying to do with Retribution, the newest novel which has just been released. According to reviews, it's bringing in the Native American pantheon (hey, if you've got the Greek gods and the Atalantean gods, why not Native American gods?). The reviews have also not been stellar on Amazon, but people don't do well with change. I'll be interested to see if it does any better.

There was one more strike against No Mercy for me, and please keep in mind that I was reading it last night, completely and utterly exhausted from trying to get our house ready to be shown to a potential buyer (who I really hopes buys the duplex, because he would like for us to continue to rent if he chooses to invest in the property), so the fact that I noticed this at all is incredible in and of itself. Whoever was doing the copy editing for the hardcover edition seriously dropped the ball. There were so many typographical errors that it was almost dizzying, and they were the kind of simple errors that I try to teach my freshman to look for--were instead of where, your instead of you're (or the other way around), and most egregiously, confusion of there, their, and they're.

Guys. I read fiction to escape the humdrum proofreading of my daily life. Don't make me do it on my time off too.

No Mercy - C-

Review: Quicksilver and In Too Deep

Krentz, Jayne Ann. In Too Deep. New York: Putnam, 2010. Hardcover. +339 pages. $25.95

Quick, Amanda. Quicksilver. New York: Putnam, 2011. Hardcover. +342 pages. No price.

So I've been meaning to review these for a week or so, and so today, I'm finally going to get around to the first two books in Jayne Ann Krentz's new Looking Glass trilogy. She does keep coming up with new powers for people in her Arcane Society series--glasslight is something completely new, and to be honest, it doesn't make a terrible lot of sense. I understand that she's had objects imbued with power before, but mirrors apparently just soak up psychic energy and there are some who can read this glasslight.

So, let's start with the first book in the trilogy: In Too Deep. It really wasn't a bad book, but I was a little disappointed. Fallon Jones has been part of the Arcane Society since Krentz began writing about it, and really, it was his turn to find a girl. Isabella was raised to be paranoid, her grandmother is missing, and she's been set up as the seller of psychic weapons. The plot basically revolves around catching a serial killer using glasslight and some Victorian era curiosities made by a Mrs. Bridewell, as well as finding and taking care of a cache of these kinds of weapons that have been hiding in town for years.

The story is good enough, but what stuck out to me was the fact that there wasn't a lot of backstory. It seemed like Fallon and Isabella just flat out jumped into bed with each other without any kind of thought whatsoever. I could even understand it if there was some explanation that their psychic abilities told them that they were perfect for each other or something like that, but there isn't any of that. Fallon and Isabella are just suddenly, inextricably, in love. Bang. There's no buildup to the romance, and there's no real crisis in their relationship. As a romance novel, it wasn't Krentz's best.

Quicksilver, on the other hand, was really good. First of all, we get to meet one of the Sweetwater family, the family that takes on the job of doing what no one else can and putting down the truly dangerous arcade talents. Owen Sweetwater rescues Virginia Dean, a glasslight talent, from being framed for murder, as he's tracking down who might be responsible for killing a number of other glasslight talents around London. This is, of course, set in Victorian era England, so the relationship necessarily has to go more slowly than it did in In Too Deep. They end up finding the Quicksilver Mirror, a powerful psychic weapon, and it turns out that the murderer has been killing glasslight talents in order to make some mirrors more powerful.

The one thing that did disappoint me about Quicksilver was that we got to meet Mrs. Bridewell, just briefly, but then she disappeared. I have a feeling that a lot could be done with her as a character--why is she making psychic weapons? She's not doing it to terrify people--she lets people rent them to take care of small matters, like a cheating husband. The person who has out and out bought the last few of her curiosities worries even her, and I would have liked to have read more of that.

The final book in this trilogy, Canyons of the Night, comes out 30 August and is set in Krentz's futuristic world of Harmony, and I'm desperately looking forward to it.

Overall grades:

In Too Deep: C
Quicksilver: B+

AND TOMORROW IS GHOST STORY!

Grrr.

So, LivingSocial is shutting down its Facebook application where it allows you to keep track of the books you've read.

This is disappointing.

