It’s time for the most wonderfully fun and expensive monthly thread, where we ask about what you’re reading, tell you about what we’re enjoying, and then we all buy too many books – HA!
Kidding. Like there’s such a thing has having too many books. PSHAW.
I’m currently not reading a romance – SHOCKING I KNOW – but it’s finally spring and I’m about to go dive into my back yard and kiss every blade of grass. The forsythia is blooming, the bleeding heart is growing so fast I should be able to see it grow taller with my naked eye, and I’m finally able to start working on my Straw Bale Garden.
Straw Bale Gardens by Joel Karsten was a Kindle Daily Deal awhile back, in the middle of winter, about the time where we had 14-too-many inches of snow and I was reading the bulb and seed catalog like it was pornography. Straw Bale Gardens is about…vegetable gardening inside a straw bale, which is conditioned with fertilizer and creates a sterile and perfect environment for a vegetable garden as it slowly turns into compost over the course of the summer.
Since I have not-great clay- and rock-filled soil, and a surfeit of wild animals in my yard, my vegetable gardening results have been consistently poor. We’ve got deer – see at right, the very large buck looking for my very small vegetables – and squirrels and chipmunks and mice and probably some garden gnomes bogarting my vegetables. Last year I harvested two whole strawberries and one tomato. They were freaking delicious, but I want more.
The book explains why straw bales work, how to condition them, how to set up plastic then net shields for them, where to plant what crops and how to reseed for additional harvests, and makes it seem very easy and doable. One of my favorite parts is the frequent advice and explanations of how to “work smarter, not harder.” I will have TWO tomatoes this year, people!
So that’s what I’m reading – over and over, to make sure I get it right. I have TWO TOMATO GOALS, you see. Game on, Mr. Deer.
Amanda: I’m reading:
Ripped by Edie Harris ( A | K | G | AB ) – I really disliked Chandler in the first book so I’m really interested in seeing how Harris makes me empathize with the heroine.
Come as You Are by Emily Nagoski – I’M LEARNING SO MANY NEW THINGS. My roommates might be tired of me giving them fun facts about hymens.
Asking for It by Lilah Pace ( A | BN | K | AB ) – Some of the SBs and I have already mentioned how interested and cautious we are. I’m nervous, but excited to read it.
RedHeadedGirl: I’m reading Beauty and the Rake by Erica Monroe, and My Lady Vixen by Connie Mason ( A ).
Beauty and the Rake is really interesting, and a full review will be forthcoming. I like how she’s weaving in threads from the Disney animated and the original La Belle et Le Bete and turning themes on their heads.
My Lady Vixen is fucking crazysauce and involves a scarlet-pimpernelling hero who’s only getting away with it because everyone around him is REALLY DUMB and also he’s a pirate.
Amanda:
Speaking of scarlet pimpernels…I loved that book, but this is my favorite review of how bad it is.
RedHeadedGirl:
One of the hilarious easter eggs in the most recent season of Downton was that Richard C. Grant played an art collector who had mad love for Lady Grantham.
They played Lord and Lady Blakeney in the not-great 1990s tv miniseries Scarlet Pimpernel.
Elyse:
I’m reading Broken by Cynthia Eden ( A | K | G | AB | Au ). Amnesia! A serial killer! Jinkies!
I’m also listening to The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert. She talks about the five large extinction events in geological history and the fact that we’re currently in the 6th due to human expansion. It’s fascinating but a little morbid.
Carrie:
Oh, Sixth Extinction is on my TBR. As to what I’m really reading, I’m about halfway through Grave Phantoms by Jenn Bennett.
Next up is Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen of course, which I plan to read in conjunction with the commentary in Bitch in a Bonnet by Robert Rodi because I love to argue with him in my head.
So what about you? What are you enjoying or putting aside right now? Whatcha reading?
Shopping note:
After a Whatcha Reading? discussion, Lisa M emailed me to ask if I could link the books mentioned in the comments to the various retailers to make shopping a little easier. I wish I could! But I can drop some retailer links for you right here, so that if you feel like shopping, you can select your preferred retailer. Some of these links are affiliate-enabled, and SBTB receives a percentage commission from purchases made. If you use them, many thanks. If you don’t want to us them, no worries, mate! (And if your preferred retailer isn’t here, let me know and I’ll add it for you if I can!)
