A couple of guest “speakers” over at Dionne Galace took on a particularly thorny topic, and did it with grace and a willingness to grab the bull by the horns: race in romance. It’s an interesting topic; the romance genre is one that has often seemed to lag a bit behind other types of literature in catching up to trends like, say, strong women, so it makes sense that it would have trouble catching up with the idea of having non-white romantic leads as well. Monica Jackson and Roslyn Hardy-Holcomb discuss the trends and reasons, and they’re very blunt and unafraid to speak their minds. It’s a fascinating read.

In unrelated news, today’s review is of Michael Connelly’s A Darkness More Than Night. One more library book so I can get them turned in on time Tuesday and it’ll be back to review books with me—which is good, because another pile of them arrived! Updated list to come soon.

Have a wonderful long weekend for those of you who get one!

I almost forgot about the Booking Through Thursday today!

There was a widely bruited-about statistic reported last week, stating that 1 in 4 Americans did not read a single book last year. Clearly, we don’t fall into that category, but . . . how many of our friends do? Do you have friends/family who read as much as you do? Or are you the only person you know who has a serious reading habit?

While I know people who don’t get to read as much as they’d like to, and who don’t read as much as I do, I’m not aware of knowing anyone who actually doesn’t read. I suppose it’s possible; I certainly don’t quiz all my friends on their reading habits, and I can think of one or two people who might or might not read. However, I think just by nature of my interests I tend to get along best with other folks who read. We have more in common to talk about if nothing else.

Speaking of which, someone noted on one of my reviews the other day that I had read the book really quickly after my previous review. I can read a book in anywhere from 2 weeks to 12 hours. This figure depends on several things: how busy I am with other matters; how restless I am (ADD & PTSD both contribute to bouts of extreme restlessness); how interesting or boring the book is; and whether I’m in a “reading mood.” I’ve finished big, thick hardbacks by starting in the morning and finishing in the evening, but sometimes I’m lucky if I get through a few pages in a day. Just yesterday evening I read the first 200 pages of Connelly’s A Darkness More than Night, probably in the space of about 4 hours.

I removed the ability for guests to submit new category suggestions to the links directory. This is easier (on both us and you) than setting up captcha verification of all submissions, and it’s gotten rid of about 95% of the directory spam. If it gets worse again I might get rid of the ability for guests to submit anything, but only if necessary.

I realize I never sent out anything over the announcement list about the site changeover, nor the Twilight Time list. Unfortunately so far we’ve been unable to work out why our mails are bouncing from both lists. Hopefully we’ll be able to work it out and at least get one message out on each, but ultimately we’re considering shutting down both lists anyway and focusing more on the blogs, shirts, and site.

Not much else today… I’m reading Michael Connelly’s A Darkness More than Night and hope to review it tomorrow, followed by Robert Masello’s Bestiary (both are library books due back on Tuesday, so I figure I’d better get a move on!).

“Old Books” by Ken Palk

If I were a zombie, I’d feed on coffee, not brains. My brain is only half-functional this week even after my two small cups of coffee per day, so I hate to think what it would be like without that much. Just to see if the virtual caffeine perks me up, here’s a cup of coffee from stock.xchng, my favorite site of stock photography.

They have very reasonable terms and cool images, so I highly recommend checking them out.

Nope, that didn’t wake me up. Oh well. Anyway, new review up today: Tobias S. Buckell’s Ragamuffin. Very nearly as good as his debut Crystal Rain, and given how good that one was, that’s saying a lot.

Anyway, I think I’m going to read my Connelly and Masello books next, just because they’re due back at the library on Tuesday. Don’t worry—there’s plenty to come after them!

Eeek. I got tagged. So, here are the standard rules:

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules.
2. List eight (8) random facts about yourself.
3. Tag eight people at the end of your post and list their names (linking to them).
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving them a comment on their blogs.

Now for the eight facts. Uhh, this’ll take some thinking, I think. I keep having to suppress the urge to slip in facts that are related to my life but not really about me.

1. I’ve been playing tabletop roleplaying games for about 20 years. One time when my aunt asked what book I was reading and I replied that it was a book for a roleplaying game she cut me off and turned away (apparently this was not a ‘worthy’ pursuit). Regardless, it’s one of the most fun and imagination-expanding hobbies ever, and is one of the ways in which we spend time with some of our best friends!

2. When I was 31 a doctor’s office receptionist asked if I needed an adult to sign for me. She thought I might be under 18.

3. I’m very short; I’m not even an inch over 5 feet tall. Somehow this tends to surprise people who know me from online; I remember someone in Warcraft when I was playing a troll warrior saying he was sure I was some sort of tall Amazon.