I've been keeping track of my reading habits for the last three and a half years (I had to go back and check LiveJournal to figure out exactly how much I'd read). I kept track of all the new books I'd read, not any of the books I'd re-read. Nor does any of this include all of the articles I read for school. I read comparatively few full books, and I only count books I've read the whole way through--right now, that is 572 total.

In 2008, I read 267 books.
In 2009, I read 187 books.
In 2010, I read 99 books.

According to LivingSocial, that means I've read 19 books this year.

It's July. That can't be right. I can only see 15 on the first page, because apparently, functionality has gone by the wayside, and, well, yeah.

Of course, I've only talked about 12 via my blog (these would be fun books, rather than schoolbooks). And while I know I've been re-reading a lot...I know I've read more than this.

In any case, LivingSocial suggested importing collections to GoodReads. Right, I have a .csv file, so it shouldn't take long for it to put this up, should it?

time to completion (loose estimate): 3763 min, 16 seconds

Wait, what? It's going to take two and a half days? I could upload the books manually faster than that. IF LivingSocial would let me see the rest of my collection!

Oh, right. LivingSocial apparently said "Screw you" to the Facebook app some point last week. Now that I've logged in to the main site....apparently, they've said screw you to that as well.

Okay. Fine. Maybe I've only read 19 books so far this year, which in and of itself is somewhat horrifying to me, because I can't remember when I've read so little for pleasure--I know it's not because I wasn't reading for school. But then, I had French last semester, rather than a literature class, and the literature class I did have was mostly focused on poetry. Then in May, when I did have time to read, I didn't. So, 19 books might not be too bad.

It does seem that GoodReads is backlogged with people importing, and it does seem to be importing without me needing to have the import thing open--I think? I have no idea. I'm not leaving the thing open for two and a half days, much less leaving my computer on, especially considering the heat it puts out and the weather we're having.

So, let this be a record of how many books I have read, if not the actual books (though I do have the .csv file if I get really, really bored one day) should GoodReads fail me in adding books.

And actually, it's 20 books, gosh darn it. The first book to be manually added to Good Reads will be Linnea Sinclair's Gabriel's Ghost. Which is awesome. And you should go read it. Because it's awesome. And definitely worthy of the RITA award it won.

Lead me not into temptation....

....especially bookstores.

There's a reason I have shirt that says that. It's always dangerous to take me in a book store, because quite honestly, I want everything.

Today, however, I was in search of one book in particular--Timothy Zahn's newest Star Wars book, Choices of One, which I will not start until this evening at the earliest, because I have to get through my homework first and if I don't read my homework first...I'll end up Sparknoting it instead. Bad English graduate student!

But the problem with bookstores is that you then realize that there are more books that you want. For instance, Sherrilyn Kenyon is coming out with a new Dark-Hunter book on 2 August--Retribution--and apparently, another one comes out in paperback in November--The Guardian.
And then Joanna Lindsey has a new book out, When Passion Rules, set in the Regency era. Julie Garwood is coming out with The Ideal Man, Mary Balogh just released The Secret Mistress last week, Stephanie Laurens has two new books,Viscount Breckenridge to the Rescue in August, and In Pursuit of Eliza Cynster, due in September (The Capture of the Earl of Glencrae comes out in January 2012), Nora Roberts has one set for November, The Next Always, and Catherine Coulter just put out a new FBI thriller today, Split Second.

Oh, but wasn't my last Catherine Coulter review abysmal? Yes, it was, and I found the next book, now in paperback while I was at Barnes and Noble and looked at the blurb in the cover. Here's the blurb listed on Amazon, attributed to Publisher's Weekly:

In Coulter's fab 14th FBI paranormal romantic thriller (after KnockOut), FBI special agents Dillon Savich and his wife, Lacey Sherlock, look into the possible haunting of a U.S. senator by his dead wife as well as a more earthly crime: Germany's Schiffer Hartwin Pharmaceutical, which has its U.S. headquarters in Connecticut, might be deliberately withholding an inexpensive cancer fighting drug, Culovort, to force cancer patients to require the far more expensive Eloxium, in short supply. The FBI probe dovetails with one by PI and part-time ballet teacher Erin Pulaski, who's hired by a Yale professor worried about his cancer-stricken father being affected by the shortage. In a wild coincidence, Bowie Richards, the FBI special agent in charge of the New Haven field office, also hires Erin—to babysit his daughter, a ballet student of hers. The attraction between Bowie and Erin grows as they help Dillon and Lacey crack a complicated double case. Coulter fans will want to see more of this new crime-fighting duo.

