Showing posts with label laurielikesbooks Blog. Show all posts

January 23, 2012

What's Going On?

I started having pain in my left arm this summer. I thought I had pulled a muscle, so I rested it for a couple of weeks. It didn't help, so I saw a shoulder specialist, who took X-rays and explained that it was referred pain from my shoulder. He gave me a shot of cortisone and sent me to physical therapy. Though the physical therapy worked to an extent, my second visit to that doctor showed me he didn't really understand what was going on with my shoulder.

My physical therapist recommended another specialist, whom I learned was in partnership with the shoulder specialist my husband saw a couple of years ago when he had trouble with his left shoulder. (He had had shoulder surgery shortly before we got married because his shoulder kept dislocating. Though his surgeon had long ago retired, he referred his patients to the specialist my husband saw a couple of years ago.)

Although I didn't know it at the time, it turns out it's my husband's doctor is the top shoulder specialist in the city. Luckily he saw me right away, looked at my older X-rays, and gave me a 2nd shot of cortisone, one which actually worked for a few days. Both my physical therapist and I noticed an immediate improvement in my shoulder, but a week later it had started to regress. So I went back to the doctor, who indicated that the shot had been as much for diagnostic purposes as it had been for pain. We talked about it, he sent me for an MRI, and after getting those results, scheduled surgery for a few days before Christmas.

Everyone in my side of the family has a very low threshold of pain, so after surgery when the doctor said my shoulder had been really messed up, I was actually relieved. Not only was there a tear in the rotator cuff, but the bone spur he had expected in my shoulder had actually broken off, leaving everything inflamed and disgusting. I had just started physical therapy again, a week after my surgery, when my husband, daughter and I went to see A Dangerous Method. I missed the last step going down a large flight of stairs and landed directly on my left wrist. After trying to ignore the pain through lunch, I noticed a huge blood clot had developed on my wrist, and we ended up at a nearby doc in the box. Two hours later I learned nothing had broken but that my left arm, hand, and fingers were badly sprained. They splinted my hand and wrist and sent me on my way.

When, a few days later I realized I kept re-injuring my hand, my husband suggested I see a specialist. He agreed that nothing was broken but I left his office with my wrist hand and fingers in a cast. I am supposed to have the cast removed this week, and I hope most of the swelling, pain, and general ickiness will be gone. I did take a break from PW duties for the last week in December, and have muddled through my last three reviews using DragonDictate, a voice recognition program I am using to write this very blog entry. I wish I had had Dragon Dictate back in November when I researched and wrote my 1st publishers weekly feature article, which required me to interview 20 authors, then writes eight hours a day for two days to complete the piece.

All of this explains why I've not blogged in months, but this weekend, when I went to look something up in my old blog, I discovered it was gone. Blog-city.com apparently went off line on December 31. I did not know they were going bye-bye, because all their e-mails to me must have been sent to my old AAR address, which has been defunct for 3 years.

This had a very disheartening effect on me; that's more than 6 1/2 years of writing, including probably 100 reviews. Even worse was discovering that I did not have complete archives for the blog. When I switched from PC to Mac this summer, I needed to jettison old files, all of which I had backed up. Unfortunately, the process of transferring files did not go entirely as planned, and not everything made it through the process. Among the lost files was a huge XML file containing the old blog in its entirety. I contacted blog-city.com's owners this weekend, and have requested they try to send me another backup. In the interim, I decided to upload here on blogger the files I did retain, which includes everything from the original blog's inception in 2002 to early 2007. There is simply too much good stuff for me to let go entirely, and it's a shame that all those links from AAR and Heroes and Heartbreakers are now useless. But by my uploading the blog here--each month is a single entry--I will feel better. I can only hope that those missing months can be accounted for. As for the password-protected portions of blog, I have no clue whether or not they were/are included in the archive files, but I'll soon find out. So far I've uploaded August, September, and October 2002.

As for my injuries, I plan to work through any remaining discomfort associated with my shoulder and arm in trying to get back into online writing. The hand may slow me down, but now that I know that anything I do to my shoulder cannot damage my shoulder, I'm going to grin and bear it.

See you here and there!

March 31, 2003

laurielikesbooks Blog for March 2003

laurielikesbooks.blog-city.com — March 2003

Teresa Southwick and Elizabeth Lowell

Even though I'm still coughing enough to make my cracked rib hurt like hell, I figured it was time to start blogging again, particularly since sitting at my computer hurts no more (and no less!) than laying in bed. So I'll talk about three of the boo

Teresa Southwick now writes only series titles, but she used to write American Historical/Western Romances that I enjoyed. I first read her in 1995 with Winter Bride, a mail-order bride story that earned a B from me. Given that I'm not much of a fan of the American Historical or Western, I kept her in mind during subsequent visits to the bookstore, but somehow missed her 1996 release - Blackstone's Bride, although I did find it used in 2000 and read it immediately. It was another good read and earned a B- from me. Certainly Southwick doesn't write Westerns on the level of, say, Lorraine Heath, but these were good enough that I vowed to continue looking for her books.

At roughly the same time as I read Blackstone's Bride, I noticed Southwick had a couple of series titles for sale. Never having read in the Silhouette Romances line before, I had no idea what to expect. It didn't take me long to realize the SR line was a "sweet" line, but by the end of reading the first of the two books - And Then He Kissed Me - I came to the conclusion that this was more of a Young Adult book than a romance written for an adult. I had the same reaction to the second story - With a Little T.L.C..

I wrote about this in the June 1st, 2000 ATBF, but am talking about it again because I find it fascinating to track this author's writing style over the years. Those two Westerns were both "warm," as opposed to the "kisses only" rating for the two SR's. What bothered me most about both books wasn't that they were kisses only, but that in at least one of the two (it's now been so long since I read them that I can't remember the order of events in both), the hero proposes marriage after kissing the heroine two times. And she accepts! How on earth two people could know they are compatible after sharing two kisses seems ludicrous to me, which is why I was very interested in Southwick's January 2003 release for Silhouette Special Editions - Midnight, Moonlight, and Miracles.

The SSE line is one I've read many times before - how would Southwick handle a book in this line after failing for me in the SR line? I'm happy to report that this more recent release was pretty good. My grade for it was a B- (Ellen Micheletti's grade for it at AAR was a straight B). In MM&M, the hero and heroine are linked together by tragedy. Simon has a seeming death wish, and ends up in the Megan's ER after a helmet-less motorcycle crash. He blames himself for the death of his son and ex-wife and has given up on life. His only tether to it at this point is through his mother-in-law, who knows the heroine through a "only in romance novel coincidence;" she's the one who okay'ed a cornea transplant after her grandson's death, and because of this generosity, the heroine's daughter, Bayleigh, now has the gift of sight.

The mother-in-law interferes enough so that Megan becomes Simon's private nurse, and though Megan would like to tell her Big Secret, the mother-in-law thinks it best to wait as she believes Megan can emotionally reawaken Simon. And so it goes.

As contrived and "Lifetime Movie of the Week" as this premise sounds, the author acquits herself well. There's a good deal of poignancy in the relationships that develop throughout the book, some great chemistry, and Simon's trip out of his semi-self-imposed darkness into the light, with the help of the three women, is quite effective.

