MotherReader is hosting the third annual 48-Hour Book Challenge. To quote:

I’m setting the date for the 48 Hour Book Challenge — that special contest that allows you to read guilt-free for as long as you can stand it! I’m avoiding ALA and Father’s Day weekends, plus I like having the Challenge on my birthday. So the chosen weekend is — ready for it? — June 6–8, 2008.

…

Read and blog for any 48-hour period within the Friday-to-Monday-morning window. …

The books should be about fifth-grade level and up. Adult books are fine …

It’s your call as to how much you want to put into it. …

The length of the reviews are not an issue. …

For promotion/solidarity purposes, let your readers know when you are starting the challenge with a specific entry on that day. Write your final summary on Monday, and for one day, we’ll all be on the same page, so to speak. …

Your final summary needs to clearly include the number of books read, the approximate hours you spent reading/reviewing, and any other comments you want to make on the experience. It needs to be posted no later than noon on Monday, June 9th.

You’ll need to sign up in the comments section of the above-linked post.

I’m definitely hoping to play along, although I’ve no idea how much of that weekend I’ll be available for. I also have at least one friend who’ll be doing it as well and who, since he doesn’t have his own blog, will be joining in with a user account on this one. I’ve created a ‘guest posts’ category and we’ll come up with some way to make it obvious who’s posting at the time.

Speaking of books, today’s reviews are: Patricia Cornwell’s Predator and Janice Maynard’s upcoming By Appointment Only. I highly recommend the former!

Oh yeah… Iron Man was great! Very fun, although the odds of an MIT grad forgetting his social security number so quickly after spending his entire time there using it nearly every day as his ID number for EVERYTHING is a little small. (Yes, you can roll your eyes now.)

Sorry about the lack of reviews. It turned out there’s a gluten-free baking mix recipe in the gluten-free eating book, and I wanted to test it out before reviewing that book. I just made a final recipe from Sticky, Chewy, Messy, Gooey, so I hope to review that soon. I also plan to make a final recipe from the superfoods cookbook tonight.

Wednesday was the upper endoscopy. Apart from a killer headache that I couldn’t take anything for (no food, water, etc. for 6 hours before the procedure) it was quick and easy (not to mention I was blessedly unconscious for it). No ulcers; it looks like I just had acid reflux masquerading as gallbladder trouble, etc. A month on an acid-reducing proton-pump inhibitor med plus an improved diet has definitely helped, so, looks like I’ll be taking an acid-reducer for a while. Meanwhile they’re doing biopsies just to make sure there’s no h pylori infection or celiac disease (since the latter runs in the family and the former is often a cause of acid & ulcer problems).

Then I spent yesterday gardening, since my tomato seedlings arrived Tuesday. I planted nine seedlings (three each of three varieties), and six medusa pepper plants that I bought at the last minute (a decorative but edible sweet pepper with a bush growth habit). Some nifty new furniture that we got also arrived yesterday.

Here are a few gardening photos:

The red thing around the tomato seedling reflects red light at the plant, which is supposed to lead to a larger harvest. It acts as a mulch so you don’t have to weed around the tender roots. And if you pour water into the tray, it directs it down toward the roots of the plant, so they grow strong and deep instead of shallow.

Yeah, yeah, I know. I’ve gone crazy with the camera.

I was hoping to review The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Gluten-Free Eating today, but it looks like my tomato plants are about to be delivered and I’m not ready for them. Eeeek! So I think I’m going to get into gardening gear and go do some digging. I’d like to say it’ll be up tomorrow, and it very well might be, but tomorrow afternoon is my endoscopy so I’m not sure what all I’ll get done. I apologize in advance for the slow pace of reviews (and everything else) this week. Hopefully I’ll make up for it on Thursday and Friday!

Edited to add: *groan* Apparently the former owner of the house buried landscaping fabric all around the roses I’m trying to dig up. It’s under a couple inches of soil, and it’s thick enough to be a real impediment to digging things up without being thick enough to stop some tough things from growing up through it. I spent a while loosening up soil around the plants, but I’m going to have to appeal to that husband of mine to do some digging.

