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:

That Word. You Keep Using That Word. I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.

In my reading, I run across some of the same mistakes again and again and again and some of them show up so often that I feel like I need to launch a personal crusade to eradicate them. Now, I'll be the first to admit that my grammar and word usage are not always above reproach. I make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. However, I try not to make the same mistake on a consistent basis and if someone points out my error, I will take pains to correct it. Consider this my attempt to point out some such mistakes.

It all started with authors who use "vice" when they mean "vise". This is still the one error that makes me growl out loud when I run across it. And I run across it A LOT. The usual occurrence is when an author is trying to describe a hangover and the character describes his or her head as being stuck in a "vice". Which, okay, is kind of true. But, truthfully, it's a vice (specifically, overindulgence) that has led to the head feeling as if it's stuck in a vise. No one ever seems to make the error in reverse, though. I've never read of a character whose only "vise" was gambling. Oh, I'm sure there are books out there where this mistake is made, they're just not as common. This mistake is actually so prevalent that I literally cheer a little when I see an author using "vise".

I've also noticed a tendency among authors to use regime/regimen/regiment interchangeably. These things are not the same. A regiment may assist with regime change and endure a rigorous exercise regimen to get them in shape to do so. But, my dears, it is not an exercise regime. Or an exercise regiment. Not the same. Just because the words are similar and share a root does not make them synonymous.

Recently, I've noticed a number of romance authors writing about the "throws" of passion. Now, it's possible that the participants got so excited they began hurling items across the room, but I do believe that they were actually in the throes of passion. Homonyms are not synonyms.

There are other errors that rub me the wrong way, but these three seem to be the ones I'm seeing a lot of recently and the ones that are almost bad enough to make me give up on an otherwise perfectly good book. Remember, authors, spell check is a helper, but it's far from infallible. Trust your instincts; if it doesn't feel right, double check it. Even if it feels right, double check it. Ask your local grammar snob to proofread for you. (You may not think you have a local grammar snob, but you do. Some are just better than others at hiding it n public. Trust me, they're judging you in their minds. Talk about an "exercise regime" and look for the quickly-concealed wince.)

Well, I've basically turned this blog into a place for me to rant about the crap that bugs me in my reading, so I expect both of you will see more posts along this line in the future. Consider yourselves warned.

The Slump

I know you've gone through them--those periods when nothing on your TBR stack is catching your fancy; when none of the hundreds of books you have seem appealing; when every book you do manage to read leaves you profoundly underwhelmed. Or maybe you don't, but it seems to be a regular thing for me. I'm going through a slump right now and it's not because I'm not reading good books. I've read a lot in the past couple of weeks that I know, objectively, are good books. The problem is that the only books giving me profound feelings are the ones that I want to fling at the wall and then jump up and down on in anger and frustration. And, I hate this feeling. I hate feeling like I'm reading books because it's habit and not because there's something that I just can't wait to get to. And even the books I've been excited by haven't lingered with me for long, no matter how good they were from an objective point of view.

I want something that makes my heart sing. Or that makes me laugh out loud. Or that makes me weep like my world is ending. I want to feel big, teenager emotions. I want book crush. I want to feel the way I did when I first read Andrew Smith's Winger or Ernest Cline's Ready Player One or Neil Gaiman's American Gods or Lish McBride's Hold Me Closer, Necromancer or any of the myriad other books that have made me give a little squeal of happiness and hug them to my chest and maybe do a little happy dance around the apartment (though I admit to nothing).

And it's not the books, it's me. I know that. I mean, one of the books I just finished was Scott Westerfeld's upcoming Afterworlds which is really fucking good. I could write a wordy discourse on its razor-sharp observations on publishing and its keen insights into the life of a writer and its seamless integration of two separate novels into a cohesive whole and how perfectly it captures the highest highs and lowest lows of that first young love. But, I can't rhapsodize over it like a teenager discovering John Green for the first time. I'll be recommending it to friends and colleagues and my sixteen-year-old niece, but my skin won't flush and my eyes light up with evangelical zeal when I do. Which is not due to any shortcoming of the book itself. I'm just feeling oddly flat about everything I read right now.

Have you ever felt that way? I'd think it was symptomatic of something deeper, but it's only books that are leaving me (not) feeling this way. Movies, TV shows, toy-like things, really good stinky cheese--any of these can still make me giddy and excited and desirous of sharing my "discovery" with everyone who crosses my path. It's just books.Maybe I need to go back and re-read some old stand-bys. Maybe that would shake me out of my slump. Or maybe I need to read a book that I know I'll enjoy but that I can read completely non-critically. (Mmmmm...brain candy.)