Right after I finished MM&M, I went to the UBS to look for another Southwick, and found a 1994 release - Reckless River. It's hard to believe how much better Southwick's writing got in the one year between RR and Winter Bride! Reckless River pits a beautiful and feisty riverboat captain against the handsome and hardworking owner of a railroad company. She believes his railroad will put her out of business, and since her father remarried and her father's new wife's son is a lech, her riverboat business is all she has. As for the hero, he's frustrated by this capable young woman and beguiled as well, and soon realizes she's afraid of something, but what is it, and might it have to do with her "step-brother?" It's not hard to see where this one is going, and it goes there loudly, with every cliche in the book, and with every bit of manipulation the author can toss in there. At their first meeting the heroine shoots at the hero, later he rescues her from a being raped, they lust, they fight, they lust some more...how can they reconcile her hatred and his plans, which eventually come to include her?

Oddly enough, even though I didn't much care for this book, when I realized there was a sequel, I actually spent some time looking for an on-line copy to buy. Just before I clicked the "buy" button, though, I came to my senses and realized that buying a sequel for a book I didn't really like was probably not a good idea.

What next, then? Well, how about trying one of Elizabeth Lowell's Westerns, perhaps Only His, a book which received DIK status at AAR some years ago? And that's precisely what I did.

I often have a very visceral reaction to Lowell's writing. While it's almost always purple, over-the-top, and melodramatic, and while most of her heroes are alpha-heels to their heroines (with an exception for the hero in Love Song for a Raven) , at times there's nothing like reading one of her books. Too Hot to Handle features all of those adjectives, and yet I love it. Chain Lighting is another Lowell I adore, even though it too is over-the-top. For some reason, though, what the heroines in both these books endured before meeting the heroes, who then mistreat them based on a lack of knowledge of who these women really are, becomes all the more touching when the heroes fall in love, for when they fall, they fall hard.

I'm very hot and cold about Lowell, though, and have written often that while some of her series titles worked for me, an equal number failed - and for the very same reasons! Outlaw worked...Fire and Rain and Warrior did not. And before I go off on a rant over her expanded, re-written single titles of originally shorter series romances, I'll stop here and talk about Only His, which is not destined to become a favorite Lowell for me. It's got the embittered sharp-shooting hero with a secret grudge against the heroine's "husband," the heroine with a secret - the "husband" is really her brother - desperate and with literally nothing left to lose after the Civil War, on a journey by horseback out West, followed by outlaws and Indians who want him dead, her body, and her horses.

All the same adjectives mentioned earlier apply here as well - in spades - and while the book isn't bad, it certainly isn't DIK-worthy. My grade for it was a C+. I know it's a favorite for many, though, and while I did appreciate that the heroine had more "spunk" than some other Lowell heroines, it just fell short of being a recommended read. When I think about it, the only full-length Lowell I do recommend is the first of her medieval series, and I wonder if I'd feel that way if I read it for the first time today? Something to think about.

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

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I Don't Get 'Em

At times I feel like my tastes are different from everyone else's when it comes to romance novels, a feeling that came on strongly last month when two things happened - the vote came in for Best Series Romance of 2002 and I read What a Man's Gotta Do

There have been many, many times in the past when I've felt a disconnect from other readers because either I don't care for a very beloved author or will adore a lesser-loved book everyone else raved about while not caring for the book(s) by that same author most people think are her best. To put a nice face on it, I could say that occasionally my tastes are "esoteric."

I granted six 5-heart reviews when I was at The Romance Reader (all of which can be found at AAR, btw), and can remember that four of the six were pretty controversial. Nobody but me thought that Jane Ashford's The Bargain was all that special, certainly everyone knows by now how much disagreement there's been over Christina Dodd's A Well-Pleasured Lady, while Elizabeth Elliott made a tremendous number of fans with the few books she published, most thought her first - The Warlord - was terrific but far fewer were as enamored of Scoundrel as I was, and I can't recall anyone at all besides me who thought Jill Marie Landis' Day Dreamer was a great read.

Shortly after AAR began reviewing new books, a double-DIK review of Kathleen Creighton's One Christmas Knight came in - both reviewers couldn't have loved the book any more than they did. I read it and was so bored by it that my grade for it was a big fat F. I remember talking about it on one of our discussion lists, only to have somebody else respond and say, "Now you know how I felt after I read Day Dreamer based on your recommendation." Ouch!

After we posted Ellen Micheletti's rave review of The Older Woman, I bought it and read it. It didn't do a thing for me - I gave it a grade of C+ and traded it in, thinking that was the end of it. But then, while preparing to post Blythe Barnhill's Reviewer's Choice column, I noticed that Jennifer Keirans picked the Reavis book as her favorite for the year. And then, when it was voted as our readers' favorite series romance of 2002, I was astonished. What had they seen in this book that I had not?

In January we posted a B+ review of the Templeton book, and there was a great deal of discussion about it on AAR's internal discussion loop as well as on our Reviews Message Board. To a person, everyone thought this was a really good read. So last month when I was laid up in bed, I read it, and liked it even less than I had the Reavis. For a short book, it took me days to complete, I thought the royalty tie-in absurd, and frankly thought the love story between Eddie and Mala was boring. I can't recall anyone raving about the Leanne Banks series title -The Playboy and Plain Jane - that I mentioned about in an earlier blogging that was also a January release, but I found it (as a B-) a more enjoyable read than the Templeton.

When I reflect on the Creighton, Reavis, and Templeton books, all three were clearly doing something different than the norm, which may explain their appeal to others, and perhaps that's the very same reason none of these books worked for me. Next time - my abortive read of a 1995 romance that's been on my shelf tbr ever since - Island Flame by Linda Windsor.

It's good to be "back."

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

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Behind the Scenes of our Annual Reader Poll

Some bitching from me now, and it relates to a matter under discussion on our ATBF MB as well as a new interview we posted earlier this week. There is always a group of readers who remain convinced that only huge, best-selling authors do well in our Annual Reader Poll because it is only a popularity contest. They also believe that if only more people read Book X or Books X,Y, and Z, these other books would surely have beat out the boffo blockbusters that do win. This is even an issue among our staff - feathers were ruffled last year when I publically shared a comment Robin Uncapher made to me regarding The Bronze Horseman and Out of Control. What had she said? That had more people read the former, it would no doubt have been their favorite book of the year, so phenomenal was the book.

Our annual poll is most assuredly not a popularity contest - while there are a good number of lead authors represented in the results, discussion among voters is that they take their vote very seriously. While for every Suzanne Brockmann there's also a Danielle Steel, whom I'm happy to report has never appeared as a winner/honorable mentionee in our annual poll. And yet, whose books take up more room on bookstore, superstore, and discount store shelves? Steel, of course. You're also more likely to find Connie Mason, Cassie Edwards, and other authors who sell well but whom are routinely derided by AAR readers, on the shelves than Adele Ashworth, Carla Kelly, and Susan Grant, and yet these are but a few of the lesser-selling authors who have done well over the years in our poll.

That's not to say, though, that many lead authors don't win or receive honorable mention in many categories, but there's a good reason for that. The reason why they both sell well and score well in the poll is that they are apparently writing books that readers - at least our readers - want to read.

Another wrinkle to this whole discussion about lead authors came into play for the second year in a row - and relates back to Paullina Simons' The Bronze Horseman. The year it was eligible for our poll - 2001 - it was released in hardcover. It was not released in paperback until 2002. The argument goes that books published in hardcover are penalized in our awards poll because not enough readers will buy them to read. And so, it is asked, why don't we add a category so these books don't "fall through the cracks?"

Hmmm... where to start w/that one? First of all, our annual reader poll is not exactly the Oscars. It may be blurbed about on an author's web site or included in the write-up of the author on the inside back cover, but the media is not exactly beating down our door waiting to report on the winners for wide distribution to the reading public. We have great turn-out, and I believe that every author who won or received honorable mention deserved their placement based on the votes cast. I don't understand the investment some people have in the results, nor do I understand why often the results are personalized. It sometimes comes across that if the results don't match a reader's ballot, they must somehow be "wrong."

