Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

Book Rant: Guess This Book!

I received the following book rant from Nali, and it's totally over The Top and back down the other side of The Top and climbing back up again. But this time - there is book rant challenge! I challenge you to guess which book this is? I'll give you a hint: it was published in the late 70s, and when I read this, I remembered reading it, and remembered the highfalutin' hilarity therein. Hang on, folks. It's wild. 

I am so glad I found your site this week. The timing, it was Serendipitous, falling into place with the convenient ease and grace of a pregnant amnesiac stumbling into the exact worse assumptions on the part of the nearest hot man. Because, otherwise, I would RIGHT THIS MOMENT be interrupting Mr. Man's weekend-gaming-relaxation-time to rant and scream about the complete and utter, aneurysm-bursting RIDICULOUSNESS of the book I picked up at the thrift store today. Since that would mean he had to take his headphones out, and they are the only things drowning out the fact that the cat is in heat… read more »

WTFlorida? Brevard County Libraries Remove 19 Copies of 50 Shades from Circulation

WTFery of the morning, as reported by Dianna Dilworth on GalleyCat: Brevard County Public Libraries in Florida have pulled their 19 copies of 50 Shades of Grey from the shelves.

Why?

HuffPo has a quote from Don Walker, a spokesman for the library, who said, "it's semi-porgnographic." The HuffPo article indicated that several other libraries in Florida had refused to purchase copies, but Brevard bought 19, then took them out of circulation, sending notices to the 200 or so people on a waiting list.

Library services director Cathy Schweinsberg told Florida Today: Nobody asked us to take it off the shelves. But we bought some copies before we realized what it was. We looked at it, because it’s been called ‘mommy porn’ and ‘soft porn.’ We don’t collect porn.”

Brevard County Public Libraries don't collect porn. But since there's no established definition of what porn is, particularly for a library, I took a closer look at their collection to ascertain the items within their collection that I knew included sexually explicit… read more »

A Few Notes on Submitting for Review

I receive many requests for review daily. This is probably not a surprise. It increases with each review we do, particularly if I review a self published romance. I've begun to notice a pattern with the requests, and so I put together this list of tips to address them.

Here are a few hints on submitting for review here:

1. I don't accept every book pitched to me, nor do I guarantee a review.

1.5. We review romance fiction, with the occasional, and I mean occasional, diversion into novels with a strong romantic element, or nonfiction that might appeal to romance readers. I am partial to most sub-genres of romance with the exception of romantic suspense. Carrie S is all about fantasy and science fiction romance, and we both make the occasional foray into nonfiction. RedHeadedGirl reads the old skool classics, both awesome and crazysauce. But the majority of what we review here is romance. Not thrillers, spy comedies, books about investing, or nonfiction biographies of slain world leaders. 

Book Rant: Iris Johansen’s The Bronzed Hawk

Contining the theme of Book Rants, books that really, REALLY pissed a reader off, I bring you Leslie, who picked up a re-issue of a book originally published in the 80s, and found it to be jaw-dropping horrible angry-making. Sometimes it's the nonsensical plots, and other times, it's sexism, racism, stereotypes, and complete asshattery. When a romance lets a reader down, the result can be epic. 

Book: The Bronzed Hawk by Iris Johansen Originally published: 1983, Bantam Loveswept Reprint edition: 2011, Bantam Loveswept

And now: here's Leslie. Grab a drink and settle in, y'all. 

Iris Johansen wrote the second historical romance novel I ever read – The Magnificent Rogue [Goodreads | Amazon | BN | Sony | Kobo | All Romance eBooks]. And I freaking love that book. Love that book, like, its permanent home is on my nightstand. Other than my Kindle free downloads, my other favorite place to find books is browsing the library shelves. And when I saw what I figured was a reissued contemporary romance by Johansen, I WAS SO EXCITED! Something just clicked (because other than her… read more »

Jane Eyre Vs Wuthering Heights Smackdown - A Guest Entry by CarrieS

This guest entry from CarrieS is in honor of Charlotte Bronte's birthday, which was last weekend, 21 April. 

OK, Bitches, this is it.  In honor of Charlotte Brontë's birthday (April 21, 1816), it's time to fulfill my long-time goal of establishing what I believe may be a universal truth:

You cannot passionately, deeply, own-multiple-copies-of, take-to-a-desert-island-as-your-one-book, love both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.  Love one, hate the other.  That's the deal.  You may appreciate the quality of the writing in both books and their historical significance, but on a visceral level you will love only one.