Or maybe I'll never have that giddy, book-crush feeling again. Maybe I'm doomed to a life of readerly maturity. Maybe I'm becoming,,,a critic.

Did Not Finish

So, if you're coming here looking for in-depth reviews and blurb-worthy pull quotes, I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed. I've given up all my noble intentions of finding something nice to say about every book I read and trying to be thorough and coherent in my thoughts. Instead, I'm just going to write about books the way I talk about books, which is all emotion and little thought.

Okay. So, there was this book that I was looking forward to reading because it was a fantasy/sci-fi hybrid about a girl who falls in love with a (male) harpy, which sounded like something that would entertain the hell out of me. But, what this book really and truly was was something completely different. Have you ever read one of those awful Native American romance novels from back in the day? You know the ones where the innocent white girl ends up living with a Native tribe and falling in love with the Alpha Warrior (usually after a bout of "lovemaking" that is really rape), but she can't love him because her mother was kidnapped and.or killed by members of this same tribe and her father (and the entire town) believes the Natives to be brutal inhuman killers but her love for the Alpha Warrior is enough to build a bridge and make the villainous villagers realize their mistake? THIS IS THAT NOVEL. Only the Native Americans are replaced by "harpies", which aren't even really harpies, but a species indigenous to the planet that has been colonized by earthlings sometime in the future. Oh, and the harpies are brown, except for the Alpha Harpies, which are golden. This is a seriously racist, imperialist, sexist piece of garbage and I could only get through about a third of it before I gave up in disgust. (Had I not been reading it digitally, I would have thrown it across the room, then ripped it into pieces and tossed it in the recycling. Pushing the <Delete> button just isn't nearly as satisfying when a book is this offensive.) Maybe the plot got better. Maybe the heroine stopped being so very Mary Sue. Maybe all of the racist bullshit (that isn't really racist bullshit because these are fantasy creatures, duh) got justified or rectified or something later on. Maybe something happened in the 200 or so pages that I didn't read that made this story brilliant. But, I wasn't going to finish, even if none of the (very, very, very serious) problems I've already mentioned hadn't existed because the prose was gods awful. It was all short declarative sentences and not a contraction in sight. Remember those stories you wrote in first and second grade? Remember the prose "style" you employed because you were seven and didn't know any better? This whole book was pretty much written in exactly that style.

I'm not sure if I should name the book or not. A couple minutes of Googling would probably lead you right to it. I mean, I'm sure the author spent a shit-ton of time writing it and it's her baby and she's probably really proud of it and although it's a really, really small possibility, there's still a possibility that if I name the book the author, or someone from her publisher, will come across this and read it and it'll make her feel bad, which would make me feel bad. On the other hand, that's a miniscule possibility and naming the book may keep someone from wasting their money on it. Grrr. Okay. A compromise. I'll name it, but I won't link to it. The book is 'The Flight of the Golden Harpy' by Susan Klaus. It;s got an average of four stars over on GoodReads, but the reviews seem to be fairly evenly divided into the five-star and no-star or one-star camps, so I'm not the only one who had issues. Apparently, though there are some serious fangirls out there and gods bless them. It just goes to show that the right reader is out there for every book.

Ahhhh...That's Better

So, Queen of the Tearling didn't really work for me. But, shortly after completing it, I read The Kiss of Deception by Mary E. Pearson, and everything that didn't work for me in the Johansen was "fixed" in the Pearson. The plots of the two novels aren't really similar at all and, if they weren't both fantasies that I read close together, I'd likely not be comparing them at all. But, I did read them close together and, while I didn't hate the Johansen, it was a deeply flawed novel, in my opinion. The Pearson isn't perfect (I don't think there is such a thing as a perfect novel), but the elements I found troublesome in the Johansen--world-building and character-development chief among them--were so well done here as to create, for me, a startling contrast.

While very, very different in their approaches to creating such, both novels take place on a post-technical Earth, in a society vaguely medieval in nature. However, where the world-building in QotT was vague, with only sporadic clues as to how the old world ended and the new one began TKoD without spending excessive page count on back story, still manages to convey exactly why technology no longer works in her world and how society first began to rebuild itself. The characters in Kiss are fully-realized; her women are strong and capable without sliding into Mary Sue territory; both male leads have their attractions,but also some big, big secrets and flaws; her "villains" seem less like over-the-top mustache-twirlers than deeply committed, possibly misguided people whose agenda doesn't necessarily align neatly with that of our heroine. If you're looking for a sweeping fantasy of a post-tech human society, I can't recommend The Kiss of Deception highly enough. It is a YA novel, in contrast to the Johansen, which is being marketed to an adult audience, but it is, in my opinion, far more mature than QotT and worth the read.