Jen S, aka Jennifer Schendel, addressed the hardcover conundrum on the ATBF MB, and I thought it would be good to paste it here:

After all this talk about hard cover (or even trade paper) releases limiting an author or books chances to win I went back and looked at the results for the last 3 years and this is what I found:
Hardcover releases that won in 2002:
Faking It - Jennifer Crusie
No Place Like Home - Barbara Samuels
Hard Eight (dishonorable win) - Janet Evanovich
Hardcover releases that received Honorable Mentions in 2002:
A Summer to Remember - Mary Balogh
Chesapeake Blue - Nora Roberts
Daughter of the Game - Tracy Grant
Dying to Please - Linda Howard
Trade Paperbacks that won or received an Honorable mention in 2002:
Shannon McKenna won best new author for her tpb book "Behind Closed Doors"
Too Much Temptation - Lori Foster
The Seduction - Julia Ross
That's 10 books that won, despite something other than a mass market release.
In 2001 Winners or Honorable mentions went to the following hardcover books:
Fast Women - Jennifer Crusie
This Heart of Mine - SEP
The Bronze Horseman - Paulina Simmons
The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon
Ritual of Proof - Dara Joy
Narcissus in Chains (dishonorable win) - LKH
In 2000 Winners or Honorable mentions went to the following hard cover books:
Welcome to Temptation - Jennifer Crusie
Mr. Perfect - Linda Howard
I know I've missed some books, and if I had more time I'd find the ratio between the winners and total books that win, but really I don't see it as a hinderance.
Yes it'd be nice if everyone's favorite book could win and that more mid-list, cult, or debut authors could win, but since this is a numbers game that's just not possible without doing something unfair to handicap more popular/bestselling authors.
Instead I think people should focus on the postive. When authors like Tracy Grant and Paulina Simmons, who were relatively unknown at AAR before their breakout books amongst readers here, place despite being in hardcover. That means word of mouth is working, at least at AAR.
Also, I can understand Laurie not wanting to add more categories, because if you have too many new categories after awhile the ones that exist have no relevance.
But that's just my opinion.
~Jen~

AAR is so much more, obviously than its annual reader poll. Indeed, the ATBF column that precedes the awards column is devoted to staff favorites. The books chosen by our staff vary in terms of how well-known their authors are. Harper Allen is not well known at all, and while Cheryl Reavis and Sharon Sala are more widely read series authors, none of these three authors are the biggest selling series authors out there. One staffer chose Stef Ann Holm's first contemporary; given that this author wrote in the less-read Americana sub-genre before, one can hardly call her a major name. Teresa Hill, who writes series titles under the name Sally Tyler Hayes, was also chosen as having written a favorite by one of our staff. Hill is relatively new to single titles, and this book in particular was quite controversial among those who actually read it. Tracy Grant and Emilie Richards also wrote books chosen by our staff - again, neither are boffo blockbuster authors. And then there's Carla Kelly, a goddess to most of AAR's staff and much of AAR's readership, and yet to most romance readers, a relative unknown.

Then there's our annual "look back at the year/buried treasure" column that Robin puts together. It offers our staff the chance to talk about their year in reading, and also, since it kicks off the poll itself, reminds readers of lesser-read gems they may want to check out before voting. This is in addition, of course, to the actual reviews we post, which leads me to believe we do a good job of bringing lesser-known books and authors to the attention of readers.

Finally, I'll add my own little wrinkle in to muck things up even more - and it's something that I believe proves my point. Earlier this year we posted an interview of Tracy Grant, and earlier this week we posted an interview with Roberta Gellis. For all the discussion among readers who say they are interested in more intelligent, well-crafted, and accurate romances, I've found that some of this is really lip service. The Grant interview has been online for more than 2 months now and roughly 500 people have read it in all that time. So far the Gellis interview has attracted fewer than 250 readers. And yet, when we post an interview with a Julie Garwood, Judith McNaught, Nora Roberts, Linda Howard, etc, 500 people will have read the interview within a day or so.

What this shows, I believe, is that while many online romance readers may decry the fact that Gellis has had to change the focus of her writing from medieval fiction to medieval mysteries and the re-telling of myths, this happened because fewer and fewer readers were buying her books. Tracy Grant has made it into hardcover because her publisher believes she writes with enough cross-over appeal to attract non-romance readers, but does this make either of them a "better" writer than Nora Roberts or Linda Howard?

I think the proof is in the pudding - people will read what they like, and the reason why more readers gravitate toward a Roberts or Howard than a Gellis or a Grant is because more people like their books. It's as simple as that, which takes us full circle and back to the beginning. Roger Ebert may have fallen over himself extolling the virtues of Almost Famous, but in the end too few people wanted to watch a semi-autobiographical movie about Cameron Crowe's life on the bus as a 15-year-old reporter for Rolling Stone. It doesn't matter how good the movie is, in a poll where people are choosing their favorites, a movie (or book) cannot win unless it is watched (read) by a great many people. This does not make it a popularity contest; instead it makes it a popular movie/book.

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

The Ick Factor?

For the past week or so I've been unable to actually read a book. Oh, I've picked up several from the shelf and started them, but for some reason none has held my interest and they've ended up put back, unread. And then last night I picked up a book from an author who I glommed at the UBS a couple of years ago after reading and enjoying one of her books - Peggy Webb. The book I started last night cost a grand total of $0.25, as did the others I had glommed - good thing too since most of her other books have ranged from average to dreadful - and for some reason I've yet to determine, I'm reading it.

It's an old Loveswept called A Prince for Jenny, and it's worth mentioning only in that the heroine is "special" - I don't know if it's genetic, a result of a delivery gone awry, or an accident, and at this point I don't even know if the book will have an "only in a romance" (or soap opera) turn of events leading to a recovery. I've never read a book with a lead character who was mentally challenged before, and don't know that I ever will again. Reading this book is less an entertainment experience than it is like watching the news to see if and when the war with Iraq will start. I want to see what will happen next because it's incredibly foreign to me.

I honestly can't imagine falling in love with someone who isn't smart. Even where friendships are concerned, I can count on one hand the number of friends I had growing up who weren't smart, but the chemistry was there and they weren't stupid - just not "book smart." Now, if my husband suffered a brain injury a la Harrison Ford in Regarding Henry (or the real life Phineas Gage), would I stop loving him? No, but would I have fallen in love with him to begin with?

He and I talked about this last night and I was surprised that he didn't have a definitive answer. He hates stupid, but was unable to say whether or not he could have fallen in love with a mentally challenged woman. I, on the other hand, know I could not because a good deal of our relationship is founded on mutual brain power. This is not to say we walk around discussing Plato, quantum physics and hang out at Mensa mixers, but it takes a certain amount of intellect to "keep up" with people who are well-educated and fairly intelligent.

We've got a DIK review of Pamela Morsi's Simple Jess online at AAR, and for those of you unfamiliar, the hero in this book is "slow." I was lucky enough to meet the author during the 1996 national RWA convention and asked her about the creation of this hero. She told me that her mentally challenged daughter was the inspiration for Jess, and that he was originally a secondary character in Marrying Stone. She didn't know whether her publisher would greenlight a book starring Jess, but they did, and she was equally surprised and gratified at the reading public's response to it.