WHAT DID I SAY ABOUT THE PARANORMAL STUFF IN BOOKS THAT WEREN'T PARANORMAL?

So, Whiplash has been taken off the wish list. I don't want to read it anymore. And as for Split Second:

A serial killer is on the loose, and it's up to FBI agents Dillon Savich and Lacey Sherlock to bring him down. They soon discover that the killer has blood ties to the infamous and now long-dead monster Ted Bundy. Savich and Sherlock are joined by agents Lucy Carlyle and Cooper McKnight, and the chase is on.

At the same time, Agent Carlyle learns from her dying father that her grandfather didn't simply walk away from his family twenty-two years ago: he was, in fact, murdered by his wife, Lucy's grandmother. Determined to find the truth, Lucy moves into her grandmother's Chevy Chase mansion. What she finds, however, is a nightmare. Not only does she discover the truth of what happened all those years ago, but she faces a new mystery as well, a strange ring that holds powers beyond her ken.

As the hunt for the serial killer escalates, Savich realizes he's become the killer's focus, and perhaps the next victim. It's up to Lucy to stop this madness before it's too late.

That sound you hear is me banging my head against the wall.

Oh, and then I got home, and UPS brought Twilight's Dawn and Gabriel's Ghost. I finish The Reef tonight, and then start in on The Sun Also Rises for class. I'm editing a novella for a friend. I'm buried in books and books that I want to read.

Just the way I like it.

Quick Update

I finally managed to finish The Ambassadors for class--I have to start Edith Wharton's The Reef tomorrow. Before dinner, I picked up Anne Bishop's Shalador's Lady, which I've had for a while but haven't had the time to read. Spare minutes to read--unrelated to school--have been very rare, so I've been treasuring them over the last several days, not to mention treasuring the fact that I seem to have gotten over my reading slump that hit mid-May.

I won't go into a long review, but Shalador's Lady was excellent. I've always appreciated Bishop's world, which is a universe unto itself, and the novelty and detail does much to keep a reader's interest. It was definitely an A read. Checking out Anne Bishop's website, I discovered that she had just released Twilight's Dawn, another collection of novellas in the Black Jewels universe (following the first collection, Dreams Made Flesh).

And my brother had given me an Amazon gift certificate for my birthday....

So I ordered Twilight's Dawn and the first Linnea Sinclair's Dock Five novels, Gabriel's Ghost (as well as a cross-stitch pattern book, but that is neither here nor there). I could have bought Twilight's Dawn for my Kindle and saved two dollars, but to be honest, I didn't want to. Reading a real, physical book is so much better than an e-reader, and two dollars wasn't enough for me to give up the real book. So I'm looking forward to those being here in a few days.

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In other news, I had been contemplating a long post about writing, in general, but the more I think about it, the more I draw back from writing about writing. Odd, I know, considering that I'm a writing teacher, but I wasn't planning on talking about academic writing--I was going to talk about fiction writing.

But I keep not writing about it. I suppose I should just make myself write about it--force myself to become more comfortable talking about my writing process...but I can't. Anyone else have this problem?

Review: Finders Keepers by Linnea Sinclair

Sinclair, Linnea. Finders Keepers. New York: Bantam, 2008. Paperback. 2005. +453 pages. $6.99

I meant for this to be a review of In Too Deep and Quicksilver, but I picked up Finders Keepers at lunch today, and it was just dying for a review. So In Too Deep and Quicksilver will have to wait, because this was just too good not to review.

To be honest, I almost put it down when I picked it up. For several reasons. First of all, I had a sneaking suspicion that Sinclair had read too many Star Wars book. Why?

Well, the ship our heroine, Trilby Elliot, owns is called the Careless Venture. Now, Trilby makes some illegal runs. Her ship is falling apart. Doesn't sound like anything we know, right? Like a Imperial Star Destroyer that Booster Terrik conned out of Airen Cracken and renamed the Errant Venture?

