A Recipe

Usually, this is a space where I write about books. But, I bake a lot. Like, a lot a lot. There are a few things I can do without a recipe because I've done them often enough that I've essentially memorized the formula. But, yesterday, I wanted cake. Specifically, I wanted snack cake, but not chocolate or yellow or spice or applesauce or any of the usual square pan snack cake varieties. I wanted a citrus cake. But, I didn't want a loaf cake either, because they tend to be heavier than what I was looking for. Ultimately, I had to come up with my own recipe. I borrowed a lot from various snack cake recipes on the internet and in my cookbook stacks, so I'm in no way claiming that this is 100% original. It is, however, delicious and a recipe I will use again, which is the real reason I'm putting it here.

1 cup granulated sugar
8 tablespoons (1 stick) softened butter

Mush these together with a fork and then whip them up with a wooden spoon because, no, I don't have a stand mixer.

Add:

1 egg
3/4 teaspoon lemon extract
1/2 teaspoon orange extract
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Whip it all together until it's creamy and delicious.

In a separate bowl, stir together:

1 to 1 1/4 cup all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
Nutmeg and dried ginger to taste (I used about 1/4 teaspoon of each)

On the stove, heat until just warm:

1 cup buttermilk
1/2 teaspoon dried lemon peel
1/4 teaspoon dried orange peel

Alternate adding the flour mix and the buttermilk to the fluffy butter mixture until you have everything combined. Pour the batter into a greased and floured square or rectangular pan. Bake at 350F until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean. (For the rectangular pan I used, this was about 35 minutes. The smaller the pan, the thicker the cake and the longer it may take.) Cool it in the pan for way longer than I did (at least 30 minutes, probably closer to an hour) and sprinkle with powdered sugar before cutting. If you're feeling fancy, you can make a glaze of lemon juice, powdered sugar, and water instead of using the powdered sugar. I'm not going to tell you how many servings this makes because it makes however many or few you feel you can get out of whatever pan you used. You can just eat it straight out of the pan with a fork, if that's what makes you happy. I wouldn't blame you one bit. It's pretty tasty cake.

Impostor Syndrome, Bookseller Edition

I started this once and it wasn't right. I'm not sure that it will be right this time, either. I have things I want to say, but don't know if I have the words to say them the way they feel in my head.

I fell into being a kids book person by accident and, quite frankly, it's often still an uncomfortable fit for me. I love the people and I love a lot of the books, but I still feel like a fraud. I feel the same with adult books, but the ALA Youth Media Awards were announced today and it really brought home how at sea I often feel when it comes to books for younger readers.

I have the bookseller version of Impostor Syndrome. Some days are better than others. Today is a bad day. Today I really, really feel like I am faking my way through the career that I chose. I'm not saying this because I want reassurance—on my good days I know I am damn good at what I do—but because it's cathartic for me to express the feeling. It's important to name it. To acknowledge it. To take away some of its power. (To recognize that part of the cause of this current episode is hormonal.)

I talk a lot about reading what you love and to hell with anyone who judges you for it. But, the truth is that I have a hard time doing this for myself. I judge myself and my reading tastes far more harshly than anyone else ever could, which is what makes me so fiercely defensive when other people judge what I read. Secretly, I think they're right. I think there's something wrong with me. I think that the books I read aren't good and that I am less of a reader for loving them. I think I'm not smart enough or educated enough to understand "good" books or I'd like them more.

My thinking brain knows that most of this is not true, but my feeling brain is a lot fucking louder. So I'm going to wallow for a while. I'm going to try not to engage much with the more judge-y of my peers and customers because I'll be engaging from a position of super-defensiveness. I am going try not to feel guilty that I have a Romance binge planned for the next week or that the books at the top of my next stack of ARCs have magic in them. And I'm also going to force myself to read non-fiction and literary fiction and message books because I feel bad about what I really want to be reading. And I'll nominate things for the IndieNext List that I think I'm supposed to like, rather than the books that actually bring me joy to read because I don't want to be judged by my peers.

My name is Billie. I have Impostor Syndrome. Today it is especially loud.

Read Whatever You Want, You're Still a Reader

I'm pissed, so there will be swearing. A LOT of swearing.