How have I come to this conclusion?  Well, to start with, I currently own at least three copies of Jane Eyre, one of which is wrapped in plastic and stored with my earthquake survival kit (along with a copy of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, in case you're wondering.).  Jane is my role model, my friend, my faithful companion and guiding light.  On the other hand, I've read Wuthering Heights three times out of a perverse sense of duty to Literature, and I… read more »

Plagiarism and The Story Siren

In a series of links that dropped my jaw, made me shake my head, and feel a boatload of "Oh, No," here's an eyeopening series on how to catch someone stealing your content online, which was posted today by CuddleBuggery  after Katiebabs saw an anonymous link on this older post on plagarism.

The follow posts are from January 2012, and I'm not sure why the book blogging community wasn't aware of it until now. 

Kristi Diehm, better known as The Story Siren, was allegedly caught lifting articles about blogging and making minimal changes to them for her site. Bloggers B from Beautifully Invisible and Vahni from Grit and Glamour found the evidence and confronted her about it. Their entire story is like a master tutorial on how to use analytics to identify who is reading a website, and when - and in this case, possibly why.

Part the first: Beautifully Invisible is plagiarized, and figures out who it is, where they came from, and what they looked at.

Part the second: Grit & Glamour explains options for dealing with similar circumstances,… read more »

Book Rants: Killer Temptation, Part Deux

By popular demand, here's more of Pig reading Killer Temptation [Goodreads | Amazon | BN | Sony | Kobo | HQN | All Romance eBooks], from chapter two, all the way through… chapter four!

Pig: OH HAI. It's me again. This book keeps blowing my mind hole.

----- Kindle Loc 337:

When she'd first gotten this assignment she'd been more than a little nervous because her boss had told her the owner, Sean Guthrie, was a personal friend of his. He'd also said Guthrie never, ever did anything halfway, so he expected the place to be knock-your-socks-off fabulous. Zoe had interpreted his enthusiasm to mean she'd better come in with a high rating or she could kiss her promotion to the A-Team goodbye. -----

Three words for you: Quid. Pro. Quo.

Two more: Mr. T.

-----

But Zoe had always been scrupulously honest in her evaluations. She didn't plan to change that, not even for a personal friend of the boss. So, inwardly she'd been terrified the Indigo Inn wouldn't match up to her… read more »

Book Rants: Killer Temptation

Every now and again, I receive exceptionally irate and often hilarious email messages from readers who are in the middle of a romance that is so WTFCRAZY they cannot keep it to themselves. And then my inbox is splodey with the awesome, and I love it.

The book rants are epic. When we romance fans pick up a book that drives us bonkers with the WAT?, it can get ferociously funny. So I have a new feature for those of us who love the WTF books so very much - and there's absolutely an audience for crazysauce books. I know there is: I'm in it! When a book falls off the bad spectrum and, powered by the sheer propulsion of crazysauce on fire, circles back around to WOW AWESOME, it's a beautiful thing. Where would we be without the excellency that is crazysauce romance? I'd be miserable - I love books like these, which amplify the silly with excellent crazy and bring on the fun.

So here's our first… read more »

Romance, Arousal, and Condescension

The media courage of 50 Shades continues, long and frequently enough that there are some themes emerging. One fantastic example: mommy porn.

In two words, there are a lot of things wrong with Mommy Porn. Add to that "Mommy's naughty reader" and the rhetoric that women are ashamed of their erotic reading material and thus buy and read it digitally, as the Wall Street Journal suggested yesterday, means that the shame-wagging-finger gets bigger.

I have a different finger to use in reply. It's the middle one.

Romance has struggled with the pornography label for a long time. And I give the middle finger to that label as well. I'm sure you've heard it: "romance is porn for women!"

There's a lot of things wrong with that statement, too, almost as much as "Mommy porn." I realize this is a long ass entry, so if you read only two sentences, let it be these:

Romance is not porn for women.

Porn is porn for women.

There is nothing… read more »

A Description of Nipples

I did a lot of vacation reading last week, and one thing that jumped out at me (not literally but if it had been it would have been awesome) is the relentless pursuit of cliches when describing nipples.