Oh yeah, I also read and enjoyed the first installment in Penny Reid’s Elements of Chemistry. It wasn’t quite what I expected but I enjoyed it, though I don’t generally like episodic stuff and don’t seek out NA as a genre.
Speaking of NA, I started, stopped, and finally finished L. H. Cosway’s Hearts of Fire. It was o.k. It’s a companion piece to Six of Hearts which I really hated. The hero of the latter is such a controlling douche and all the illusionist fol-de-rol can’t redeem his treatment of the heroine. Jack, in Hearts of Fire, has his quirks and Lille, her drippy moments, but they never descend to the depths of Jay and what’s-her-name. There is at least one more connected book about a character introduced in Hearts, but I don’t see how it will be NA. I will be happy if it aspires to the quality of Cosway’s earlier contemporaries.
I read a lot this past month….
I’ve mostly been reading books that were recommended here! Let’s see, what else? A Kristan Higgins just popped up on Overdrive from my library, which was a quick and easy read: In Your Dreams. I’m enjoying the heck out of Victoria Alexander’s The Importance of Being Wicked and I have the first of the Gaslight Chronicles open on my Kindle at the moment.
By the way, those hay bale gardens are amazing. I have a friend down NJ way who is on her third year of doing this and she has fantastic results. Good luck keeping the deer at bay. Up here we mostly have rabbits and bears.
It’s been a weird reading month for me, as yesterday was the last day of my master’s program and I’ve been running around finishing things up for that. Nevertheless, I did enjoy Patricia Briggs’ Hunting Ground and Tessa Dare’s Say Yes to the Marquess. Entering into a couple of months of light TA work before I go back into the office full time, so I’m planning on reading all the books I’ve been putting off for the last 3 years!
I finished KMM’s Fever series this month, reading Faefever, Dreamfever and Shadowfever. The 3rd and 4th books are my favorite. I thought Dreamfever was overly long and convuluted, but ultimately very satisfying because it answered so many questions. I’m refusing to read Iced or Burned because I have a feeling they will annoy me and the series will never end. I’m good where it ended.
I read Dirty Rowdy Thing which I loved even more than Sweet Filthy Boy. Christina Lauren has become a must read for me. Their Beautiful Bastard series is on Scribd, so I read the first one. Even though it was “hate fucking” by the midway point I was in, because… Christina Lauren. I’ll read more of that series until Dark Wild Night comes out in September. September. Ugh. But it now has a cover on goodreads!! (Yes. I’m that excited.)
Read Reaper’s Property because Joanna Wylde gets so much love, but I don’t think I’m into MC books. They’re not just “bad boys” who, like, smoke or are brutally honest. They’re… bad.
After reading that I wanted to read about nice people falling in love, so I read Instant Gratification. I loved Instant Attraction (and yes SB Sarah, I want to learn to snowboard now!), but this second in the series was only ‘meh.’ The heroine really annoyed me. Why not have an affair with him?
On Dublin Street was very close to being a DNF, until about 45% in, then somehow it got really good, and I totally enjoyed it, really cared about the characters. Thinking of checking out the 3rd in the series (the 2nd features Johanna from the first book. I didn’t really like her).
I usually alternate my romances: a contemporary, then an UF/PNR, then an historical, then back to contemporary, but lately I just haven’t wanted to read historicals. I loved the Madness of Lord Ian McKenzie, but I had to DNF Lady Isabella’s Scandalous Marriage. I just didn’t care. I did really enjoyed The Earl’s Mistress. It includes mild (is it just me?) BDSM which a lot of Liz Carlyle readers seemed to be pissed about. But this was the first thing I’ve read by her so I wasn’t shocked (shocked! I say). Although dear god the familial relations in that book were insane. And she kept explaining how everyone was related and I still don’t understand.
I really just want to read contemporaries now. I’m about to finish up The Deal and will probably start The Hook-Up next, and then Beautiful Stranger, oh and Chase Me keeps catching my eye. They’re all on Scribd. I said last month I would continue the Scribd subscription but now I’m thinking I won’t. My tbr list is already so long, do I really need all of this? So much pressure! Also, will I want to read any new adult ever again after reading all these?
Oh! Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. I’m reading a few “routines” a day. Fascinating.
Happy Reading!
