Sunday Soup -September 7

Sunday Soup is... beatniks, home improvements, and a winner from Jeaniene Frost

Soup Dish:  on my mind this week
✽I'm still trying to put my house back together. My daughter is reluctantly sorting through large piles of toys and possessions, and I am reluctantly tackling a Defcon 4 Laundry Situation. On the upside, I have implemented a New Penalty for a certain house rule that has been pretty much ignored, which is "if I catch you, you owe me an hour of chores of my choice." So that bought me a nice cleaned up basement room yesterday.  In addition, I managed to partially disassemble a closet system in my master bedroom so that I could fit a shoe organizer onto an upper shelf.  Like that damn mouse with its damn cookie, I need to go back to Home Despot for a shelf bracket to shore up the structure that I demo'd.  Wheeee. On the upside, all my shoes have happy little paired up homes now.  w00t!

✽I had a fun conversation on Twitter this week that I thought about Storifying, but the disclaimer about using it with Twitter says that you are allowing it to post to your Twitter account. I don't like that, so phooey on Storify. The convo was about beatniks, the high point of which was me posting this youtube clip from Laverne and Shirley, and having it reposted by the Simon and Garfunkle fan account, which totally made my day.

✽Loved this post from Wendy The Superlibrarian about romance, love, sex, and inspiration.


What I'm reading

✽I got a copy of The Beautiful Ashes by Jeaniene Frost via RT, and while I sort of missed the boat for an advance review, I hope to put one up soonish. The short story is, I really really liked it. Angel/Demon stories are kind of hit or miss for me (Meljean Brook: Hit; Larissa Ione: Miss) but this one totally worked. I hesitated to read it because I'm not really a fan of the NA genre (does anyone else automatically read "Not Applicable" for NA ?) but I was pleased to find out that the only thing NA about this book was the heroine's age, which is twenty. To me it read as straight-up urban fantasy with a very strong romantic/sexual tension element.  It does have a cliff-hanger, sequel-bait ending, but in a most delicious way.  The story resolves, but the resolution turns out to open up a whole new can of worms.

✽Katie Porter's Own, the debut in a new Special Ops erotica series. I hit a snag early on with this one, but because the author has a good track record for me, I gave it a second chance and did enjoy how the relationship developed.  Thumbs up.

✽I'm still slogging through a mediocre contemporary which I am stubbornly refusing to DNF because I have A Plan in mind for a future post. I killed a quick 80 page novella for the same Plan which was OK. End tease.

Outlander Watch... Och. Jamie and Claire onscreen, fnuh.

✽Still delighted. Last night's cliff hanger kind of outraged me, and I know what happens next.  Sheesh.  I do see why some people are complaining about it being slow. The tensions within the clan are fairly subtle. I think the best part of this series is watching the unspoken interactions -- the heated looks & body language.



Note: this post contains affiliate links.

Rock Addiction, by Nalini Singh - Review

Information
Title: Rock Addiction 
Series: Rock Kiss, Book 1
Author: Nalini Singh
Publisher:  TKA Distribution/Amazon Digital
Release Date: September 9, 2014
Reviewing: eARC from Netgalley
Reason for reading: Nalini Singh is a huge favorite of mine

The Short Answer 
To be honest, I was a little disappointed.

The Blurb (from Singh's website)

A bad boy wrapped in a sexy, muscled, grown-up package might be worth a little risk…
Molly Webster has always followed the rules. After an ugly scandal tore apart her childhood and made her the focus of the media's harsh spotlight, she vowed to live an ordinary life. No fame. No impropriety. No pain. Then she meets Zachary Fox, a tattooed bad boy rocker with a voice like whiskey and sin, and a touch that could become an addiction.

A one-night stand with the hottest rock star on the planet, that's all it was meant to be…
Fox promises scorching heat and dangerous pleasure, coaxing Molly to extend their one-night stand into a one-month fling. After that, he'll be gone forever, his life never again intersecting with her own. Sex and sin and sensual indulgence, all with an expiration date. No ties, no regrets. Too late, Molly realizes it isn't only her body that's become addicted to Fox, but her heart…

The Whole Scoop 
Just this morning, my Twitter feed included a quote attributed to Henry James: "The only classification of the novel that I can understand is into that which has life and that which has it not."

I checked the quote attribution, because that's how I roll, and it turns out that the actual quote is "the only classification of the novel that I can understand is into the interesting and the uninteresting." (based on two different archives of the full text of "The Art of Fiction").  There are numerous documents that attribute it the other way, but they are not the primary text. Just so you know.

However, the apparently incorrect version of the quote intrigues me more as a reviewer and a reader. And I think it sums up a bit of the difficulty I had with this book. It just didn't have the life, the crackle, that I associate with Singh's paranormal romances.

