The champion of the DABWAHA has been decided!
Congratulations and confetti to Abigail Roux, winner of the 2013 DABWAHA, with her book Stars & Stripes!
Special awesomeness: in celebration, Riptide Publishing is offering 30% off backlist titles, and 50% editor's choice titles from today until 19 April, so if you're curious about the winning book, or any of their other titles, stock up now!
Congratulations to the author, and to Riptide, who promoted the hell out of the final, and to our DABWAHA Bracket Champion, Vi!
Vi had the mostest-correctest bracket of all, predicting not only the winning book, but the championship duel, and three-quarters of the Final Four with a 79% accurate pick percentage. Vi, got any lottery numbers?
Did you read Stars & Stripes? The publisher's warning of “explicit violence” warned me off, but I'd love to know what you liked about it.
Thank you to everyone who played along, and we'll see you next year for DABWAHA 2014.
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Also worth celebrating? This piece of awesomeness from Ron Charles at the Washington Post. Charles is the editor to whom I report when I submit my romance roundups for the Post's book section. I feel like I'm working with a freaking rock star now. Get a load of this, sent to me by Pam G:
Link!
I don't quite know what to do with myself. I didn't think he could top his EL James Person of the Year video, but wow.
Now I want bacon.
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The schedule has been published for the 2013 BEA Book Blogger Con, so if you're a book blogger and you're headed to BEA, I hope you'll join in.
I'm part of a panel at 11:15 titled “Adult Book Blogging Pros: Successes, Struggles and Insider Secrets,” with Jim C. Hines, Mandy from Smexybooks, and Rebecca Schinsky from Book Lady's Blog. I hope Jim comes in heels. HE BETTER. I mean, it IS called “ADULT book blogging, right?”
Heh.
Jane from Dear Author is on the advisory board for this year's conference, and the schedule looks really spiffy. It's enough to tempt me to enter the Javits Center, and that takes quite a lot of enticement. The Javits is like hell made of cement.
Are you going to BEA? Are you going to the blogger con? I hope you'll introduce yourself if so!
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io9 posted an amazing collection of photographs of Abandoned Antarctic Whaling Stations and Bases that are completely freaking eerie. The best part?
You can do a Google Street View tour of Shackleton's Hut – COMPLETE WITH REVIEWS:
Quality Poor to fair
It was obvious from our first few minutes in the room that the housekeeping staff had not been by since the departure of the last guest. There was only one towel in the bathroom, which had the consistency and odor of an unlaundered beaver pelt. The minibar was stocked with plenty of Moir's Minced Beef, a serviceable-enough snack… but with no microwave in the room, how do they expect us to eat it?
Let this be a lesson to everyone: NOTHING is immune from reviews. Not Bic for Her pens, and not abandoned Antarctic huts from 1909. To quote Macklemore, “This is fucking awesome.”
I love you, The Internet. Let's be friends forever.
Totally random aside—a few years ago I went to the Red Cross to get CPR trained. In the class, everyone said why they were getting trained. Most were elderly care givers or Red Cross volunteers. One woman said she needed to know CPR because she was going to Antarctica.
Turns out she was a museum curator and was going to Antarctica to curate the remains of the Scott expedition. So it’s cool to see some of her work!
I know where I want to go on my next vacation! (The ridiculous thing is that I’m completely serious.)
It’s pretty awesome that Stars and Stripes won the DABWAHA. Seems like it got a little crazy.
As for the book itself, I didn’t think the violence was that explicit (but this is in comparison to the Bourne Identity, which I just finished); I think they’re a bit more action/adventure, with a little procedure thrown in.
I really enjoy the series, which means that I try extra hard not to squee when recommending it. The writing is a bit rough in the first few books, but greatly improved in the 3rd? and more recently. (I think we had talked about rating plot and writing separately before; definitely do that for book 1, and I promise it gets better.) The characterization is still a bit inconsistent at times; despite that, the characters are one of the best parts of the series. They’re engaging, funny, annoying, and everything really great characters are. I love mysteries and action/adventure type stories, and these books are really great at it. I actually thought the plot of Stars and Stripes was one of the weaker in the series, but there was a lot of character advancement and development. And, the newest book, #7, Touch and Geaux came out yesterday, and I’ve heard lots of good things about it.
Loved the video – but had the opposite reaction to the bacon! No bacon for awhile after seeing that.
I only read the first book in the series, which struck me as mediocre (ridiculous plot, annoyingly poor writing)—glad to hear the writing improves over the series.
More positively, I just read another book by Abigail Roux, According to Hoyle, which was thoroughly preposterous but a lot of fun. It was the sort of historical that people prone to potato rage should avoid, I just pretended it was taking place in an alternate universe. Two content warnings, there’s quite a lot of violence including sexual assault, and it ends with the romantic plot resolved but the adventure plot not, with the sequel not announced yet. I could recommend it for someone looking for a fast-paced switch-off-your-brain tale with very entertaining characters.
Dear Ron Charles,
I adore You. You’re welcome.
-CarrieS
The bacon looked better on Scalzi’s cat, but I got the biggest charge out of the cookbooks bound with the “hides of independent book store owners” and the Soylent Green reference.
FYI – the Riptide sale goes until the 15th, not the 19th. And I’m psyched about the sale – even though I wasn’t going to buy anymore books this month.
For people looking for recs – I’ve read two of the 50% off books – Skyfall by Aleksandr Voinoiv and Frat Boy and Toppy by Anne Tenino (either reviewed here or at DA) and they’re both great, in completely different ways. Skyfall is set in Germany, at the end of WWII – the hero is a Germanic mechanic secretly (and then not so secretly) in love with a German pilot. And it really works. At least it worked for me.
Quick pimp for other riptide books on sale for 30% – Country Mouse by Amy Lane and Alekandr Voinoiv, Incursion by Aleksandr Voinoiv (space opera with aliens!), Quid Pro Quo by LA Witt and Aleksandr Voinoiv (hot rent boys having hot sex – not usually my thing, but the whole series works for me) and Love, Hypothetically by Anne Tenino.
Not romance related, but Shackleton related, I listened to the book The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition by Caroline Alexander and it was AWESOME!!! Alexander, who generally writes true adventure stories, is one of my favorite nonfiction writers and this books is full of heroism under the most extreme conditions.
Oh! Oh! Ask Jim how the latest book is coming along. I would also like to know what he’s wearing this spring.