You did it! We figured this one out! It is a truth universally acknowledged (by me for certain) that the Bitchery pretty much knows everything, and really, it's true. Scroll down to see the solution for this HaBO - and many thanks!
This HaBO request comes from Nicci, who is searching for a Regency romance that’s lost on her Kindle:
I know I have this book somewhere on my Kindle. It’s there, even now, lost in the digital aether, but I hope you can help me locate it again. It’s a Regency-ish romance I read about ten years ago, but that won’t help in finding the publishing date since I had a brand new Kindle and immediately went on a huge book buying spree. I’m pretty certain this book was part of a series or at least loosely connected to one. The hero wasn’t a member of the family, club, or whatever it was that bound the series together, but he was a peripheral character for a book or two before he got his own story.
Our hero was from a noble family, but I don’t believe he was titled himself. He was also as poor as the proverbial church mouse and desperate to hide that from everyone. He lived in a tiny rented room, and I remember one scene where he was doing his own ironing because he couldn’t afford a valet. He attended party after party to (1) eat crappy party food so at least he wouldn’t starve, and (2) make investment contacts for a financial deal he was putting together, maybe involving canals or maybe something else. He ended up hooking up with the sister of one of the family/club/whatever members, and that’s about all I remember. I hope that’s enough info for someone out there to recognize it.
Gasp, he has to do his own ironing! Scandalous!
At first I thought it was Diane Farr’s The Fortune Hunter but the hero chases an heiress rather than an investment. Thought I’d mention it anyway because it’s great book!
Is it one of the Lonely Lords books by Grace Burrowes? It rings bells…
Like Nicci, I have oh-so-many books “lost” on my kindle app for iPad. Do any of you use or know of apps for organizing books on kindle?
This rings a bell for me, also. Mary Jo Putney’s Fallen Angels Series, maybe? Will have to look it up now!
I know this one! (I think) It’s the wonderful A gentleman undone by the equally wonderful Cecilia Grant.
LML: I don’t know what works for the Kindle app on a computer–not yet, at any rate. However, on a Kindle, you can set up groups of books under “Collections.” On my (very) old Kindle keypad, doing that was easier than on my new Kindle Voyage at first. But it can be done. The biggest problem is that, as far as I can tell, your books may be either in the Cloud (that’s the whole list of your purchases there) and also on your Kindle (which you must place there). If you want to read a book that’s in the cloud, you must be in a place where your Kindle can be reach it. Found that out in the doctor’s office. Good Luck!
Margarita, unfortunately, that’s not it. I haven’t read A Gentleman Undone, but I’m purchasing it for later. So thank you very much!
Miranda, thank you. The Fortune Hunter is one of my favorite books, but that’s not it, either.
Agree, re: kindle organization. The collections is a wonderful way to organize them, though it’s difficult to see on, say, a fire, as opposed to the more traditional kindles. I like to make sure to add the book to collections as soon as I’ve finished it to make sure I actually do so.
My collections are by both the genre and also catnip. So I have contemporary, SciFi/Fantasy, Historical, NA, etc, but I also have collections named sports, tattoos, NSFW (this is any BDSM), military, and there’s a collection named ‘read again’ for all the books I want to visit in the future (so I don’t have to search them out)
LML: There are lots of apps for cataloging your books, but most aren’t connected to any reading app. You have to catalog and tags books separately, but that way if you have a bunch of different reading apps, or if you check something out of the library, but don’t own it, you can search for them all in one place, plus you can catalog your print books there, too. I like LibraryThing, but libib is popular, too.
This problem of forgetting is not new to m. What I usually do, after everything else has failed, is to put the books in alphabetical order, by tittle or author. – have a quick scan in the hope the cover will “talk” to me. Then go letter by letter, a few each day. Painstaking but it works.
Hope you find your book, I’d like to read it too.
And thanks for the very interesting books offered, quite a few deserve a read.
Want. To. Read. This. Book. NOW!
Pretty sure I’ve read I’ve read this one, although the title is escaping me as well 🙁
Authors whose books I like and are likely to have this theme in a Regency-ish setting but which tend to meld into one great amorphous mental blob for me would include Stephanie Laurens, Mary Balogh, and Tessa Dare. Long shot are Julia Quinn, Julie Garwood, and Amanda Quick. Listing in hopes it provokes someone else’s memory….
Potential other thought: any possibility it was a novella in a collection? If so, that may be why I’m not recalling it with a scroll through covers on the Kindle….
This sounds so familiar, but I can’t quite place it. I was thinking it might be Connie Brockway’s The Golden Season, but that’s only a guess on my part.
Could it be Miss Wonderful by Loretta Chase? You’ve got a dandyish hero who needs a wealthy wife, a spinster heroine and a canal. I can’t remember if the H is impoverished or not. Also part of a series (although I didn’t read the others).
Hera, I’ve not read The Golden Season, but I’ll pick it up now. Thanks!