The characters were on the cardboard side to me; the heroine a meek everyday librarian with a tendency to run when scared, and the hero a blustery, occasionally over-stepping alpha male.  While the characters are technically beyond New Adult age, it had that feel to me because the heroine was quite young and inexperienced, and there was also a surprising amount of sex -- bordering on erotica-level heat and frequency.

The book falls naturally into two sections, the division of which is a bit spoilery, but I I liked the second half better.  The pacing picks up, the action picks up, and I liked the scenes with the other band members.  On the downside, there isn't a compelling plotline here to keep things moving -- it's a very internal, overcoming-our-issues story, which works great when you love the characters, but doesn't help if the characterization isn't working 100%.

The Bottom Line
Lots of people are loving this title so maybe I just had an off day, and I suspect there is no way the average Singh fan is going to bypass it no matter what I say. And honestly, I will most likely pick up the next book in this series, but I have to hope that it works a little better for me.

Around the Blogosphere
Romance Reader At Heart
Book Swoon
Feeding My Addiction

Summer Soup - September 1

Sunday Summer Soup is... summer's end, the ethics of heroism, The Muppets, some indifferent reading. Another Sunday thrown off by holidays...

Soup Dish:  on my mind this week, and a few favorite links

✽Well, we're winding up summer around here. School shopping is done, orientations have been had, and the first day of school is Tuesday. Yesterday I took my older daughter to Bumbershoot to see Panic! At The Disco, which was a surprisingly (to me) great show. Earlier in the week I took my younger daughter to see The Princess Bride, the last of the Movies In The Park for this summer.  AND, still working on replacing outlets and things like that. Woohoo, DIY!

✽I am ridiculously fond of the Muppets.  I'm exactly in the demographic for the original Sesame Street, and I still think The Muppet Show from the second half of the 70s is one of the best family shows ever, bar none.  Also the Siberian prisoners singing "Workin' in a Coal Mine" is pretty much the funniest thing I've seen all year.  So when Bookriot featured the Muppets' best literary references, you know it was one of my favorite things.  While we're on the topic, The Monster At The End Of This Book is still one of the best, most-fun-to-read-aloud kids' books ever.  I hope it never goes out of print.

✽On a more serious note, there are a couple of articles colliding for me: The Overdetermined Hero by Liz McCausland, wherein I feel uneasy about the heroes I love to read about, and in fact, have named this blog for:

If we want to claim that reading romance empowers women–and many people do–we have to acknowledge that it can disempower us too. No one has to think about the appeal of the stalker-alpha, of course. But I do wonder what we’re afraid to look at when we evade the questions he raises.

In another article, Jessica Wise posits that literature in fact, changes reality, which has some interesting commentary but isn't very well supported as far as I can tell.  For instance, she says:

Whether you’re reading Harry Potter or Great Expectations, you’re reading the kind of plot that inspired Darwin. Yet recent studies show that his theory might not be the whole story. Our sense of being one man or one woman (or even one species) taking on the challenges of the world might be wrong. Instead of being hard-wired for competition, for being the solitary heroes in our own story, we might be instead members of a shared quest: more Hobbit, than Harry.

but I couldn't find any supporting links or references either in the transcripted article or at the original Ted Talk video (possibly because I'm a Ted Talk n00b, having only watched a few vids and not tried to engage at all).

Both of these articles made me think of Jayne Ann Krentz's Bowling Green speech, to which I've referred before, about how the traits ascribed to popular heroic tradition (whatever that may mean in context) tend to have survival value.  Sadly, it seems that the publicly available transcript of the speech has been taken down, but the gist of it is, today's genre fiction (and historically speaking, most fiction that speaks to the common public) promotes optimism - courage, valor, honor, integrity, love.

I kind of want to get the three of them on a panel to talk about romance heroes.  With water balloons, or something.

What I'm reading
The list is a little thin this week; lots of non-reading things going on!
✽Finished an ARC of Nalini Singh's new contemporary, Rock Addiction.  Watch for a full review on Thursday.

✽Also blew through another ARC that was super-amazing but won't release until late October, so I'll be coy about the title.  You're gonna want it.

✽I'm in the middle of Tall Dark and Cajun, by Sandra Hill. I'm thinking of doing a mini-feature on Cajun heroes-- does anyone have a favorite? 

✽I started a couple of titles that ended up stalling out a little for me; I'm not calling them DNFs just yet but I dunno. They're both BDSM romances but both of them hit "oh please, really?!" bumps for me.

Outlander Watch... Och. Jamie and Claire onscreen!

✽Yup, still loving this show.  My only critique is that I found the 1940s music playing during the Castle Leoch scenes to just... not work for me.  But eh.  You gotta love Dougal, right? Such a shady, nuanced character.