I’m currently reading As Kinky as You Wanna Be: Your Guide to Safe, Sane and Smart BDSM by Shanna Germain (and others). However, this may be put on the back burner when Anne Rice’s BEAUTY’S KINGDOM comes out this Tuesday. Yes, there is a theme here…
Not a lot of reading this month; best hands-down was Slow River by Nicola Griffith: character-centered science fiction with a lyrical, complex unfolding of emotional depths and a really compelling main character.
I also read My Beautiful Enemy by Sherry Thomas (I would have liked some more assurance at the end that the heroine grew beyond her extreme insecurity: I totally understood why she tried to kill the hero when he left her but it’s not a good basis for a long-term relationship if she doesn’t improve!)
Also Lock In by John Scalzi, political science fiction about disability and transhuman technology that raises a lot of issues but is a little underdeveloped.
Also an old classic from 1814, Peter Schlemihl: a somewhat odd and mysterious story about a man who sells his shadow.
Still reading On Grief and Grieving by Kubler Ross and Kessler but it’s such a sensitive subject that it’s taken me six weeks to get a third of the way through. I highly recommend this book.
Also read Tool and Prick by Paige which were good stepbrother romances. Fairly predictable but some great sarcasm and fighting.
Next up is finishing Dead Heat by Briggs and Kevin Hearne’s Shattered.
I read The Secrets of Richard Kenworthy. I read the first few chapters, then skimmed and skipped parts of the middle section and then read about the last 4 chapters. I am fine with that and consider it done.
I read the The Shadow and the Star plus Flowers from the Storm by Laura Kinsdale. They were intense and I plan on reading more of her books but need a break. I wish she had epilogues as I would to have some follow up on where the characters are in 5 or 10 years.
I finished The Never Ending Sacrifice by Una McCormack. It’s a Star Trek DS9 novel and sort of had a Cardassian romance in it. Then it was on to Hell on Wheels by Sue Ann Jaffarian. It’s part of the Odelia Grey series and I find them to be a nice comfy read.
I am currently reading Dreaming Spies by Laurie R King, Crimson Angel by Barbara Hambly, and A Knight in Shining Armor by Jude Deveraux. Crimson Angel is the newest Benjamin January mystery and Rose, Ben, and Hannibal go to Cuba and Haiti. I love this series. My history nerd needs are very well met. In Dreaming of Spies we get to find out what Russel and Holmes did in Japan. I have read all of the Russell/Holmes series and hope this one is an improvement over the last two. I read A Night in Shining Armor when it originally came out and wanted to revisit it. I remember it as an ok book but not anything special.
I got Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography by Laura Ingalls Wilder for my birthday and have been looking through it too. It has so much information in it and I love to read all the notes.
I have a complicated relationship with The Scarlet Pimpernel books. The black and white movie and the 1982 one I adore (it was my first exposure to Ian McKellen, even), and the musical was my first great theater love, but the books… I have this thing where I keep rereading them occasionally but usually wind up snarking them all the way through. Then sometimes I try to write fanfic that unfucks the history and come to the conclusion that it’s just too fucked up to be unfuckable.
Just finished reading The Fantasy Maker by Emily Kendricks. Loved it! Great balance of Romance, drama, action and trashiness! I highly recommend this one. I can’t find any additional books by Kendricks so I’m assuminging that this is her first. She hit it out of the ball park!
I pulled a couple of late-nighters with a historical/mystery series by Kris Tualla. The first book is called “A Discreet Gentleman of Discovery” and is on sale for .99! It takes place in Norway in the 1720’s, and the hero is deaf. He was disinherited in favor of a younger brother because of his disability, although he communicates quite well between sign language, writing, and lip-reading. He has established himself as a private investigator and is trying to save up enough money to buy his own estate, and also solve some murders along the way. The heroine has an estate, but as the story opens her husband has bankrupted her with his gambling and opium addiction. Really original setting and a squee-worthy hero, I just finished book 2 and it’s a foregone conclusion that I am going to gobble all of them up.
I also had to spend some time curating my wishlists; added a bunch of stuff to my Scribd library and deleted them from Amazon and Paperbackswap.