Dewey has put up a fantastic new book meme that I just have to participate in, because it provides plenty of food for thought: the negativity meme.

1. When you dislike a book, do you say so in your blog? Why or why not?

Yes. I see my reviews as existing to help people pick which books they might want or not want to explore in their precious spare time. The best way to honestly help people is to list everything I think they might want or need to know about a book in order to make that decision. That includes not just things I like or don’t like, but why, and things I think others might like or dislike even if I don’t agree.

(more…)

First, before I forget, today’s review is of Peggy Knickerbocker’s delightful Olive Oil from Tree to Table.

Second, it’s time for the weekly Booking through Thursday meme, which I’ve actually missed for the last few weeks. Today’s meme is:

How about a chance to play editor-in-chief? Fill in the blanks:

__________ would have been a much better book if ______________________.

Now, I do a lot of book reviewing, so there are dozens of places I could go with this. But since I reviewed a cookbook today, I’ll let that dictate my choice—particularly because that’ll give me the opportunity to turn this into a rather funny story.

“The Fearless Chef would have been a much better book if the recipes had been kitchen-tested.”

To quote from that review:

I have a great love of Bananas Foster, so we decided to make the Jamaican Rum-Baked Bananas, which are described as “a tropical answer to Bananas Foster.” They include a bit of curry, and instead of flaming the alcohol you simply bake the dish in the oven, which sounded easier.

When we mixed things together I found myself triple-checking (literally) the amount of alcohol to go in; 1 cup of dark rum sounded like an awful lot. In fact, I even just checked it again because I still find it hard to believe the recipe called for that much. But hey, we were testing the cookbook, so I figured we should use the recipe as written.

We put everything together and into the oven. We basted it halfway through as stated. Then, at the end, I watched out for the cats and my husband opened up the oven to see if dessert was done.

I heard a whooshing sound and the slam of the oven door. Then I smelled burnt hair. I whipped around, and when my husband turned to face me all I could say was, “umm, you should look in a mirror.” His eyebrows had been trimmed, his eyelashes (despite his glasses) were a rather interesting ragged length, and the front row of his hair above his forehead was shriveled and now brown instead of black. A gout of flame had apparently shot straight out of the oven when he opened it up.

Nothing like that has ever happened to us before.

Now, on to the topic I was planning for today. Recently I ended up in Penguin’s database of reviewers. Because of this, I suddenly find myself reviewing a lot more erotic romances and variations on the same than I ever expected.

The other day, someone I know said to me, with a tone of horror, “don’t tell me you’re reviewing romances!” as though this was a terrible thing. It reminded me that once upon a time, that’s how I would have viewed it. Yes, I bought into the stereotype (which, mind you, existed for some time with good reason) that romances were ‘bodice-rippers’—ridiculous stories in which helpless, naive women waited for the strong, domineering man to come along and rescue them. And maybe once upon a time that was largely true, but it isn’t any more.

Out of curiosity I decided to read Alison Kent’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing Erotic Romance a couple of years ago. And in reading that book I came to realize that romances have changed a lot, and I decided to give them a try. Since then, I’ve come to a conclusion.

Romances have changed. And really, that shouldn’t be a surprise. The women of recent generations don’t tend to have patience for stupid, helpless heroines, and these women are writing more and more of the erotic romances out there. This means that the people writing these books tend to want the same things we as readers do: strong heroines who are capable of standing on their own two feet, and can match wits with the best of the heroes. Just like books of any other genre, romances can be written well or poorly depending on the skill and talent of the individual writer. Dismissing the genre out of hand is simply silly.

So I’m no longer vaguely embarrassed by the idea of reading & reviewing these books. Instead I’m enjoying opening my eyes to a whole new genre and discovering some wonderful writers, many of whom write in other genres I enjoy as well.

Agave nectar is officially one of my favorite discoveries ever. I first read about it in Heidi Swanson’s Super Natural Cooking. It’s a sweetener in syrup form made from a cactus (the same one that gives us tequila), and it has an extremely low glycemic index—meaning it takes a comparatively long time to get converted into blood sugar. Those with blood sugar problems such as diabetes know this is an extremely useful thing in a sweetener.