And yet I can't help but be bothered by the premise of the Webb book - for some reason the allure of a grown man falling in love with a mentally challenged woman escapes me. Were the positions reversed, would my reaction be any different, I wonder? Probably not, given my own needs, but I don't know that I would be as bothered by it as I am where it is the woman who is "special."

If you think this is worth exploring in an ATBF segment, let me know via post here or via email. Thanks.

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

A Prince for Jenny and The Fortune Teller's Daughter

I'm definitely going through a bad phase as far as reading romance is concerned right now. I read like a maniac the first two months of the year, and actually did pretty well from last summer until the start of this month. I can't tell you how many books I've started this month, only to put them down again, although they include the Peggy Webb Loveswept I mentioned in my last blogging. I'll tell you where it bogged down for me. The heroine is believed to be retarded and at one point she is labeled as having Down's Syndrome in a newspaper headline. This misnomer just screams "mistake;" even the author, at an earlier point in the book, lets the reader know (along w/the hero), that people w/Down's Syndrome look different. Some of you may in fact be old enough to remember what they used to call people w/DS - Mongoloids, in reference to the size of their heads and some distortions in the face. Anyone who looks at Jenny can immediately recognize that she does not have DS.

No, it bogged down for me when the hero went to talk w/the heroine's doctor to find out precisely what was wrong w/Jenny. Apparently she can understand everything but through a series of wiring issues, she suffers from large motor skill deficits (but not small motor skills, because she's an accomplished artist) as well as writing and reading disabilities. The doctor doesn't explain it like this - all he says is that she can understand everything and is not retarded - and gives no name to her syndrome. Had I not been intimately familiar with certain motor skill and learning disabilities, I'd have been even more lost in trying to determine what's wrong w/Jenny. As it is, it makes little sense that many of her small motor skills are fine and her large ones aren't; if you asked me to put a name to her amalgam of disabilities, I'd say it was some form of cerebral palsy... and yet, it's apparently genetic as the hero later goes to the doctor for a consult on - I think - a vasactomy.

I didn't finish this book, but I did skim much of it. The love scenes are excellent, and since the hero knows the heroine isn't really slow, it removes some of the ick factor. So the real reason I couldn't finish the book is because I think the author took a cop-out by giving Jenny this amorphous set of symptoms and by bringing the hero's ex-wife back in a sub-plot you can see coming a mile away. Subtle it's not.

One of the books I did manage to finish recently was Susan Wilson's The Fortune Teller's Daughter. I've now read three of Wilson's books - Hawke's Cove, which I reviewed and found a reasonably good read (my grade was a B_), and Cameo Lake, which I didn't find as original. It was good enough when I read it, but in two weeks, I'd forgotten the storyline and the characters (my grade was a C+).

Sandy Coleman's grade for The Fortune Teller's Daughter was a B-; this matches my grade as well. Wilson's books, while not romances, are Women's Fiction with strong romantic sub-plots and eventual happily-ever-afters, although Hawke's Cove was far less conventional than either of the two that followed. In TFTD, heroine Sabine Heartwood settles into a small town she visited as a child because she longs for roots - before doing so she lived a nomadic life with her mother, an itinerant fortune teller. Craving what she missed growing up, she settles in Moose River Junction, Massachusetts, where she meets the town's prodigal son, Danford Smith, who is on a forced hiatus as promising film director because his grandmother's death has left a couple of major "loose ends" that are not easily tied up. One is his mentally challenged Uncle Nagy, whom he promised his grandmother on her deathbed he would not institutionalize, and the other is the family's movie theatre, which is an albatross around his neck because Uncle Nagy caretakes the losing venture and would be lost without it.

As much as Sabine wants to put down roots in Moose River Junction, Dan wants to escape. His actress girlfriend reminds him that he's liable to lose the momentum of his career, and he feels guilty about a Big Secret he's been living with most of his life. While it's a Big Secret for him - it's no secret at all for the reader even though one senses it was meant to be. This is likely the biggest flaw in the story, and I spent too much time wondering when everything would be revealed to Dan and Sabine.

The sub-plot that actually brings the two together aside from chemistry and destiny comes from Sabine's extra-sensory gifts, gifts that she's denied because of her difficult relationship with her mother, who has always encouraged those gifts. Author Wilson melds this sub-plot together with the backstory of Sabine and her mother's relationship, and why Sabine doesn't know who her father is. Although there's a sense already knowing at least in part what her mother's Big Secret is, there's still a poignancy to it that I appreciated.

Wilson is an author I will continue to read even though her books are less than completely satisfying. She draws me in with her characterizations so that even when I know something I'm not supposed to know, I can't wait to see how it all will turn out.

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

(Mostly) a Rant Against AOL

I just deleted a post to one of our message boards trying to lead people to a site promoting the romance and emotive passion involved in corporal punishment. I guess there's really no limit to the amount and degree of perversion in the world. I only hope they don't hit all our message boards; just deleting that one post made me feel as though I need a shower! Although spanking between consenting adults may be something I don't understand, it's just fine with me if it does the trick for other people. But I'm going to assume "corporal punishment" refers to the underaged, which I find outrageous. If I misunderstood and the site is simply a B&D/S&M site, well, never mind my outrage.

I've been quite busy over the last several days in several ways. The first, of course, is catching up on reviews posting, and I'm now within a reasonable number of days behind, so some of that pressure is off. The second is the late archiving of reviews from our page of new reviews - I'm now almost half-way through that process, which is also nice. This is a quite tedious monthly process, which leads me into my third reason for being busy - working with the company working on our reviews database/site redesign. Once that reviews database is up and running, I won't have to do things such as archive reviews. And then there's the fourth reason for my being busy - AOL.

Early last month I sent my monthly list of books to buy to Dolores at Books 'N' Stuff, the new/used romance-friendly bookstore I frequent. When I went in the next day to pick up my books, I learned that she never received the list via email, and I had to call my husband to pull the titles out of my "sent mail" box. I didn't think much of it until later in February when I tried to email those authors who had done well in our annual reader poll. I communicate with many of these authors fairly frequently, and even those I do not, I've found over the course of several years, respond within a day or so when informed of their wins/honorable mentions.

Because Shelley Dodge, AAR's pollster (and an AAR Reviewer as well), was injured and ill the week after the poll closed, the results to me were delayed, leaving very little time to contact these authors and prepare the ATBF column that announces the results. So when I hadn't heard back from a majority of authors - including the biggest winners - in a couple of days, I emailed them again, and a day later, when they still hadn't responded, I went into a panic.

So I put together a list of those authors who had responded and those who had not - I hadn't heard from any author on AOL while I had heard from most on other ISP's.

My next step was to hop up to Yahoo and resend to those AOL authors. I followed one of those emails up with a phone call to one of these authors to verify what I thought the problem was, and sure enough, she'd never received the swbell.net-sent emails but had received the Yahoo mail. Extremely frustrated because by this time there were only a couple of days left before the column and awards page were to go online, I was pleased to finally see email trickle in from most of the winners - only Nora Roberts and Maggie Osborne ended up not responding. Given that Roberts and I are in fairly frequent communication, I tried one last effort for her, contacting her publicist, who promised to forward my email to Ms Roberts. Unfortunately, it must have been too late as I never did hear back from her, which left me surprised and frustrated.