4. I attended both MIT and Harvard. Before you find this impressive, realize that I dropped out of MIT after less than two years, and left the Boston area before I could finish my psych degree at Harvard. Taking night classes at Harvard was awesome though because the profs knew we were there because we wanted to be, unlike many of their daytime students, so they enjoyed teaching us and this enthusiasm made their classes more fun. They also gave us less homework because they knew we had jobs.

5. I am an extreme introvert in real life—although less so than I used to be.

6. I have five (5) diagnosed mental disorders—some biological and genetic in origin, some experience-based, ranging from bipolar disorder and ADD to PTSD. Despite this I get on pretty damn well, partly because of the miracle of modern medicine, partly because of the support of wonderful family and friends, and partly because of sheer stubbornness.

7. Every single day of the last more-than-10-years I’ve considered how lucky I am to have my now-husband. Like many women I long had the tendency to date people who were like my father, even if they didn’t seem like it on the surface, and I was extremely lucky to finally break free of that and find someone amazing, kind, thoughtful and helpful, with more integrity in his little finger than anyone else I can think of. I don’t talk about him much here because I think it should largely be up to him to decide how much gets said about him online, but suffice it to say that he’s awesome. Ladies, you can be jealous: he does the dishes and vacuums!

8. Let’s be honest: our cats rule the household, particularly Selene, whom we refer to as our “tyrant queen.” We have a morning ritual: while I’m eating breakfast she’ll sit on my right knee. When I’m done eating I’ll gently put my fingertips on her sides. If she doesn’t jump down at that (which she almost never does), then I pick her up and hold her on my shoulder for our morning cuddle. If I’m in a hurry and forget to do this she gets testy.

And yes, that title of “tyrant queen” is despite the fact that she’s an adorable little ball of fuzz that weighs barely more than 7 lbs:

Okay, now for the tagging. If any of you don’t want to meme, just pretend I didn’t tag you. Scott, Melmoth (because who could be more hilarious?!), Bildo, Cynthia, Cereal Girl, Chessack, Aaron, and female-gamer. I’ll drop you all the requisite note after breakfast.

We’ve started in on the recipes from the whole grain bread cookbook we’re reviewing. I’ve definitely eaten whole grain breads that were quite delicious, but it’s true that it’s much more difficult to make whole grain breads at home that are light and flavorful. What Reinhart’s book claims to do is show us a method for making whole grain breads that solves both of these problems.

The background science is thorough and I’ve learned a lot from the pre-recipe reading. We made the first recipe yesterday, from the basic whole wheat master recipe. I deliberately used entirely standard whole wheat flour—no white wheat strain or other flours—because plain whole wheat is my least favorite of the whole grains in terms of texture and flavor. I figured if he could make that come out well I’d be pretty impressed.

So what do we have in the fridge? A smooth, gorgeous whole wheat boule. It’s downright fluffy in texture, which is something you just don’t see every day. And oh, yes, it IS delicious.

I look forward to making more of these recipes and reviewing this cookbook! This is one book I won’t be handing off to the library when I’m done with it.

Speaking of books, I have two new reviews up: Tara Moss’s thriller Split, and Tobias Buckell’s SF debut Crystal Rain.

Those of you familiar with LotRO might be familiar with the pie-runner deed. It’s a low-level set of Hobbit quests in the Shire, in which you run spoiled pies back to the Hobbit who baked them (on a deadline naturally), avoiding Hungry Hobbits along the way. Once you’ve completed all of the quests, and thus the deed, you get a new title you can add after your name: “Pie-Runner”.

Today we were out and about and we happened to see a catering truck from a ribs restaurant. On the back bumper it had a notation painted: “Rib-Runner”.

The jokes started flying:

“Hey, he got his Rib-Runner title.”

“He must have completed his Rib-Running Deed.”

“I wonder how many deliveries that takes, and how hard it is to avoid Hungry Humans?”

I hope they get a delivery person who plays LotRO.

Today’s Booking Through Thursday meme is a particularly powerful one for me:

When growing up did your family share your love of books? If so, did one person get you into reading? And, do you have any family-oriented memories with books and reading? (Family trips to bookstore, reading the same book as a sibling or parent, etc.)

I absolutely gained my love of books from my family. I started reading very young (2 or 3?). I have a vague memory that at some point, mom got me to switch entirely from being read to, to reading on my own by stopping in the middle of a book and telling me that if I wanted to know what happened next, I’d have to read it to find out. Very effective! If I recall correctly, we were reading the Little House on the Prairie books at the time. I really don’t have much memory of picture books and the like; the first books I remember reading were the Black Stallion series and the Little House series.