Then there's this, the second paragraph of the book: "She bolted for her freighter's rampway. Overhead, a nest of sleeping bloodbats burst out of the rocky crevices like small, leathery missiles. The panicked bats spiraled in front of her. Screeching, they fled through the wide mouth of the cavern into the lavender twilight" (1).

That didn't remind me of a mynock at ALL. (I wish I could find the video from The Empire Strikes Back, but I gather that Lucasfilm allows no Star Wars material to survive on YouTube.) Then there's an overly talkative droid (spelled with an apostrophe before the word - 'droid- doubtless to also keep from ensuing the Wrath of Lucas who copyrighted the term "droid").

About seventy pages in, I declared to my husband that I wasn't sure that I could go on. There was too much "freighter lingo" that Sinclair was trying far too hard to get across. First, while a certain amount of lingo would be acceptable, we aren't short order cooks. Second, when I hear the word "trike," I don't think of a span of three days, and when I hear the word "deuce," I most certainly don't think of a two-day span. Surely, the Romance Writers of America had to be joking by naming this book as a finalist for the Best First Book prize, or 2006 had been particularly bereft of good first romance novels.

My husband convinced me to keep reading, at least just to enjoy how bad it was. So I kept on.

And realized that the book was actually pretty damn good.

Once you get past the lingo and the first Star Wars-like moments (not that there aren't other moments, but we'll get to those), what you have is a distinctively original (at least, I thought so, though there could be something else she's riffing on that I'm not familiar with) universe with a complicated power struggle. The plot is incredibly dense, so I won't outline it here, but I was impressed with the detail (including a new language, which does, at times, also become distracting, like the freighter lingo). And the romance was incredibly understated, which was somewhat confusing to me, given how this was marketed (as a paranormal/sci-fi romance). It was far more sci-fi than romance.

More than this, it was populated with very memorable secondary characters. The military officers that work for our hero, Rhis Vanur, are amazingly intricate in their own motivations and personalities, and I really wanted to know more about them (sometimes more than our heroine, though not our hero). I really felt drawn into this very detailed universe that Sinclair had created.

Mostly.

There were a few places where I was pulled out. One was another Star Wars reference: DZ-9 (Dezi), Trilby's droid, was blasted into pieces and put back together by Vanur. Dezi is C-3PO without a doubt:

"They made the first landing of stairs before Mitkanos could insert a comment. 'You built this 'droid, Tivahr?'

Rhis shook his head, grinning in spite of his pain. 'He's Trilby's. I was just putting him back together for her after he had a slight accident.'

Mitkanos grunted. 'Did you have to hook up his mouth?'" (418).

On the VERY NEXT PAGE, a 'Sko, an alien, who apparently doesn't speak Standard very well addresses Trilby, and we understand why her last name is Elliot. It's so Sinclair can make this joke:

"'El. Li. Ot'" (419).

Yes. That's right. It's an E.T. joke. It's an E.T. joke that was bad enough that it not only threw me out of the novel, but I got up from where I was sitting, came into the office, and pointed it out to my husband. Who immediately understood why I had gotten up.

Now. To be fair, I liked the book a lot. And it's clear that this was Sinclair's first novel, so I'm willing to be more forgiving that I might otherwise have been. And I decided that I definitely wanted to read more of her books, if for no other reason than to see what would happen in the universe she'd created. The events of the novel had to have repercussions, and I could see lots more happening.

So off I went to Sinclair's website. First of all, my comments regarding Jayne Ann Krentz's website stand? Sinclair's website could use an upgrade, as it was hard to navigate and needs some real design help. But imagine my disappointment when I discovered that Finders Keepers is the only novel Sinclair as written (at least as far as I understand) in this particular universe. She does have one series (known as Dock Five), but that's it. Everything else is a one-shot. And I do find that disappointing, because someone as gifted in world-creation as Sinclair is really needs to fully explore the universe they've created, and this one was particularly compelling.

I do intend to start Sinclair's Dock Five series when I have more time and money--since the Kindle version is the same price as the paperback (which infuriates me since there is no additional outlay for the publisher once the book is put into ebook format)--I will go get a hard copy. That way, when I get tired of them, I can make at least some small money from Half Price selling it back.