Knowing I had to deal w/this swbell.net/AOL issue had to take a back seat to a more pressing problem - the disappearance of AARList archives and messages, which was/is my last issue with which to contend. Despite Anne Marble and I practically fire-bombing yahoogroups' with "need help" forms, they list remained down after nearly a week, and there is no human being with whom you can speak at Yahoo for yahoogroups; they provide no real customer service for their free services. Anne investigated moving the group elsewhere while I sought help from some other yahoogroups set up to help group owners. We eventually decided to create AARList2, a stop-gap measure while we continued to try and get AARList restored. Unfortunately, yahoogroups only allows us to add 100 email addresses a day, and only 500 in all. AARList has nearly 1,000 members, which means we could add only half the original list and "invite" the remainder to join.

We worked on the wording of the message we would send to those we were adding and those we would invite, and now, after three days, we've got a third of the old list on the new list. We're both pretty sure that as soon as all this work is done, the old list will be restored, but what choice do we have? Anne has been remarkable throughout this process, calm, collected, and methodical. Given my emotional nature, this has been quite helpful to me.

Since we had that plan under-way by Thursday evening, I devoted part of yesterday to the swbell.net/AOL issue, particularly since there are at least two AAR staff on AOL who had not been receiving my messages, causing major problems on individual projects they were working on. My first call was to SBC (aka SWBell). SBC told me to get in touch with AOL because they knew of no problems. After writing AOL and assuring them that it wasn't individual AOL members simply blocking my messages because I'm a pest, I received an email in return with a phone number, and so made the first of three calls to AOL, finally to hook up with someone in their mail operations department who indeed confirmed that mail from swbell.net is being blocked. AOL and swbell.net are both aware of the problem, I was told, and I was given another phone number, this time back at SBC, in their mail operations department, to call.

After that call, and a call to another phone number, I was given an email address at SBC and told all I could do was to write that email address. How the tech and his supervisor could tell me with a straight face that they had no ability to send an email of their own in order to escalate the issue is beyond me, and my eventual email to the address given was blistering. I informed them that I was most displeased that:

1) There is no human being to whom I can speak who can actually DO something about this problem.
2) swbell.net NEVER informed me there was a problem; had not a particular issue come up I might never have known my emails were not being delivered and two projects may have fallen apart.
3) The problem has persisted now for far too long without resolution.
4) When I called swbell for the final time and was given this email address, I asked whether they could also forward my complaint to the appropriate department and was told this was impossible because the tech department is not connected to the mail department. This is simply absurd and bureaucratic gobbledegook at the highest level of insanity and inanity.
5) Why is it that an aol person finally confirmed that there IS a problem while swbell tech support said they knew of no problems? In other words, why is a company to whom I am paying nothing more helpful than the company to whom I'm paying $40 or $50 a month for service?

I provided my phone number and will hope to hear from them early next week. If not, I'll simply resend that same message hourly during working hours until they do.

Well, I wanted to talk about some books I've read, but I think this is enough for now.

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

Comments

'Laurie Gold' left this comment on 26 Mar 04

No; the problem has never been resolved. When I email aol users, I cannot send the email formatted for html and cannot send to more than one person at a time.

TTFN, LLB

'A visitor' left this comment on 18 Feb 04

L, Did this problem get fixed...? I have the same problem and am getting no where fast...Ed

Ed [vsiedhmurovic@sbcglobal.net]

A War Slump?

I can't tell whether it's now the war or a quick stomach virus that hit me over the weekend (and now plagues my daughter) that's making it next to impossible for me to read, or whether I'm truly in my seemingly-annual romance reading slump. After beginning several books and putting them back after a chapter or two, I finally settled into Gina Wilkins' The Family Plan, first in a trilogy with the second and third titles to be released in April and May. I haven't read a ton of Wilkins, but did enjoy Seductively Yours and Secretly Yours well enough to read her more often. The Family Plan didn't click with me even though I'm often a sucker for both single men raising children and heroes who pursue their heroines.

Given my lack of success with the Wilkins book - my grade for it is a C - I'm not sure whether I should really be trying to read The Selkie by Melanie Jackson or not. I adore the selkie myth and don't want to ruin the reading of what may be a perfectly wonderful book because my slump may not be reading-related but instead caused by the war in Iraq. Perhaps it's better to focus on the news on TV, in newspapers, and in newsmagazines than to read books for now. Is this affecting any of you?

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

Two Conflicting Thoughts = Intelligence

I've heard it said that the ability to hold two conflicting thoughts in your head is a sign of intelligence. If that's true, I must be a frigging genius.
I just finished watching Donald Rumsfeld give a press conference - it seems the Syrians have

I've heard it said that the ability to hold two conflicting thoughts in your head is a sign of intelligence. If that's true, I must be a frigging genius.

I just finished watching Donald Rumsfeld give a press conference - it seems the Syrians have decided to join the fun and help the Iraqis. Ever since the war began last week, I've tried to put my misgivings about it aside and focus on the task at hand - supporting the troops so that they can do their job quickly, get out, and get on with the rebuilding of Iraq. My misgivings were and are so numerous that recounting them in my mind is like watching a ping-pong match - for each reason on one "side," there's an equally compelling reason on the other. Genius indeed.

Here's a bit of that ping-pong match that's been playing in my head, first shared with AAR staff a week or so before the war began in response to some postings about why so many Americans are angry at the French:

The French government became the Vichy government in WWII in a way many other European nations did not. And, although it hasn't been highly publicized, the French are the only members of NATO not on the defense planning committee.
I think it's very easy to forget that appeasement was the European policy before WWII - for England and for France. The US was isolationist, but then Hitler wasn't knocking on our back door. We know that policy was a failure.
I know it's dangerous to share opinions on this stuff in a "mixed" group such as we are, but I'm personally so conflicted about the whole thing that I don't have any clear answers. William Safire wrote a brilliant OP-ED piece in the NYT last week about French companies selling Iraq contraband items, and this is supposedly behind their refusal to even consider a war resolution, but I read Safire w/a skeptical eye (can't help it - I'm a liberal!).
On the one hand I think Saddam's gotta go, on the other hand why now when North Korea is so dangerous, and would it have been had Bush not called NK/Iraq/Iran the Axis of Evil? On the other hand, so much of the opposition from the rest of the world is because countries like France and Germany are afraid of being neutralized in terms of power and are therefore flexing their muscle (isn't this why Spain is gung-ho, because they want to gain some power?). Then again, Afghanistan is a total mess and we've done very little to help the elected Karzai coalesce his power base. Then again, I do think that some countries purposely like to thumb their nose at the US. Then again, Israel needs to stop building settlements and leave many of the ones they built and kick out Sharon, who's always been little more than a thug.
Then again, ... well, this could go on forever.

My biggest frustration boils down to this: while there's all this focus on how many civilians may have been killed so far, which plays right into the Arab street, there's no "on the other hand" from the Arab street - no count of how many Iraqis Hussein has killed and tortured over the years or even since breakfast. And we seem to live in an age when the anti-war movement isn't against an "unjust" war like Vietnam, the anti-war movement is against any war at all. It would be great if we could all live in peace and harmony, but Saddam and his gang are violent and virulent, and proof of that comes from people who have lived to tell the tale. The rest of their fighting dirty is despicable and yet should have been expected (and some of it was), but executing POW's goes beyond the pale for me. I only hope that his behavior begins to turn off some of those states tacitly supporting him, like the French and the Russians, the latter of whom are selling weapons not only to the Iraqis, but to the Syrians, who now are forwarding that equipment to Iraq.

One of the scarier things I've read is that the rest of the world is more fearful of an unchecked US than they were when the US and the USSR were locked in a cold war. I would have thought the dangers to Europe when the Soviet bloc was nestled up to western Europe would have been far more scary. What's scary to me is that there are countries out there who would rather bury their heads in the sand than try to come up with real, workable solutions to problems. I'm not sure what those solutions are, but I know what they aren't.