I'm sure you know what I'm talking about here: there's a sexy scene, and the characters undress. The sex scene - which is, it seems to me, more often from the male point of view than the female - includes a catalog description of the heroine's body.

First, I don't know why there's a need for a list of descriptions for each part, particularly the breasts. There are times when I see the catalog of naked parts and skim right over it, because it seems necessary only because the reader might need to be reminded THEY ARE NAKED NOW SEE THE NIPPLES?

Kay Manning, Peyton Bradshaw, Kristal Singletary, and Plagiarism

Since January there's been coverage of plagiarism on Amazon, with folks self-publishing works in the public domain or copying works by other authors, slapping their own names on them, and selling them.

NPR and FastCompany covered the problem in January regarding plagiarised works - including in one case a word-for-word copy of Dracula - posted as "erotica" - which tends to sell rather briskly.

One issue is that even if Amazon responds and removes the content, the onus is on the author who was plagiarized to seek any damages. From this article at Appazoogle:

Just to give you one more recent example, Elise Bauer, food blogger at Simply Recipes, discovered that her recipes and photos had been stolen and repackaged as an ebook through Amazon’s Kindle store. After complaining, Amazon informed Bauer that they unlisted the book, but if she believed she was entitled to compensation by the guilty parties, it was up to her to take action. Well, no wonder people are angry. For someone who never submitted her content to Amazon in the first place, why is the onus on her to play avenger? And apparently, according to the Bauer article, it is pretty… read more »

RSS FEED ALERT: Please Update Your Feeds

If you are reading this in a RSS reader, this entry is for you.

Feedburner has stopped updating entries automatically, and the only way it refreshes the feed is for me to go and do so manually. Most mornings I can do that, which is why you might notice entries that went live around midnight appearing around 8-9am Eastern time. Sometimes I can't, which is why you'll notice that sometimes four or five entries appear at once - and you've missed something, for which I apologize a LOT.

Reader Shaming

Another day, another article about genre fiction, including romance, selling quite happily in digital format. And the reason?

Wait for it….

Reader embarrassment!

Kindle-owning bibliophiles are furtive beasts. Their shelves still boast classics and Booker winners. But inside that plastic case, other things lurk. Sci-fi and self-help. Even paranormal romance, where vampires seduce virgins and elves bonk trolls.

The ebook world is driven by so-called genre fiction, categories such as horror or romance. It's not future classics that push digital sales, but more downmarket fare.

Lovely. 

Here's the thing:

I hear from many readers weekly that they do feel embarrassment about their love of romance. Sometimes they are conflicted about finding that their feelings of loving what they read are at cross-purposes with their feelings of dislike or even revulsion when they identify problematic elements within it. Others say they feel shame and embarrassment about what other people say or think about the romance genre, or better yet, the people who read it.

The people who write to me about these subjects do not ever, and I mean EVER, include a statement that they are embarrassed because they are reading books… read more »

Romance Writers Ink Contest: An Exercise in Discrimination

Late last night, links and fiery tweets went around about Romance Writers, Ink, an Oklahome-based chapter of the RWA. They've stated  that for the 2012 "More than Magic" competition for published writers, they will "no longer accept same-sex entries in any category."

Way to be bigoted!

Book Format Prejudice and eBook Sales

First: NEWS! Which isn't new news, but I'm still thinking about it. 

Literary god Jonathan Franzen decided that ebooks are horrible and immoral and paper books have a tangible longevity that is superior to digital.

Yeah, whatever. Here's my question: I think there needs to be a term for book format prejudice, and it works both ways. There are snide comments made about paper by ebook lovers, and equally snide Franzenesque comments about digital from those who prefer paper. Folks who like audiobooks also report snide comments, so there has to be a term to sum them all up, one that's as inclusive and descriptive as possible. I mean, do people grouse about large-print books being for all those amoral people who can't see the .8 font size of a mass market paperback? It's ridiculous.

Theresa Romain suggested Bookotry, a pastiche of "book" and "bigotry." I also like Book Bigot.

Heather Ponzer suggested Printist, and comments like Franzens would then be labeled Printentious.

Llmysticowl suggested Biblioformist.

Maggie Robinson suggested Page Rage, which also works. And Tina suggests Biblio-biased.

What do you think? What would be a good term for the cross-format prejudice?