I have been in the book business off and on since 1994—more on than off, to be clear—and I have always read genre fiction. This made me an outlier and, to be perfectly honest, an outcast among independent booksellers for a long time. I always found kindred spirits with whom I could talk Romance or Science Fiction or Mystery, but we were like Catholics during the Reformation, recognizing each other by secret hand signals and fearful of exchanging more than whispered recommendations for fear of being caught out by our more literary-minded peers. In time, that started to change. I not only found more indie booksellers who read what I read, but more and more booksellers who may not share my tastes, but accepted and respected them nonetheless.

But, the Old School Independent Booksellers are still out there. They're still gatekeeping. They're still trying to make me feel lesser because I don't read and love the "right" books. (They're still pretty much all older white men.) And in the last couple of months, I've experienced several of them. Today, it just got too much and I cracked. Not in public, because I still have to deal with these assholes in my professional life and I'm not quite ready to be a pariah. But, FUCK THEM. How dare they fucking try to tell me I'm not a reader or a bookseller because I don't swoon over the Dead White Man Canon. How dare they fucking judge me because I like happy endings and magic and shit blowing up. HOW FUCKING DARE THEY.

I'm done. I'm done being quiet. I'm done apologizing for what I choose to read. I'm done sitting back and pretending it's okay that industry newsletters don't review the books that I like to read and sell. I am starting a fucking revolution that shouldn't even need to be a revolution. I am declaring, here and now, that YOU ARE A READER and YOUR BOOK CHOICES ARE WORTHY.

You love Hemingway? Great. Let's have a conversation about why you do and I don't. You haven't read Nora Roberts? Let me try to convince you why you should and why she is a fucking goddess. You don't like Nicholas Sparks? Neither do I, but Jane Doe does. Let's ask her what it is about his books that works for her. We don't have to agree on books or authors. The world would be really boring if we all did that. Instead, let's celebrate the fact that we are all readers and we have found each other. Let's have each others' backs and protect our fellow readers from the scorn of the gatekeepers and tastemakers and anyone else who dares to try to make us feel lesser.

We are the revolution. We read whatever we want. We reject your scorn and your judgment. You have no power over us or our choices. WE WILL NOT ALLOW YOU TO MAKE US FEEL LESSER.

Bite me, motherfuckers. Your time is so fucking up.

My Very Own Book Tournament Thingy

It's nearly December, so everyone's coming out with their "Best of 2018" book lists and folks like The Morning News are starting to gear up for their book tournaments and I am, again, trying really hard not to groan so loud that people in the next room can hear it. I mean, sure there are lots of books on these lists that are, by any objective measure, really good books. But, sweet baby jeebus in the manger, so few of them are actually enjoyable that it makes me sad/angry/frustrated. Howsoever, where there is a problem, there is probably a solution and I think I've come up with one. Granted, the solution will probably make me batshit insane by the end, but I think I'm okay with being more crazy.

Here, then, is what I am doing:

I am creating my own book tournament.

I am asking my bookish friends to help me pick a slate of titles that came out in 2018 and were enjoyable to read. I don't care if they are "good" in a critics'-darling sort of way, as long as they were, in some way, enjoyable to read. Did the story captivate you? Were the characters people you wanted to have dinner with? Were the characters people you wanted to set on fire with your brain? Really, did you just care about the characters in some way, either good or bad? Did you have an awesome time hate-reading a book? Was there a book that was total book crack for you? These are the books I'm going to pit against each other in my tournament. I don't care about the hot literary novel about a broken family. I want the hot Romance novel with two broken people finding love. I want the Mystery novel where you figured out whodunnit by page 10, but kept reading because the dialogue was sparkling. I want the memoir that made you laugh out loud or decide that the memoirist was your new BFF, even though you've never met and likely never will. I want the historical fiction wherein a dress was so lovingly and exquisitely described that you did a Google image search for it. I want the YA-fantasy-love triangle that had you saying "Well, that was a cliche from top to bottom, but I cannot wait for the next book in the series." I know that, for some of my friends, the books they most enjoyed will also be good books and I want those, too. I just don't want anyone to feel like books they nominate need to be impressive in any way. This is about the joy of reading and of sharing the books we love with others and maybe arguing their merits, depending on how "fancy" I want to get with this here tournament-thingy.

If you are reading this and haven't already been invited to join the Facebook group created for the tourney, you can find us here. Come join us and fight and vote for your favorite books of 2018.

Books and Social Media

I am going to try to post here at least once a week. I may not always succeed in that goal because sometimes I just don't have anything to say. Today, though, I want to talk about social media and books and the options available for sharing and discovering.