Make sure to read everything Fareed Zakaria writes for Newsweek; he understands the region, and though he was for the war, he's a voice that understands where we're making our mistakes. We need to know this and not get caught up in biased reporting on the left or the right that makes it sound as though we're doomed or that it'll be a cake-walk. I disagree strongly with those on the right who would have us believe that we're all being brainwashed by the liberal media into believing we've gotten ourselves into a disaster; I'm smart enough to discern the truth from the variety out there in print and television and I know you are too. It's neither a disaster nor a cakewalk, but it would be a mistake to believe making democracy out of the Middle East is going to suddenly emerge from the war, which is what I think the "biased" liberal media is trying to remind us through their reporting.

War is war - innocent women and children will die as surely as they have died in every modern war, and yet the US is trying extremely hard to prevent civilian casualities. On the one hand, this is the right thing to do, but on the other, well, I won't go there.

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

February 28, 2003

laurielikesbooks Blog for February 2003

laurielikesbooks.blog-city.com — February 2003

Misc. Musings about Insomnia, Being Sick, Watching TV, and Birthdays

I can still remember that night in the summer of 1992 when we came home from an outdoor James Taylor concert. Dallas heat and humidity make for thirsty people, and all I could find to drink was a huge diet Coke. I had such a caffeine buzz that I was unable to sleep that night, even though I'd been sleep-deprived for months caring for our infant daughter. It was the first night of almost ten hellish months of utterly despairing insomnia.

Everyone goes through bouts of sleeplessness in their lives; as a chronic sufferer of sinus and bronchial infections, I've been on more heart-pounding, bounce-off-the-walls medications than I care to remember, but not sleeping for ten months is a vastly different experience. It's pretty bad when you take actual prescription sleeping pills and still can't sleep. Which is why when a neighbor who hadn't slept more than a couple of hours a night in almost 20 years introduced me to another neighbor, I almost dropped to my knees and kissed his feet. This other neighbor? The doctor who ran a sleep clinic at a nearby hospital.

After wearing a contraption for days that was able to determine by body movements when a person is actually sleeping, we determined that unlike some insomniacs who actually get more sleep than they imagine, I did not. And because traditional sleeping medications didn't work, the doctor prescribed something else for me to take, something that is not generally given for sleep disorders. It worked on the very first night, and for years I continued to take it, albeit in smaller doses to minimize any side effects.

A couple of years ago I decided to take myself off the medication and fooled myself into believing it would work, but within a week or so, I was either up all night or would wake in the middle of the night and be unable to go back to sleep. My original doctor/neighbor had since moved on and I went to another doctor, who told me he didn't like the medication I'd been taking, and gave me something else to try. It didn't work, so I went back to the original prescription, but now I needed more of it than I'd been taking before I stopped. Oy.

Convinced this original RX was not a good thing to be on, my doctor has me taking a small amount of it but is also giving me something else in an attempt to wean me off pill #1 and onto pill #2, which he believes is safe to take permanently. It too is not a traditional sleeping medication, but the chemicals in my brain seem to like it for sleeping. I've been advised not to try to sleep without anything because clearly there's an imbalance that can't self-correct. My doctor says, "You need corrective lenses to see, why not accept you need a pill to sleep?"

As I mentioned earlier, not being able to sleep becomes a vicious cycle. You worry so much about not sleeping that in itself, the worry makes the problem worse. On the other hand, you become used to existing on less sleep than normal people get. That's important for me in terms of writing and running a web site, because often inspiration will strike late at night and I'll work into the wee hours of the morning. But when I'm finished and ready to crash, I'm often too hyper to do so, which means that every so often I'll have to close the door to my study every night at ten and simply force myself not to get out of my bed after that time.

It was extremely difficult for me to write my segments in the current ATBF column. Since for some reason I lost all personal discipline in writing the segment I'd assigned myself the week before, I got all caught up in another segment that unfortunately took me two days to put together. Which meant the original assignment was still being written at a time when I'm usually posting the finished product, and all the other things that needed to be done for a first of the month update weren't done either. Instead of the column being ready to go (well) before bedtime on the 31st, it wasn't finalized and everything else complete until nearly noon on the 1st. I hate that. I'd gotten off my sleep schedule because of being blocked, and now would now race against the clock to finish before my daughter's friend went home so I could devote myself to her on her birthday. We had a blast surprising her with her presents, which I'll talk about later.

Staying up late does give me the opportunity, while I'm trying to unwind and fall asleep, to watch some pretty funky television. Conan O'Brien, for instance, is sometimes hilarious, and I've discovered that Anthony Bourdain's A Cook's Tour runs an episode at 11 on Friday nights. I've talked about Bourdain before, and both my husband and I enjoy A Cook's Tour. This past Friday night was an episode I'd not seen before, when Bourdain visited French Laundry, a northern California restaurant, with some of his chef buddies. The chef/owner of this restaurant is like a god to other chefs, and this particular show featured more than 20 courses from the tasting menu that shocked and delighted Tony. I'm not a good cook, nor am I all that brave when it comes to trying food that's "out there," but this was fun to watch.

But not nearly as fun as watching the new Jimmy Kimmel show on ABC at 11:30. I don't know that I like Kimmel all that much, but who knew that Snoop Dogg was so funny? He co-hosted the show last week, and on Friday night presented a videotape of himself shopping for clothes and accessories for Kimmel at a local swapmeet. I'm sure the Dogg was not stone cold sober during the live show, but I sure was, and I thought it was hilarious.

Last night I started Sue Margolis' Apocalipstick, and am enjoying it thus far. Whether it'll be as good as Neurotica remains to be seen. I've also got to get started on Catherine Anderson's upcoming Only by Your Touch. After skimming parts it looks like more of the same from her, which means another abused heroine and another too-good-to-be-true hero. The one Anderson romance I truly enjoyed was Phantom Waltz, but if this upcoming book is anything like Baby Love or some of her other titles I know about, I'll conclude that she relies on certain themes too often. Oh well.

And now to talk about our daughter's birthday. We're pretty miserly during the year and limit presents, for the most part, to Hannukah and her birthday. Since she has made so many changes for the better in her life in the last year, we wanted to reward her. She got over her illness, she mainstreamed to a very tough prep school environment, made new friends, and achieved academically more than we could have hoped for in her first semester. She hasn't a clue that as long as she was accepted socially at this new school, we frankly didn't care if she came home with all C's; we simply wanted her to acclimate. The all A's and B's were a wonderful confidence booster, and we wanted to reinforce the idea that good work, good behavior, and being a good person can only lead to more good things. And so we gave her a shopping spree for her birthday.

I'd dutifully written down all the things she'd asked for during the last several months and suggested to my husband that we take her to the stores selling those items to get them all for her. He agreed, and yesterday, after her friend went home, we got in the car and drove to the shopping center that had the two stores we needed. After we went to the correct aisle for the first thing on the list and picked it out, she started walking toward the cash registers, thinking she was done. We stopped her and told her we weren't. As we continued through that first store, and then onto the second, we all got caught up in the excitement of the experience, and by the time we went back to the car, we had three shopping bags filled with the several items on my list.

We perhaps spent somewhat more than we would have otherwise, but not by much, and since her birthday party is going to be small because it's a slumber party for just a handful of girls, it pretty well evens out. Even if that's not precisely the case, sometimes a kid just deserves something special If you're ever looking for an extra special surprise for someone in your life, I highly recommend a surprise shopping spree.

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

Comments

Is this de rigueur?