@Julia, most of Liz Carlyle’s books are not a series, but they interconnect via a network of characters that are related by blood, marriage or friendships. Yeah, there are some hella dysfunctional families in there! So if you read her earlier books, you’ll figure out who’s who. And they’re all worth reading, her writing quality is top-notch. I thought the BDSM in The Earl’s Mistress was pretty light too, I liked it a lot.
Welp, finished Liar Temptress Soldier Spy last night. It was a little weird for me, because the Kindle ticker at the bottom said that I was 65% of the way done and had two hours worth of reading to go, but the book was over. Weird.
I then started The Liar by Nora Roberts, because why not, but am only about 10 pages because Nap, two episodes of Gilmore Girls, one GoT, and a Daredevil. I watched a lot of TV today. Bad reader.
I finished the first Nalini Singh Archangel book “Angels’ Blood”. Interesting setup but struggled with the pacing, especially interweaving the plot vs the attraction between the two. Definitely darker and didn’t flinch from showing the brutality of the paranormal life, although I did shake my head with “And this is a *romance*?” sometimes. Knowing there are further books with this couple may temper that, but it was disappointing considering how much everyone seems to like Singh’s books.
Not sure what’s next. Library book sale was this weekend and I actually knew romance authors this time to look for, so I have an interesting pile to choose from.
I met Susanna Kearsley yesterday via her book tour, and she was lovely and signed my copy of “The Winter Sea”, the May issue of RT Book Reviews, and the copy of “A Desperate Fortune” that I purchased on-site. 🙂 Naturally, this prompted a re-read of “The Winter Sea” that led to my being awake at midnight, unwilling to put the book down, 265+ pages into the story. I was in a book slump…. but no longer. 😀
At this point, it’s mostly going to be reading for research-paper-writing purposes. A couple more weeks until the end of the semester. I can make it…. 0.0
Something I read and really, really liked this month was Time Served by Julianna Keyes. It’s a contemporary about two blue-collar people who were teen lovahs, then went in very different directions in life. The driven heroine is a high-powered lawyer who is pretty sure she has escaped the gravity well of her early life, the surly hero recently got out of jail and is now nursing his grudge against the heroine full-time. I tend to have a really hard time with contemporaries and find most of the ones I try way too fluffy and/or overwrought and unrealistic to handle, so I think it’s safe to say that I’m a pretty choosy reader. And I thought this was really good! The people are imperfect and act like actual people. The writing is very smart, too.
I’m between fiction books right now, but am presently reading Dirty Old London: The Fight Against Victorian Filth, by Lee Jackson. It’s pretty great if you’re the kind of person who likes single-topic histories of this type, and if you don’t mind/are secretly fascinated by the history of sewers and so on. There’s a fairly amazing reveal at one point that some of London’s finest aristocratic homes didn’t actually empty their “cesspools” (basement chambers the household’s excrement fell into for storage) but instead just had them vaulted over, and then built a new cesspool, leading to some of the foundations of the very finest homes in London being, apparently, “honeycombed with ancient ordure”.
@Karin Thanks for the info on Liz Carlyle! I would definitely read her again.
Just read The Obsession by Lilliana Lee (aka Jeannie Lin) – it’s the first in an erotic trilogy and it def didn’t have an hea or hfn. I really enjoyed it, although it’s pretty dark and there’s some dub con. But it was really compelling. Kind of reminded me of some of the crazier Black Lace historicals I read in the 90s. The author’s note said she was inspired partly by Anne Rice’s Beauty.
Also read Under New Management by Jane Davitt – m/m bdsm contemporary that I liked but didn’t love.
And I read Trust The Focus – mm NA that got great reviews and that I just didn’t love as much as everyone else seems to.
I read a few books earlier this month, now am in a reading slump. The last two I finished were Carry Her Heart, a really sweet contemporary romance by Holly Jacobs and Conor’s Way by Laura Lee Guhrke.
*sees hits on Scarlet Pimpernel piece from this site*
*ventures over*
Omg. Best blog title, ladies. Well done all around.
I had the opportunity to volunteer at a community farm this week in honor Earth Day and we were set to work setting up straw bales for strawberry planting. It was very cool, but incredibly hard work to pull the center out of the bale. My co-worker said he treats his with high nitrogen content fertilizer/other stuff for a couple weeks in order to get the center soft.
Anyway, it was very cool to see it in action, as I’d never heard of them til reading this. Good luck with your garden if you use them< Sarah.