In the meantime, however, this hard copy is going to do something else hard copies are good for--and go visit our favorite Snarky Writer, as I'd like to see what she has to say about it.

Linnea Sinclair's Finders Keepers: B

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In other news, I would like to blame Snarky Writer for some of my confusion. Her recent posts on the internet traffic her blog gets caused me to look at mine for the first time. And I do not know where some of these links came from, and I cannot find links on those sites to my blog to discover! Arg!

I also have a post about writing that I'd like to put up, and of course, the upcoming reviews of In Too Deep and Quicksilver. But out of respect for everyone's news feeds, I'll leave it for another day.

Burning Lamp and Midnight Crystal Review

Quick, Amanda. Burning Lamp. New York: Jove, 2011. Paperback. +423 pages. $7.99.

Castle, Jayne. Midnight Crystal. New York: Jove, 2010. Paperback. +406 pages. $7.99.

I might call this review Jayne Ann Krentz, part 2. In any case, I'd been looking forward to these two books since I'd picked up Midnight Crystal earlier this week, and today, after completely and utterly bombing a 17th Century Poetry and Prose final, I decided it was about time to settle down with something fun to read and that wasn't going to make me crazy. So I picked up these two wonderful books and read them this afternoon. (Stop looking at me like that. Yes, I realize that I read faster than any human being alive. It's a survival trait among English majors.)

Burning Lamp gets a B. It's definitely above average, and quite a page turner. I didn't want to put it down and sped right through it. It was definitely a worthy follower to Fired Up and I appreciated the way that things were meshing together.

There are two main families competing in the Arcane Society. The Joneses, whose investigative branch, Jones and Jones, does much of the dirty work of policing the psychic community for the Arcane Society, and the Winterses, who often hold themselves outside of the psychic community. The Jones ancester, Sylvester, tried to supplement his psychic power through chemistry and something called the founder's formula, which has the lovely effect of making people who use it go crazy. The Winters ancester, Nicholas, decided dealing with metal and crystals through alchemy would be the way to do and he would destroy the Jones family. A curse goes down through his family, hitting generations here and there, and unless the heir can find the lamp and a woman who can work dreamlight energy (a special form of psychic energy), well, they're screwed.

The Dreamlight Trilogy (Fired Up, Burning Lamp, and Midnight Crystal) all have to do with Winters heirs and their individual searches for the lamp. Burning Lamp brings in some previous characters from other Arcane Society novels who play slightly more than a bit part, and gives a good look at the somewhat seedy underside of Victorian society. It's entertaining and page turning. There were a few places where I felt like the plot jumped ahead without any real logical reason--characters making assumptions that they really didn't have the information to make. Hence the B.

Midnight Crystal, however, gets an A. I'm giving it an A for one particular reason. Krentz's world of Harmony is one of the best exercises in world building I've seen in a romance novel. For those unfamiliar, Harmony is a world colonized by Earth, but which lost contact with the planet not long afterwards. There are alien ruins which put forth psychic energy--everyone on Harmony has some sort of psychic power which they can use through a substance they call amber. But some people on Harmony have an additional power that has been hinted at in books not affiliated with the Arcane Society--but which is the psychic power of the Arcane Society nonetheless. The story itself is fairly straightforward--Winters heir looking for the lamp and the dreamlight reader being a Jones. The plot fairly writes itself. But there is a lot of humor involved.

Part of this humor comes from the world-building. Each book, we discover something new about the alien civilization that once lived on Harmony long before humans arrived and who left lots of psychic ruins. We also learn more about the intricate society Harmony developed in its separation from Earth, including an interesting way to deal with marriages, and a complicated Guild system that operates outside of the government with extraordinary power due to their members' ability to shut down energy storms known as "ghosts." It follows its own rules regarding psychic energy--use too much and you have between an hour and a half hour before you conk out dead asleep to recharge.

But the best humor comes from the dust bunnies.

Well, here. Watch this trailer for one of Krentz's other Harmony novels, Silver Master.