I'm still working on that upcoming romance by Catherine Anderson; I should be able to blog about it tomorrow, but I wanted to talk for a minute about something in another book I'm reading. I won't be finished with that book until tomorrow either, but something just happened in the book that bugged me. It's something I've written about before, in at least one column segment, and it's that too many romance novel heroes, particularly in series romance, get very physical very quickly with the heroines. Perhaps I've been out of the dating scene too long, but is it de rigueur for first kisses to also involve breastal action?

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

What a Nut!

I couldn't help myself last night and watched both 20/20 and Primetime Live last night. The former devoted itself to a 2-hour documentary on Michael Jackson while the latter included both an interviewer with the documentarian and a consultation with

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

"BA," Midnight, Moonlight & Miracles, and my "Dinner Party" analogy

A slumber party managed to slow me down; I've finished the book w/the first-date "breastal action," but not the upcoming Catherine Anderson. That BA book turned out to be a good read; it got a grade of B from AAR's Ellen Micheletti, whom I find generally likes series romances a third of grade higher than I do. Yes, my grade is a B- and perhaps would have been a B had it not been for the first date BA (and a "only in romance novel coincidence" that's responsible for the book's Big Secret). The book? Teresa Southwick's Midnight, Moonlight & Miracles.

Southwick wrote two Western historicals in the mid-1990's that I truly enjoyed, and given that Westerns aren't generally my cup of tea, that's saying something. Winter Bride earned a B from me when it was released. Blackstone's Bride earned a B- when I read it in June of 2000. I'm going to look for her other historicals at the UBS, but wasn't at all sure whether MM&M was something I should even try because shortly after I read BB in 2000, I tried two of her Silhouette Romances - And Then He Kissed Me and With a Little T.L.C. - and hated both. Oddly enough, considering my problem with her new release, the reason was that they were so asexual that they could have been YA books.

It wasn't until after I read both of these Silhouette Romances that I determined the lack of anything but one or two kisses before marriage was proposed had more to do with the SR line than Southwick's ability to write good chemistry because those two Westerns had been good reads. Which is ultimately why I gave MM&M a chance and would encourage anyone looking for a series title with good characterization and some depth to consider reading it as well.

And now, on to something completely different. AAR runs two discussion lists - AARList, for readers and authors, and canwetalk, a readers-only list. I consider AAR and its lists to be a huge dinner party hosted by AAR, and am always amazed when somebody who doesn't care for AAR's style comes to the party solely for the purpose of complaining about the food. An author who periodically does just that did so again beginning earlier this week. My questions as a result of following the thread are these: is it possible that there are some people who don't make the "connect" between AAR and AARList? Not this author in particular, but some AARList members? Why would anyone join AARList if they don't like AAR, particularly when they state a moral argument against AAR's "meanness?" Does this make them hypocrites, that they only joined to promote themselves, or what? Why are so many of RT's staff members on AARList, and why do so many frequent AAR?

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

Comments

Eminen

Not long ago I bought Eminem's latest CD - the "clean" version. I think he's a whiner and a misogynist, and quite frankly, a pussy for being afraid of a sock puppet at the MTV 2002 Video Awards. And even though most of his songs are about how great he is, how scary he is to White America, how everyone's against him, and how horrible his life was while growing up, he's still quite talented. My husband refuses to listen to the CD, but I told my daughter she can listen to it - if she listens with me. I won't let her listen by herself, even if it is the "clean" version, even if some of her friends have it. By listening together, and I listen to all of the music she does, I can talk to her (and her friends when they're with us) about the songs and try to inject some reality into the situation.

Just this morning, before my daughter's friends went home from the slumber party, they were singing along with the radio, which was playing Eminem's Superman. I guess we haven't gotten that far on the CD yet, because I'd never heard it before, and from hearing them sing, I didn't think anything of it.

Later I was driving to the bookstore when the song came on the radio, and I was appalled. Clearly these girls haven't got a clue what the song's really about, but every "bad" word eliminated from the "clean" version is very easy to hear from an adult perspective. As my daughter says, "Eminem can rhyme anything," but that doesn't change the fact, as far as I'm concerned, that the man's just mean. Even if I do like the theme song from 8 Mile (which has nothing to do with bragging rights on the size of Eminem's penis, as one ludicrous anti-Eminem page I saw last month posted), even if he is talented, I'm so over him.

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

Comments

'A visitor' left this comment on 24 Oct 03

I LOVE YOU EMINEM{MARSHALL MATHERS}!!!
4EVER

Rebecca [ponieb8@yahoo.com]

A Big Fat "F"

When I put together my list of books to buy in February, I noticed it was smaller than usual, and that there were no series titles on it. So I went back through the list of series titles available this month, and saw one by Megan McKinney, whom I've never read. The book - Plain Jane and the Hotshot sounded reasonably good from its back blurb (it's about a music teacher with an inferiority complex who goes on a wilderness trip to mend a broken heart and a hunky, elite fire jumper who's also been burned - pun intended). Given this author's reputation, I added it to my list, and when I picked up my books yesterday, I decided to start with the McKinney.

The book is clumsy, juvenile, and when the heroine - about to have sex with the hero - feels as though she needs to justify why she's on the pill (she's finishing out the prescription she had from her relationship with the man who done her wrong), I wanted to pitch the book against the wall. I can't tell you how much that last bothered me. In my experience, it's only in romance land that women are worried about seeming "fast" because they take birth control.

When I criticize the book for being clumsy, it's not because of the writing - it's because of the characterization and the actual telling of the story, particularly when a note that's supposed to be delivered from the hero to the heroine is passed through the hands of the spoiled, spiteful, and jealous blond Texan bombshell who... well, do you think she delivers it? As for it being juvenile, that too goes to characterization. First there's the blond, and then there's the heroine, whose past hurt has so colored her viewpoint on men that she's totally off-the-mark. How anyone could believe a man utterly devoted to the saving of life could be a total jerk is beyond me; her behavior through most of the book reminded me of a petulant teen more than a 25-year-old woman.

This one earns a big, fat F from me, my first F in over a year.

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

How it Feels when the Floor Drops Out

If you've been in a fun house, you'll know that feeling you get when you walk on unsteady ground, sure that at any moment the floor will give out under you. Well, the floor just dropped out from under me and I'm in a state of shock. I reported in my

I reported in my blogging for December 4th that the editor of RWA's RWR Newsletter would accept my letter regarding an article appearing in the December issue of the newsletter. Charis Calhoon, the newsletter's editor, wrote at that time, "We would welcome your comments as a Letter to the Editor. If you send your comments THIS WEEK, that letter can appear in the February issue, which is our next issue under production...Many thanks; we look forward to printing your letter."

I worked tremendously hard to write a timely letter that addressed my concerns while meeting the 350-word word count allotted to me, and after faxing it in, assumed all I had to do was sit back and wait for it to be published. Imagine my surprise to learn that it was not included in the February issue - as a matter of fact, no letters were a part of that edition of the newsletter. Silly me, I started to get paranoid. Did they not include any letters because they didn't want to include mine?

Late last week I sent an email to Charis Calhoon asking what had happened, and just now received a response from Shirley Hailstock, president of RWA. I'm pasting her email verbatim, and following her email will be my letter to the editor, which I'd promised in December that I'd reprint here after it appeared in the newsletter. Since it'll never see the light of day now, all the more reason to share it with you.