HopefulPuffin, it’s not Miss Wonderful, although I did enjoy that one very much, and it does have a canal project as a plot point. Thanks for your help, though.
I may have to just go back and start with the book I bought first and work my way through, because trying to find this particular has been driving me nuts for a while.
BJ, I’ll look through those authors’ books and see if I can find it there. Thanks!
This book sounds awesome. I hope somebody can identify it, because I’d love to read it.
I think it’s an Amanda Quick/Jayne Ann Krentz book. I have been glomming them and things are a bit of a blur, so can’t name it. He needs to marry money and has his eyes on an heiress who does charitable works and runs a school for girls. They are brought together by a legacy from a mutual friend. The conditions of the will have him needing to work on a task of her setting to her satisfaction. He ends up doing the books at the school. Living frugally has made him sensible & clever with money. The heiress has given refuge to a young relative fleeing domestic violence which sets up the suspense elements of the plot.
I think heroine’s name might be Ivy and she and hero have a meet cute where he thinks she’s a maid (for reasons) in the deceased friend’s employ
Merrian, that’s not ringing any bells for me, but I’ve read so many that maybe I’ve forgotten. I’ll check out the Amanda Quick books I have in my library. Thank you!
My guess is it’s A Rake’s Guide To Seduction by Caroline Linden.
Cutiellama, you’ve found it! It’s A Rake’s Guide to Seduction. Thank you so much! Thank all of you so much. Now I can reread it, and not drive myself nuts trying to find it.
My favorite catalog app is “Book Catalogue”. Few years ago when I was reorganizing my bookshelves I decided “why not” since they were all off the shelves anyway. It’s super easy to use, all you have to do is scan the barcode, or you can search/manually enter info. It might connect to GoodReads but I’m not sure.
I love it cause you can organize everything into virtual bookshelves. So all my historicals are listed together, the paranormals, etc. You can also pick the format of the book, so I’ve also slowly been adding my e-books. And soon I’ll add a section for books I’ve checked out at the library so I can keep a record. 🙂
Oh you can also export it as a spreadsheet, which was a massive help when I switched phones.
I swear I have nothing to do with this app, just a completely nerdy librarian!
Another book cataloging option is Calibre (bonus – it’s free). It is able to sync directly to and from your Kindle and allows for more control over your collections.
Thank you to Ann Macela, Katie Lynn, Rebecca, Olivia and Got My Book for e-book organizing ideas. All the titles floating around on my kindle app make me crazy(er). On device, in a cloud, in a collection but still on device or in a cloud; no way to group series or separate read from TBR…
But goodness, Olivia, I was fussing about kindle e-books. You’ve opened up an amazing idea: catalog my entire 1000+ title physical collection as well as the e-books. The concept should horrify me, but I find it enticing.
One thing I’ve found about organizing books into “collections” on my kindle itself is that it slows done and eventually stops my kindle from functioning. So I try to store only unread content on the kindle and allow the Amazon cloud to store what I’ve read.
What I’ve done is create a database of what my e-books. Yeah. It was a project. Yeah, it took time. Yeah. It takes some time to maintain. OTOH, it works.
My entries are author, title, series and position in series if applicable, anthology if applicable, letter grade I’ve assigned, yes or no did I review, genre.
I keep it on my laptop. I am an extreme introvert, despite appearances to the contrary, and so I prefer to avoid using apps that make my library public knowledge. I resent this modern attitude that everyone in the world is entitled to know everything there is to know about me. I may choose to be on a first-name basis with the world, but that’s because I am a friendly person. If you want to know what I choose to reveal to the world, like me on facebook.
I love Calibre (I use the “Reading List” plug-in to track all the different stuff I want to read and have created lots of custom columns), but being able to just scan the barcode on physical books, as mentioned by Olivia, sounds really nice.
Maybe I can use the app to scan my physical books, export it to xls, then import the xls to Calibre. I have put so much effort into setting it up the way I want, I would be very reluctant to change.
@Got My Book , I never figured out how to use Calibre. dang it.
To computer is an arcane gnosis whose mysteries have yet to be vouchsafed unto me.
Marrian, you are definitely describing THE FORTUNE HUNTER by Diane Farr. You have my word on it. 🙂
And thank you.
Oops, I can’t edit my post and I called Merrian Marrian. :blushing:
@Gloriamaria – It is pretty complex. Thankfully MobileReads has an entire forum dedicated to it.
Thank you for the referral to the MobileReads forum, although I blush to admit it, I often have problems with the forum format, also.
NOT Gloriamaria; NOT Gloria; NOT Gloria Marie; my name is GLORIAMARIE
I pay you folk the compliment of getting your name correct.
stamping my feet. holding my breath until I die, then you’ll be sorry. so there.
@Got My Book,
Oh dearie me….
Where is the forum to help me figure out how to use this forum????
“MobileReads has an entire forum dedicated to it”
I recently started reading “A Rake’s Guide to Seduction” and I don’t see the hero being really that poverty stricken. It’s the 3rd of the Reece Family trilogy which is excellent, and I highly recommend all of them. I read “The Fortune Hunter” a long time ago, and I don’t remember him ironing, but if Diane Farr say’s that’s the book I’ve got to take her word for it! I guess I better reread it!
@Gloriamarie and the wonderful library organizers here – it does seem to take more time to figure out which app/method to use than to actually do the organizing. I do thank you for these ideas because fairly soon, I am going to have to pull together the ebooks on my laptop(from before my First Nook purchase in 2010), the books and careful filing from the First Nook, and the chaos which pretends to be shelves on my current nook (bought last year after Nook 1.0 stopped talking to the B&N server). I will definitely go with something independent of a specific reader. I want my ebooks organized in a solid directory structure on a memory card independent of any device. I am old enough to be wary of trusting anything as precious as books to changes in computer technology. I have many issues with the entire cloud idea, but it can be convenient for storage.
I like to go into Best Buy and freak out their sakespeople by telling them that 15 years ago one small part of my work at a programing job was to load data tapes into a reel to reel reader to upload the data from 1960s tape to the “modern” hard drive.
BTW, I use a Nook simply because I had a friend who worked at Barnes and Noble.
Just, imagine, someday a hero will be so poor that he will have to read real books that he gets at the flea market.
@shoregirl, believe me, I would much rather own “real” books rather than e-books but I live in San Diego where we have wildfires and about ten years ago there were three fires that the authorities believed were going to join up and burn straight across from Escondido to the north, Descanso to the east, Jamul to the south, Tecate and Tijuana in Mexico straight through to the Pacific Ocean, taking out almost 100% of San Diego County. My car was packed with my cats, spinning wheel, knitting stuff, clothes, pictures, Bible, BCP, books borrowed from friends, library books. My BF had arranged for me to shelter with her MIL in Coronado. There was still room in my car and I looked at my fifty bookcases of books trying to decide which books to save.
I sat in my home for three days waiting for the order to leave trying to decide which books to save and in the end, decided to save none The fire got to one and a half miles of my home but was successfully contained so I never had to evacuate.
Been downsizing the book collection ever since. I know have only nine bookcases and that is still too many in case I ever have to evacuate. OTOH, I live in a place where no wildfire has ever approached.
Of those nine bookcases, three shelves are fiction, twenty-six are theology, two are general non-fiction, seven are cookbooks, ten are knitting and other crafts but mostly knitting, three are iconography. If I had to evacuate, the iconography books would go as would some of the three fiction shelves.
I am really content, if not 100% trusting, of the Amazon cloud for my fiction.
As for the Nook, considering the recent business decisions B&N has made regarding the Nook and the support they are no longer going to give certain apps, I am going to repeat here what I said to my BF when she was deciding which e-reader to purchase and decided on the Nook because she didn’t like Amazon’s business’ model. ” It is my opinion that Amazon dominates and will continue to dominate the e-reader market and that other e-readers are going to find themselves unable to compete. I suspect that B&N is just plain not big enough. ”
Although, now that Amazon is opening bookstores, one here in the LaJolla neighborhood of San Diego…
Any other SB here in San Diego? Wanna make a date for a get together opening day?
@GloriamariE Sorry for the error. I love San Diego, but unfortunately don’t live there.
Karin, Nicci and Merrian, after so confidently asserting that THE FORTUNE HUNTER’s impoverished rake did his own ironing, I began to doubt myself — so I went back to make sure! I am pleased to report that I found the reference on page 3:
“He was the only man of his circle who had no servants. He polished his own boots and pressed his own linen, dusted his own furniture, made up his own fire–on the days when he could afford coal. He despised his life, but anything was better than letting his friends suspect his shameful poverty.”
I hope this helps. If not, we definitely heard about a lot of great books in this thread. I’m going to check out the others!
cheers,
Diane
@gloriamarie, Trying to decide which of your books to save sounds like the worst kind of Sophie’s Choice. When I started reading your post, I was horrified that I would read about the death of your books.
And I will say, as an itinerant travelling professor, I have moved 4 times in the last ten years. Moving physical books is a major pain. And I think you can trust Amazon cloud. But as a former programmer for sometimes sensitive material, I am a believer in putting files on a memory disk in an offsite,offline,fireproof secure location. I just don’t necessarily do that for my own computer files.
At the time, I bought the Nook, it was clear that the Kindle was better, but the choice of the Nook had to do with the people I knew at the local B&N.
Eight years ago I would never have believed that I could like e-books and e-readers so much, but at the same time I still love physical books, and crowded bookshelves, and places with lots of physical books.
I absolutely was not intending to criticize your choices. It sounds like you’ve done really well in making decisions after being so near a terrifying experience.
And you got the cats in the car.
Diane, I now have your book on my ebook wishlist!