I hate artificial sweeteners. They leave a bitter, chemical aftertaste in my mouth that I can’t stand. So, I decided to try agave. There’s some history of type II diabetes in my family and I’m prone to mild blood sugar problems, so it seemed like a good idea. Now I’m completely stuck on it. One of my favorite ‘I’m trying to be healthy’ snacks is a tall drink of plain kefir (a cultured milk drink, basically liquid yogurt) with a tablespoon or two of agave stirred into it. I also used it last night when a coffee ice cream soda drink called for a bit of sweetening; it dissolves in cold liquid much more readily than sugar.

The only problem is, the little 8 oz bottles I can get at the Whole Foods Market cost more than $5 each. Ugh. Not something I want to start using wholesale as a substitute for corn syrup in recipes. Then it occurred to me to go look at Amazon. They sell everything now, right? Right. Any moment now UPS is going to show up with a couple cases of bottles that run much cheaper than the stuff I can get at the store. YAY!

Also today, it seems I got tagged for a meme, so why not. Here we go:

• Write your own six word memoir
• Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like
• Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere
• Tag five more blogs with links
• And don’t forget to leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!

It doesn’t make sense as a sentence, but that suits me.

I’ve seen this meme just about everywhere, so instead of tagging specific people, I’m going to do an open tag. If you haven’t played yet and want to, just leave a link to your post in the comments!

Today’s review is of The Pocket Idiot’s Guide to More Not So Useless Facts.

This morning I was stunned to realize that Errant Dreams Reviews now contains 600 reviews. Six HUNDRED reviews. SIX hundred REVIEWS!

SIX HUNDRED REVIEWS!!!

*ahem* Sorry about that. Got carried away.

It took about 10 years, because I wasn’t always as focused on reviewing as I have been for the last year or so, but there you have it. Now that’s a milestone!

Edited to add: After all of that, you’d think I’d remember to post the link to today’s 600th review! Sheesh! Here it is: Susanna Carr’s upcoming Red-Hot and Royal!

I got tagged for this one by Book Nut (aka Melissa) as well as Dolce Bellezza. So, what the heck.

a) What issues/topic interests you most in non-fiction? Cookbooks and writers’/creativity books are my favorite non-fiction books. However, I’ll pick up a non-fiction book on any topic I want to learn more about and then some, and I never know what that’ll be. I’ve reviewed books on subjects as diverse as poop, truffles (the mushrooms, not the chocolates), and composting. (Okay, the weird part is that in retrospect, those books aren’t so unrelated as they first appeared.)

b) Would you like to review books concerning those? I already do, quite frequently.

c) Would you like to be paid or do it as interest or hobby? I post my reviews on my own site rather than submitting them to magazines because I don’t want to be bound by artificial limitations on word counts or the need to be nice in order to make a magazine’s advertisers happy. I’d rather be able to write exactly whatever I think is useful or necessary in order to appropriately review a book. That said, I’m happy to use things like Amazon affiliate links and AdSense ads to make at least a little money at it. After all, I put a fair amount of time and thought into my reviews—they’re more than a hobby.

d) Would you recommend those to your friends and how? I often recommend books that I enjoy. If I don’t plan to need a book again I’ll also sometimes pass it on to a friend whom I think could use it.

e) If you have already done something like this, link it to your post. Heh, you can find all my non-fiction and fiction reviews at Errant Dreams Reviews. There are hundreds of ‘em—literally.

I’ve already linked back to Melissa and Dolce Bellezza above, and rather than tagging people this time around, just consider yourself tagged if you think it would be fun to do this meme. By the way, speaking of non-fiction, here are links to my two latest reviews: Margaret Mason’s No One Cares What You Had for Lunch and Jackie Mills’s The Big Book of Diabetic Desserts.

Oh, and while you’re here, check out this hysterical printing rant I found at book/daddy. Beware the volume, and be aware that the language is NSFW.