First of all....aren't they CUTE? Second, the dust bunnies aren't only cute. They're also devious little troublemakers who pick out their own people. You don't go to the pet store and get a dust bunny. A dust bunny finds you and decides you belong to it. They're also hunters. When danger comes around, their fur flattens out, their first set of eyes (which are blue) close and their second set open (amber). And they can get mean.

They also have their own distinct personalities. Some like to dress up. Others don't. They like to entertain others. Each of the Harmony books, however, ends on the book's dust bunny doing something hysterical. In the case of Midnight Crystal, Gibson, Marlowe's dust bunny, steals energy bars out of the cookie jar and distributes them to all of his dust bunny friends. Then he takes the wrappers and collects them. Because they're shiny.

How do you not love that?

Perhaps I am a little biased. But the dust bunnies are hilarious, and they alone are worth buying the book. But Midnight Crystal also tied up several loose ends quite neatly, ended up with a great romance, and again, was an absolute page-turner.

I know I've railed against some paranormal books before, most notably Catherine Coulter's KnockOut. Here's the difference. Krentz actively markets her books now as paranormal. If you pick up a book that says it's an Arcane Society novel, you know what you're getting into. There hasn't been a massive change from one series to another. Characters who were quite mundane aren't suddenly showing up as psychics. That's why this works--we expect it, so disbelief is suspended at the beginning of the book, not halfway through. It's why Janet Evanovich can get away with her Between-the-Numbers Stephanie Plum novels--we expect those to be a little kooky (not that the regular Stephanie Plum novels aren't kooky, but these are kooky in a paranormal way).

Anyway, it's getting late. Final grades:

Burning Lamp - B
Midnight Crystal - A

And on to In Too Deep. I can't wait to get started.

Author Websites

I have to say, author websites with clear demarcations of what books are in what series are delightful.

Case in point? Jayne Ann Krentz's website.

Let me back up a moment. I haven't written in a while because I've been inundated with a 17th Century Poetry and Prose class that has been taking up quite a lot of attention and most of my time. While I've read a great deal (and learned a surprising amount about alchemy and John Donne), I haven't had time for anything fun, and my recent acquisition of Midnight Crystal (written under one of Krentz's pseudonyms, Jayne Castle) meant (I thought) that I had all three of the Dreamlight trilogy books and I could happily settle down to read an entire trilogy. I had In Too Deep (Jayne Ann Krentz), Burning Lamp (Amanda Quick) and the aforementioned Midnight Crystal. (Jayne Ann Krentz is the author of all, but each name connotes something different. Krentz is contemporary, Quick is historical, and Castle is sci-fi/fantasy. All of it is romance.)

I picked up In Too Deep ready to dig in when I noticed a little phrase on the front: "Book One of The Looking Glass Trilogy." It is, indeed, an Arcane Society novel. It's just not the one I was looking for. Off to the site I went, where I happily discovered that the first book in the Dreamlight trilogy was Fired Up, which I've already read. (I thought the dreamlight stuff was vaguely familiar!) A website that is well ordered (especially when the author is juggling three different pseudonyms) is delightful.

So, I have two books in the Dreamlight trilogy to read, the first of the Looking Glass trilogy, and the second in Looking Glass is out--the third will be out at the end of August and since it's written under Jayne Castle, it should be in paperback. I'm thinking that the Amazon gift certificate my brother gave me for my birthday may go towards Quicksilver (Amanda Quick).

After my last post, I was kind of bummed out about reading, but something about having several book to read (or thinking I had all the books in a series) means that I have something to genuinely look foward to. Since I'm also reading Pamela (and oh, there will be an epic post on how much this book frustrates me later) and need to start The Ambassadors for my American expatriates class because Henry James is SO long-winded, something light and fluffy is called for.

Also important to note what is coming out/has come out recently. Kim Harrison's came out in February, and I didn't know about it until my favorite Snarky Writer published a review of it. (Did you buy it for your Nook or did you buy a hardcopy, because I'd like to borrow it if the latter is true?) Also this month, Timothy Zahn's Choices of One and Jim Butcher's Ghost Story. I can barely wait. Lots of fun reading ahead, and I hope I can get some of it done before things get crazy this summer again.