I have a Goodreads account. I have had one since before they were purchased by that giant behemoth in Seattle. I want to have a different option, and I do have "memberships" on LibraryThing, Riffle, Litsy, and Edelweiss, but none of them offer what GR does. LibraryThing is aesthetically unappealing and not easy to navigate, which doesn't make it easy to discover new-to-me books. Riffle is pretty, but it doesn't have a lot of users and the focus seems to be more on e-books than paper books. Which is fine, it's just not me as a reader. Litsy (which is now owned by LibraryThing) is basically what you would get if you pulled out the #bookstagram community from Instagram and gave them their own app. It's very visually-focused and not really geared toward reviewing. With Edelweiss, it's very clear that the social aspect was an add-on and wasn't (still isn't) a primary focus, which is fine, because that's not my primary focus in using it, either. It has been suggested that I employ a spreadsheet to track my reading, but that's not easily shareable, nor is it a tool for discovery. There just isn't anything out there that I've found that ticks all of my boxes.

What, then, would my ideal book tracking, sharing, and discovery tool look like?

• It would not be owned by Amazon, which should probably go without saying, but I'm saying it anyway.
• Nor would it be owned by a publisher or bookstore that would try to sell me things through it or use my reviews to try to sell things to other people.
• It would have a feed, much like the one on Goodreads.
• It would allow me to make my reviews viewable only to my friends.
• It would allow me to easily share my reviews to other social media platforms.
• It would have a rating system that allowed for fractions or decimals, so that a book that fell in between two ratings could be denoted as such.
• It would have different channels for the public and bloggers and book professionals. Or, and this may make me sound like a snobby arse, it would be open to book professionals only: booksellers, librarians, publishers, authors, etc. The reason for this is that I read a lot of Young Adult and I just can't deal with the plethora of GIF "reviews" and exclamation points and hating on a book before one has even read it that happens in the online YA-reading community. (Also known as: I'm old. Get off my lawn!)
• This is kind of a unicorn, but I am talking ideals here, so here it is: It wouldn't allow one to review a book one hasn't read. I don't know how it would be possible to verify this, but I'd love to see at least some effort made. It would eliminate at least some of the "OMG! Look at that cover! I CAN'T WAIT! Here's a GIF from a CW TV Show to show how happy I am!" and the "So and so is a cis-het, able-bodied, neurotypical white person who should not ever, ever be allowed to write about any characters who are not exactly like them and, therefore, this book is terrible and we should kill it with fire. No, I haven't read it yet, but I know it's the absolute worst."
• It would have a recommendation engine that wasn't just based on "People who read and liked this, also read and liked this." I get recommendations from Goodreads that make zero sense. Just because I enjoyed this Kids Graphic Novel does not mean that I would also enjoy that Erotic Shifter Novella (or vice versa) even if someone else liked both of those things.
• It would focus primarily on user interaction. Newsletters and author interviews are all well and good, but they don't influence my reading nearly as much as what my bookish coterie are reading and enjoying and recommending.
• It would allow the formation of groups so that I could hang out and talk Romance with my other friends who are Romance readers without my whole update feed being that conversation and boring my non-Romance-reading friends.
• It would look good and be easy to navigate. Keep the interface clean and uncluttered, but a little more fancy than text-only. And if I could customize my homepage, that would be ideal.
• And, finally, if I could easily link to IndieBound or an independent bookstore for anyone who wants to buy the book, that would be amazing.

I guess, in the end, I want Goodreads and Edelweiss (and a little Facebook) to have a baby that only had the best features of each of them. If you have the skills and the time and the inclination and want to make this happen for me, I will bake something for you.

This Is All Cynthia's Fault

I thought I was done with this thing. For four years, I let it lie fallow and thought of it rarely, if ever. And then a friend of mine wanted to know more about my 50 States/50 Romances reading challenge, but she doesn't (and won't, for very, very good reasons) use Goodreads. I've been posting about the challenge in a private Facebook group, but trying to find old posts on FB is not easy. So, here I am again, sharing my bookish (and maybe, occasionally, bake-ish) thoughts and adventures and disappointments.

Since I came back to this because of curiosity about my 50 States/50 Romances challenge, I suppose that's as good a place to start as any.

