It’s November! Now to gear up to eat my body weight in food. My partner and I were already planning out Thanksgiving menu and I think we just to make and eat a bunch of sides. The turkey honestly ranks pretty low when compared with things like stuffing, mashed potatoes, and sweet potato casserole.
I wore my hot dog costume to the office today and it was a big hit! It was so delightfully silly and just what was needed. Now, here’s hoping we have some leftover candy from the trick or treaters (I’m writing this at 7:30pm on Halloween night!).
Do you have a favorite Thanksgiving, fall, or general Novmember dish?
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Elizabeth S. would like all of us to know about Carved from the Heart.
I don’t know what category best represents this level of crazy, but ‘Carved From the Heart’ is a romance novel about a witch who hooks up with a ‘sentient’ pumpkin. Happy Halloween!
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Anyone who’s a cat owner will relate to this.
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Sarah would like to put a new game on your radar where you play as a French Canadian chambermaid in a posh hotel who has to clean rooms and also solve some mysteries because she snoops a lot. You can read a review here.
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Love book data and romance novels? Here’s an in-depth look at cover trends in romance novels!
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Don’t forget to share what cool or interesting things you’ve seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we’d like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way!
I don’t know how I missed it when it came out but The Road to Roswell by Connie Willis was everything I wanted to read this week
I’ve been vastly enjoying the videos by author Elisabeth Wheatley on Instagram where she plays the roles of Contemporary Romance, Paranormal Romance, Historical Romance, and Fantasy Romance (with a cameo recently by Gothic Romance), four friends who like to get together and talk about the issues in their genres. Each genre has its own accent and way of dressing that is just so spot-on. She never fails to make me smile.
Somehow the 2 year old YouTube channel League of Pigs hit the recommendation algorithm jackpot with his latest video which is how we found out about it. A man in England made a race track for his 5 kunekune pigs and films then running it, complete with excellent editing and race commentary. We’ve been going through all the seasons one video per day. I have my favorite pigs now and I even bought merch.
It’s baffling to me that illustrated covers are supposed to be so approachable and relatable when to me they’re basically the opposite. I would not swear that it’s not a coincidence that my reading and buying of romance novels declined at roughly the same rate that illustrated covers gained dominance, but I’m not prepared to swear that it is a coincidence, either. The curves in the graphs align: I used to buy almost entirely romance; now I buy very little, and the books I do buy almost never have illustrated covers. Even when I see one that I don’t mind, it never interests me in reading the book.
@Star same here – I find the illustrated covers really off-putting to the point where my eyes bounce off them and my brain says “that’s not what you want to read”. I’ve read quite a few that turned out to be good despite the covers.
NYTimes article ‘You Can’t Hide It’: Georgette Heyer and the Perils of Posthumous Revision includes quotes from Eloisa James and Rose Lerner. (30 October) Not linking because the link is long and I don’t know if NYT allows readers a certain number of articles before raising a paywall.
I wouldn’t mind the illustrated covers if they hadn’t become SO dominant. It’s one thing if they connote a certain kind of romance (e.g., rom-comy contemporary, not super steamy), but they’re just so ubiquitous now that it’s made it harder to get a sense of genre, period, steaminess level, angstiness, etc.
Favorite fall dish:
I know this says ‘Peach crumble’, but substitute apples instead of peaches and leave the rest the same. It’s also very good with peaches in the summer.
Favorite fall dish: Substitute apples for peaches in the following for the best apple crumble ever. It’s good with peaches in the summer too!
https://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/peach-crumble-dessert/
@Kim – yes, that’s exactly it! Part of my issue with them is just the palettes not being to my taste, but most of it is that they scream “low-angst, very tropey, contemporary rom-com,” and that’s just not a subgenre I typically enjoy. I’ve read a few on the strength of strong reviews here, but it takes a pretty strong and detailed positive review to overcome the association.
If you like the sound of Carved From the Heart, Eve Langlais has a shifter series in which other authors write and in Bat and the Jack by A. Gregory a Bat shifter gets together with a scientist who can shift into a Jack o’lantern
I could eat stuffing and pecan pie and be done with the holiday meals. Not healthy, but those are my favorites.
[…] a very cool interactive story about trends in romance novel covers (h/t Smart Bitches Trashy Books for that […]
JD + Kate Industries’ latest newsletter (which is always so much fun—I can’t buy scented candles because of allergies and yet I await it each month, particularly Kate’s list of grievances against JD) revealed JD’s new Etsy cookies cutter store yesterday. Many of these look like Bitchery catnip, and are 25% off with the code SPREE.
Also, one for those of us who may be nursing a crush on Dan Souza of America’s Test Kitchen (yeah, me). It’s a year old, but still lovely:
https://www.grubstreet.com/2022/10/dan-souza-americas-test-kitchen-grub-street-diet.html
Forgot the cookie cutter shop link (always typing in a rush so my comment doesn’t get eaten, sigh). I’d imagine the 25% off SPREE code would work till the next newsletter:
https://www.etsy.com/shop/poisoncookieshop/