Luckily for me my parents were genre fans, so I read their copies of Tolkein books (including the Silmarillion, which I read and finished in 8th grade) and various sci-fi novels. I remember extended family members being huge mystery fans, including a cousin, I think, with the entire Nancy Drew series. Thus it’s perhaps no wonder that I ended up becoming a published author, and eventually worked my way ’round to reviewing books. I owe my deep love of books in particular to my mother, who indulged my tendency to get so lost in a book that I wouldn’t hear a thing when she told me dinner was ready!

Edited to add: Goodness, I can’t believe I didn’t think to add this earlier. My grandmother lived in Ithaca, NY while she was alive, and helped out at a HUGE used book sale held annually by the library system there. We’re talking a multi-story building filled to the brim with books. So some years I’d make sure to visit her at just the right time, and she’d take me, and I’d spend hours just walking the stacks and looking for fun used books to buy. That’s one of my fondest memories of time spent with her!

We made tilapia last night. We used a simple recipe that provided an easy sauce to pour over the fish; then you sprinkle with paprika and microwave for four minutes. The result was divine, and I say that even though for the most part I’m not a fish fan. The sauce was tangy (from such delights as raspberry vinegar, dijon mustard, and lemon juice) as well as sweet (honey!).

There was just one problem. For some reason, the fish blew up.

You think I’m joking. Even though we had a microwave lid on the plate, there was a ring of fish strands around the microwave that took a bit of cleaning. The entire underside of the lid was covered in shredded fish. When we lifted it off, we could see where entire sections of fish fillet were just gone.

At least it wasn’t dangerous, like the inimitable bananas foster recipe. But it was certainly exciting!

I don’t know why the idea of exploded fish leads me to this—maybe because it just sounds gross—but today I reviewed a rather unusual book that I never expected to be reading: Matt Pagett’s What Shat That? Enjoy!

When I see that a blogger whose work I’ve read has posted a piece of fiction for others to look at, more often than not I skip it. I do this for two, intertwined reasons:

1. I’m a book reviewer and published author.
2. I can’t hide my feelings—if I don’t like something, I can’t say otherwise.

I know that these people aren’t looking for the kind of criticism I regularly give to books. I can’t just turn off the parts of my brain that note all the painfully trite material and the cardboard characters. So, in the interests of not hurting their feelings, I just pretend I didn’t notice those blog posts.

The irony of it is, most of these folks say (and do honestly believe) that they want criticism. Unfortunately, what they don’t realize is that not all criticism is the same. When they’re just starting out they need a sort of broad-level critique of such elements as character and plot (without delving into the nit-picky details of word choice and such), tempered with a good dose of encouragement.

They aren’t likely to get that by posting on a blog. Most of the folks who read what they wrote are going to have an easier time noting mis-spellings and awkward word choices than the base-level issues they should be working on first. Also, because of a whole combination of factors (the natural defensive reaction to criticism; the fact that the blogger probably has no real idea how in-depth good criticism can be; the natural desire of others in the blogger’s circle of friends to bolster him with encouragement), anyone who does try to be helpful with honest criticism will probably be shouted down or driven away.

People who want to work on their writing are far better off either joining a workshop group with folks of a similar level of ability, or taking creative writing classes from a decent teacher. Most of them need to work gradually up to a thorough level of criticism, not jump straight into the deep end of the pool, and it would be mean of me to give them the full brunt of something they’re not ready for.

Anyway, I kind of got off-track here. To reiterate, because of all these things, I largely skip over any postings of fiction on most blogs I read. If I can honestly say that I haven’t read a piece yet then I don’t have to worry about hurting someone’s feelings. Thus it was with mild trepidation that I read Skin to Skin [read my review], by a blogger whose snarky reviews I love: Dionne Galace. Not as much trepidation as usual, mind you, because this was published by an actual e-book publisher and I have a fair amount of faith in her ability at this point. But still. I knew that if I read it and hated it, I wouldn’t be able to say otherwise.

So, it’s a good thing that I liked it! I found the beginning to be a bit awkward, but for a debut piece by a fresh author, that’s hardly a sin. After all, I’ve reviewed full-length novels lately that as far as I’m concerned never should have been published in the state they were in.

Therefore, if you like romance/erotica, I definitely suggest that you check out her novella. It’s an inexpensive download, and it’s a helluva fun read!

I don’t tell my characters what to do.
I just take dictation!