Back in March or April of this year, I created a project for myself: I was going to read one Romance novel set in each of the 50 states, and I was going to read them alphabetically by state. I finished the first book—Something to Prove by Kimberly Lang—on April 15th and have averaged about one book for the challenge per month. None of the books so far have been great. Or, at least, none of the books so far have been great for me. I am, by nature, a reader of Historical Romance and only one of the books I've read for this challenge so far has been an Historical. And it was an Old Skool Johanna Lindsey, so it was far from the best the sub-genre has to offer. But, part of the impetus behind this challenge was to get me reading books I wouldn't otherwise have chosen for myself.

Here, then, are the books I've read for the challenge thus far. I've tried to include some thoughts about the books in question, but it's been long enough since I've read most of them that I only remember broad strokes, so the details are very sparse.

Alabama Something to Prove by Kimberly Lang: I started off with a small town contemporary. I liked it okay, especially since the author didn't feel the need to create a Big Villain to provide conflict. It was just small people being small who stood in the way of Happily Ever After for the hero and heroine.

Alaska The Royal Treatment by MaryJanice Davidson: A kind of alternate universe setting where Alaska has a royal family. There were some good humorous set pieces, but some of the world building was questionable.

Arizona Fairyville by Emma Holly: When I started, I vaguely remembered reading this one when I was going through a period of reading a lot of Paranormal Romance. It's on the steamier side and is about a polyamorous relationship, but it occasionally felt like the focus on the sexy bits took away from the plot and the actual emotional development of the relationship.

Arkansas Wild Child by Molly O'Keefe: Another small town contemporary, this one about a prodigal daughter returning to her childhood home. It wants to be angsty and edgy and it is more of those things than some other novels, but the edginess felt more forced than natural or realistic.

California About That Kiss by Jill Shalvis: Shalvis is one of the few authors of contemporaries who is almost an auto-read for me, so I enjoyed this one more than a lot of the others on this list so far. That being said, though, her Heartbreaker Bay series (of which this is #7) is not my favorite of hers. It's enjoyable, but a little cookie-cutter.

Colorado This Gun for Hire by Jo Goodman: I like this one more in retrospect than I did just after I finished it. It features a female bounty hunter hired to protect a miner's daughter and the Army cavalryman who hires her for the job. The relationship between the two was great and the supporting characters were more than just props or plot devices, but the resolution to the external danger they face just didn't quite work for me.

Connecticut Gentle Rogue by Johanna Lindsey: This is a 2005 re-issue of a book originally published back in 1990 and has some issues, as a lot of Romance novels from the 80s and 90s do. When I was younger and didn't know any better, I devoured Lindsey's novels in all their Fabio-covered glory. Reading one now only made me realize how far the genre has come.

Delaware Cure for the Common Breakup by Beth Kendrick: This is as far as I've gotten in my quest. This was fine and would be a good addition to a beach bag, but the characters seemed to change their attitudes/outlooks/personalities because they needed to do so for plot reasons and not because they put the work in to grow and change. There was also some medical/healing stuff that was seriously questionable. It is, however, fairly "clean," so would be a good recommendation for readers who don't want all the swearing and explicit sex.


There you have it. The seven books I've managed to read so far for my 50 States, 50 Romances challenge. I'll add new blog posts for each new book I read for this project. I'll also occasionally post about other books I love or loathe, but not about the ones that are just okay. I also listen to a lot of audiobooks, so I may do a post or two about the ones that I think are really worth a listen. I'm baking a lot right now, so I may share some of that here, too. Of course, there's an equal chance that I'll get bored or distracted by shiny objects and let this die again.

More Pet Peeves

I'm back with more of the errors that bug the ever-loving f**k out of me when I run across them books. In and of themselves, they're not enough to make me give up on what I'm reading, but the damned things rarely arrive solo--like all bad things, they seem to come in threes.

Rein/reign--One does not take the "reigns" of a situation, unless one is engaged in a coup d'etat. The things used to control a horse are reins. No "g". Seriously. Just stop adding that "g" and we'll all get along just fine.

Principle/principal: Principles are those things you live by--the points on your moral compass. Principal is the guy at your high school who busted you for smoking. Principal is also the main/first/most important thing. An easy way to think of it is that the "principal" at school is the most important staff member. (And one hopes he or she has principles.)

Could of/should of/would of--NO. Just fucking NO. It's "have". Or, in contraction form, could've/should've/would've.

My biggest, biggest, biggest annoyance right now is "could care less". Think about that for a moment. If you could care less, that would imply that you care at least a little bit, There is room there, a possibility for caring less. It's couldn't care less. As in, there is no possibility for fewer fucks to be given.

I leave you now with Mr. "Weird Al" Yankovic saying in song all the things I want to say: