You know you’ve been receiving too many review books when the FedEx guy thanks you for keeping him in a job.

You know you review too many books when a relative tells you they might be gluten sensitive and the first thing you say is, “I have a review copy of a book about that…”

You know too many of your review copies are of the ’spicy’ variety when you have to start a separate book to take with you to the gym most nights. (It’s a family-friendly gym.)

Speaking of review books, here are two more reviews: Janelle Denison’s Wild for Him and, from Sensorotika, Erotika: Bedtime Stories.

And now, for today’s re-worked T-shirt design, perfect for roleplayers and gamers:

I see dead people…

Today’s Booking Through Thursday:

What’s your favorite book that nobody else has heard of? You know, not Little Women or Huckleberry Finn, not the latest best-seller . . . whether they’ve read them or not, everybody “knows” those books. I’m talking about the best book that, when you tell people that you love it, they go, “Huh? Never heard of it?”

I can do you one better—one of my whole favorite authors, not just a single book. Many of the people I talk with about books have heard of most of my favorite authors, at least in passing: Anne Bishop, Garth Nix, Tobias Buckell. However, almost no one has heard of Thomas Ligotti. He has a very loyal cult following among a very small number of people because he writes extremely unusual, bizarre fiction. It’s absolutely captivating. I highly recommend his Noctuary, with Songs of a Dead Dreamer coming in a close second:

When all the landscape is dying, descending fragrantly to earth, we alone rise up. After light and warmth have passed from the world, when everyone stands melancholy at the graveside of nature, we alone return to keep them company. This is our season to be reborn.

I could also list Bettie Sharpe among my little-known faves, but that’s only because she’s just barely started publishing.

Edited to add: I went and found Ligotti’s website for folks interested in exploring his work.

And, a handful of links:

• Mercury in sushi—I mourn.
• Free Fall by Isaac Marion—weird and beautiful fiction.
• Loud Neighbors—another weird and fascinating Isaac Marion story.
• Best source for specialty cooking stuff EVER: King Arthur Flour Company.
• The most bizarre item we’ve ever sold through Cafepress, and I’ll tell you right now that we’ve sold more than one: Level 70 Hottie Thong. Yes, you read that right—thong.

I was up late last night playing D&D, so I’m a bit dead on my feet today. One of the cats seems to be a bit sick, too, so cleaning up cat puke at 11:30 pm (yay, raw bunny vomit that apparently had been drying onto the hardwood all day while we were gone), 5:30 am, and 11:30 am didn’t help. I hope he feels better soon, poor thing.

There’s plenty for me to put up this week (including reviews of Demolition Desserts, The Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Die, Bettie Sharpe’s Ember (coming tomorrow!), and New England Cooking), but they won’t go up today. I’m also putting off playing Pirates until later, because the update seems to be wreaking a little havoc with my ability to play, and I don’t have the patience this afternoon to try again; maybe tonight or tomorrow.

So, I’m mostly posting to point you to a blog that you really should check out. It’s authored by our partner-in-crime Jervis, and called Thraveon.

What makes it worth reading? Well, Jervis has been all over the world, and somehow managed to have all sorts of insane experiences. Better yet, he’s a hysterically fun storyteller. If you want an example, check out the entry he calls ‘Airport Skiing’ and I call Bowling for Monks. Share it with your friends, leave comments… help us encourage Jervis to write more and more about his entertaining experiences.

First, yesterday’s book review was of Sebastian Beaumont’s unique and captivating Thirteen. Up next should be the Pastry Queen Christmas and Red Lion Inn cookbooks! Somehow my Amazon reviewer rank is in danger of cracking the top 1,000 (I’m at 1,007 this morning exactly 1,000 this evening), which is a little surreal since I’ve never made it a focus of my reviewing; I just cross-post brief versions of many of my reviews there so the books get a little more exposure. I can tell our Google pagerank must be recovering from the switch to the new domain name, since suddenly we’re getting lots of requests for reciprocal links from random unrelated websites.

I found the following hilarious video at Books and Other Thoughts. The costuming and detail are incredible, and the spoof is spot-on:

While that video is for the tech support weenies, computer geeks, and book nerds among you, the following is a World of Warcraft video: IRL. It’s for anyone who’s ever had to group with a jackass, and the sheer proliferation of wacky props alone makes this a hysterical view (found at Massively):

Just a reminder that Dewey’s 24-hour readathon is this Saturday the 20th! You don’t have to be available for all 24 hours to participate; part of the day is fine. It starts at 9 am Eastern time in the US (my time zone); I’ll probably be a bit late to the party so I can get groceries done. Here’s some of the most important info from that post for readers:

People who sign up to be readers are committing to reading books, posting updates in their blogs, and if they need breaks, visiting the blogs of other readers and encouraging them. The most hardcore among us will stay up the entire 24 hours and do nothing but read and update, even going so far as to skip showering and eat meals while reading. However, not all of us are that hardcore, and it’s ok for you to customize this readathon to meet your needs. … All I ask is that you be honest in your updates, and that’s about the only rule for readers.

Updating for Readers: This should be individually customized. If you want to spend 5 or 10 minutes updating each hour or every 3 hours, that’s great. If you want to update whenever you feel like you need a break from reading, that’s great, too. If you want to just read and read for 24 hours straight and then write one big update, that’s also great. You do what works for you, ok?

Suggested format for updating: Again, customize this as you wish, but I suggest updating about what you’re reading, how many pages you’ve read since your last update, and how much time you’ve spent reading since your last update. You may want to keep a running total of time spent reading, number of books read and pages read; this could make you eligible for some prize drawings. Updates might also be your typical book reviews, once you finish something.

I’ll probably do little updates frequently, although I might do several per post so as not to clutter things up too much.

So I’ll see you tomorrow!

This week’s BTT touched on Typography. As usual I went around reading a bunch of the entries, because it’s a fun way to spend a little time while drinking my coffee and you never know what entertaining stories you’ll encounter. This week I was lucky enough to come upon book-a-rama’s entry, which included the following video (NSFW language!) on “the impotence of proofreading”. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Chris, for sharing this with us!

Head on over to Dionne Galace’s blog on erotica/romance/erotic romance today. Why? Because Meljean Brook has gone and posted a video—yes, a video—containing her advice for writing an erotic romance. The following is not particularly safe for work, or young children. At any rate, I laughed out loud. Then I laughed until the tears came:

Link found over at BookLust:

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: Reverend Countess Heather the Larger of Burton-le-Coggles Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

One of my more recent blog finds has been Melmoth’s Inferno. I can’t resist it, thanks to such engrossing posts as An undead berry is a Lichee? (which suddenly reminds me that I have a delectable can of lichee nuts in my kitchen, hmm… You know, they actually do kind of look like undead berries):

Considering the sheer variety and culinary diversity that exists in MMOs these days and seeing as adventuring folk spend so much of their time masticating, why not making eating into a mini-game? Yeah, you could make it such that combining foods into ‘courses’ will enable bigger and better buffs as well as healing and replenishing mana. If you have a small soup starter and manage to follow it up with the lamb shanks and roasted vegetables, you’re allowed to try for the power combo finishing desert item! But only if you ate all of your brussels sprouts and you used the correct spoon for the soup. Otherwise the buff fails, and you go straight to bed without getting to fight Bregnip the Merciless.

Does it make me a bad person that I think this actually sounds hysterically fun? But then I’m one of those loons who totally enjoys the farming and cooking crafts in LotRO.

Anyhow, eating a pork pie and suddenly being able to bench press an elephant, or eating cheese and suddenly being more intelligent but only for thirty minutes! is totally bizarre. And what if you melt cheese on a pork pie and eat that, does that count? What happens then? Are you suddenly able to bench press an elephant with your brain? Can your pectoral muscles calculate pi to four hundred places? Food would become dangerous, you wouldn’t know whether to put mustard on your pie in case it combined in some weird way that gave your nipples the power to whistle dixie every time you’re struck in combat. For thirty minutes only.

Go on, read the whole post. I’ve barely scratched the surface of it. Make sure to always read the comments on his posts as well, because they’re frequently just as hilarious. Next in my list of new favorite reads is his entry, You don’t learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, which brings us the adventures (such as they are) of Timothy and Trevor, two troll guards sent to find out What’s Going On around the troll encampment:

Timothy: “You’re a peon at work. Good. Good. And you’re another peon, well done. Ok”

Trevor: “You’re a guard, that’s fine. And here’s a priest, lovely. Lovely.”

Timothy: “And here we have the corpse of Tony, who appears to have been smashed to a pulp with a large blunt instrument of war. Ok, good, good.”

Trevor: “Well I think that’s everything, shall we head back to base, Tim?”

Mark my words, someday this blogger will be getting his books published, if he isn’t already. If the rest of us are lucky, that is.

Lawful Stupid

Time to pass on a fun link: Wil Wheaton’s Sci-Fi Guilty Pleasures of the 80s. I love Wil’s writing, and since I grew up in the 80s I remember each and every one of these movies with, yes, that sense of guilty pleasure. Scanners is my favorite on that list, and of course I can’t help being disappointed that The Last Starfighter only got an honorable mention. However, Wil says if there’s a good response he’ll do more of these, so read & respond! I want more.

Edit: Apologies to folks waiting for return emails from me. I think the Medrol did the steroid thing of supressing my immune system enough that I developed an infection, so I feel pretty cruddy and have a doctors’ appt. tomorrow, and really am not accomplishing much. Hopefully they can make it all better, with as few antibiotic side effects as possible. Yes, this is an appt. with a new doctor, not that crappy old one.