I’m almost a month late, but I did get tagged by Dewey on the ‘you make my day’ meme. To quote Dewey, because she said it best:

So let me start off by saying that every single person who reads my blog makes my day just by doing me the honor of reading my babbling about books. But I have to pick 10 specific people and say why they make my day.

The hard part, of course, is picking only 10!

Dionne Galace: Bam’s blog is one of the first places where I discovered that romance and erotica could be fun and delicious instead of silly. And that the silly stuff can be fun too—see also Bam’s cover snark. Then she posted in ten parts Bettie Sharpe’s awesome story Ember, and I embarrassed myself by becoming a raving fan girl.

Sharp Words: That brings me to Bettie Sharpe herself, who has written some absolutely awesome stuff. She’s an incredibly fresh and original voice in erotic romance, and she’s just plain fun as a person.

Treasure Tables: This meme has largely been making its way around the book-blogging sphere, but I have to mention a roleplaying-oriented site, Treasure Tables. They have great discussions regarding gaming topics of all kinds, and have on none-too-rare occasions linked to our roleplaying resources page or articles from it, which is pretty cool. They’re on hiatus—possibly permanently—but they have such huge archives of material that this hardly makes them non-useful.

The Ramblings of a Bildo: I don’t read as much of Bildo’s stuff as I’d like, largely because I’ve not been able to keep up with all the blogs I’d like of late, but he’s a fun writer. His comic is nifty, his art is silly and fun, his writing shows great talent, and I love to read his take on video games. He’s also a genuinely nice and thoughtful guy.

Bookgasm: Bookgasm posts reviews of books that perhaps closest match my own tastes in fiction. This is dangerous, of course, because it means that every time I visit I end up adding to my ever-growing wish list! They write very thoughtful reviews that tell me what I need to know in order to determine whether I’m likely to enjoy a book.

Books and Cooks: Tara shares two of my obsessions—books and cooking–and she’s a really sweet lady to boot!

Musings of a Bookish Kitty: Literary Feline and I have entirely too much in common, and I always look forward to her blog posts and her comments on my posts!

Nonfiction Readers Anonymous: I love Nonanon’s sense of humor and playful approach to books. I always enjoy visiting and chatting on her blog!

Thraveon: Besides being a close friend, Jervis is an awesome writer, among his many other talents. I love dropping by his blog to see what he’s up to (although sadly work has kept him too busy of late to keep up with his posting) when we’re not visiting him and his wonderful family to play D&D, cook, and do other fun things. We’ve also met a ton of other wonderful friends through him.

Burning Building: I have to toss this one in here as my latest fun find. Isaac writes some of the oddest posts and stories, and they’re really neat and imagination-expanding.

As Dewey noted, picking 10 is kind of an artificial limitation on what could be a far more expansive listing of very cool people. So if you aren’t listed here, that’s hardly a slight.

In theory getting noted on this list means you’ve been tagged or something, but I’ve always seen such things as optional, only to be done if the person tagged thinks it would be fun, so decide for yourself.

Today’s review is of Erin McCarthy’s upcoming novel Fallen.

Today’s Booking Through Thursday:

Here’s something for Valentine’s Day.

Have you ever fallen out of love with a favorite author? Was the last book you read by the author so bad, you broke up with them and haven’t read their work since? Could they ever lure you back?

I’m wracking my brains here, but no, I can’t think of one. All of my favorite authors have so far kept the faith with me. I look forward to checking out others’ answers to this question and seeing how often it’s happened for them.

I’ve posted several book reviews since my last post; all of them, for the first time in a while, are fiction—no cookbooks, no non-fiction. Weird, huh? Here they are:

• Memory in Death, J.D. Robb/Nora Roberts
• The Painted Messiah, Craig Smith
• The Flawless Skin of Ugly People, Doug Crandell

I also have the awesomest husband: I got a box of books for Valentine’s Day! It includes some Val McDermid mysteries (I’ve wanted to read her stuff ever since watching the British TV version of ‘Wire in the Blood,’ based on her novels), one of which I’ve already started in on. I just couldn’t wait!