Shirley Hailstock's email:
Dear Ms. Gold,
The Romance Writers Report is a trade magazine for members of Romance Writers of America. The magazine is distributed only to RWA members and selected publishing professionals. The only letters to the editor published in the RWR are from individuals who pay dues or publishing professionals affiliated with recognized publishers and literary agencies.
Since you are not a member, and you are not affiliated with a publisher or literary agency, your letter was not accepted for publication in the RWR.
Sincerely,
Shirley Hailstock
President, Romance Writers of America
My letter to the editor:
In April CherÃ© Coen questioned me for an RWR article. Her email stated she was "looking at the pros and cons of news/rumors/gossip that spreads through the Internet via message board(s), using your message boardsâ€¦specifically on the Robin Lee Hatcher hoopla." Ms. Coen never identified herself other than as "CherÃ© Coen, Variety.com." Only when I read the article in the December RWR did I learn she is Cherie Claire, historical romance author.
After hearing from RWA members who read the article and found it biased against All About Romance, I read it for myself. Then I checked and discovered we had negatively reviewed one of Claire's books in mid-1999. Had I been told before agreeing to participate that CherÃ© Coen was Cherie Claire, I would have declined participation.
Claire's article begins with a story of how a small business was nearly destroyed as a result of a false rumor, then segues into an episode involving Robin Lee Hatcher and an interview she did with the Gannett-owned Idaho Statesman. AAR's involvement had nothing to do with rumor; we linked to the article and allowed people - including Ms Hatcher herself, an author with some excellent reviews from AAR - to comment on it. We also contacted the newspaper, which neither printed a retraction nor any letter from Hatcher. All of this is detailed in an editorial (http://www.likesbooks.com/editorial.html) I wrote afterward, which links to every post made - including those supporting Ms Hatcher.
I see no real attempt on Claire's part to present the conflict as it unfolded. She seems to accept Hatcher's view that AAR was out to do her harm because we accepted as legitimate reporting comments she made to a respectable newspaper. That Natasha Kern is quoted in the article without mentioning that she is also Hatcher's agent represents sloppy reporting.
Rather than presenting a fair analysis of the situation, I believe Claire's article provides past-RWA president Hatcher an opportunity to blame someone else for things she said and, as a result, paints an unflattering portrait of AAR - who simply provided readers a link to the original article.

Because I never made the RWA article part of any "official" discussion at AAR, I don't think I can turn around now and make an issue of the fact that they won't be printing my letter, but I'm incredibly angry about how they decided to handle things. I'm still mulling it over and may in fact bring the thing to light at AAR.

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

Comments

'A visitor' left this comment on 19 Feb 04

Rise above your floor!

Floor

Just Checking In

I did take this matter to AAR, created an article from it, and provided a link to one of our message boards, which means it's now fodder for anyone who'd like to discuss it there. You can link to it here.
As for me, I'd planned to blog about two bo

As for me, I'd planned to blog about two books today, but my bronchitis from last year/this year has now moved into this month and I'm suffering from asthma-like symptoms. So I'm on bed rest until tomorrow, at which point I'll blog about a traditional Regency I quite enjoyed (our AAR Reviewer did not) and the upcoming release of the fourth in the Louise Rennison YA series that so captivated me last year.

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

A Spinster's Luck, Dancing in my Nuddy-Pants, and The Playboy & Plain Jane

I don't seem to be doing all that much better in terms of the wheezing, but it seems to help to sit up, which means that until it's time for another nap, I thought I'd catch you up on my reading. First up is A Spinster's Luck, the debut romance (it's

I don't seem to be doing all that much better in terms of the wheezing, but it seems to help to sit up, which means that until it's time for another nap, I thought I'd catch you up on my reading.

First up is A Spinster's Luck, the debut romance (it's a traditional Regency) for Rhonda Woodward. Though I've had some good luck matching at least partly with AAR Reviewer Megan Frampton, I've got to disagree with her on this one, which she gave a grade of D. It was a B- for me, and the book would have gotten an even higher grade had it been better explained why the heroine was so upset at the hero for so many years. When she's a 16-year-old girl she overhears something he says and misinterprets it. The reader isn't privy to the misinterpretation until very late in the story, so it doesn't make a whole lot of sense why she feels the antipathy she does, but the rest of the book worked so well for me that I was surprised it was such a dud for Megan. Readers who enjoy cocoons turning into beautiful butterflies should enjoy this book, and the bitchy villainess for some reason doesn't seem the caricature this character type is often portrayed as. She's particularly effective in creating problems for the hero and heroine, and there's a poignancy to the story that makes it linger in my mind.

Next is Dancing in my Nuddy-Pants, the fourth in Lousie Rennison's hilarious YA/Chick Lit for Teens Georgia Nicolson series that both my daughter and I fell in love with last year. It took me a while to get back into the rhythm of the narrative, and perhaps the author over-dosed on the "osity" of too many words, but it's still a very fun read and I actually hope she stops the series at this point, because the ending perfectly fits the book (and the series). 14-year-old Georgia, madly in love with Robbie the Sex God, is perplexed by the "red-bottomosity" she feels for Dave the Laugh. She must deal with her nunga-nungas and oversized nose, the latter of which doesn't seem to be a problem for her growing girl-power over the opposite sex. Angus the cat is back in full force, and Georgia's sweet relationship with her baby sister is as fun as ever. 11, 14, or 40 - "girls" of all ages will enjoy this B read.

And then there's The Playboy and Plain Jane by Leanne Banks, which starts off a Silhouette mini-series. Banks has written the hunky single father and seemingly plain Jane nanny before, and does it well. This book works for the most part, but some of the series romance conventions included in this book are a bit much. The book earns a B- from me and would have been a straight B had the final conflict between the hero and heroine been expanded and more fully explored. Banks is a comfort read author for me, and those for whom she isn't a comfort-read author may find my grade higher than theirs.

I say this because the Rennison book did earn a straight B and it's clearly a more original and better book than the Banks, and would still be better had Banks expanded that final conflict. It's a good thing I no longer officially review online, because grading isn't always precise, and my reasons for the final grades of all three books mentioned today are equally imprecise. But there you have it anyway.

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

I Can't Report "There's No News Like Good News"

I know it's been almost two weeks since I've blogged, but my allergies and sinuses and bronchial tubes all decided to act up at once, leaving me more ill than I believe I've ever been. On one recent visit to the doctor, I was asked if I smoked because my wheezing was so bad. Wheezing, if you don't know, is what asthmatics do, and since I don't have asthma, I was scared, particularly when the doctor said, "You're sicker than you think." Then she gave me two breathing treatments in her office with a machine and really scared the hell out of me, especially since they didn't help at all.

I've been on two antibiotics (at once), prednisone, two nasal inhalers, a bronchial inhaler, antihistimine, decongestant, cough suppressant (w/codeine), and no relief. And - and I'm sorry to gross you out - but as someone who has suffered from horrendous coughing since adolescence, I must add that when I cough, it invokes a gag reflex and makes me sick. Most people have nasal problems with allergies - my nose is always clogged, but it's the coughing that's a major issue for me and always has been. It's no fun to need to walk around w/a plastic bag, if you know what I mean. I'm sure my daughter is convinced I'm dying, because she gets really quiet when I have a particularly bad bout of coughing and reach in desperation for something to....

Well, Friday evening things took a turn for the better in one way but a turn for the worse in another. By juggling the medicines, I finally got my first real relief from coughing and wheezing in nearly two weeks, but broke a rib in the process. By Friday late night I was coughing about 50% less, and now am 95% cough free. Unfortunately, I'm in agony from the broken rib. Sleeping is nearly impossible because I can't find a position that doesn't hurt, and rolling over almost makes me want to cry. I understand it takes about three weeks to heal, so tomorrow I'll be calling for some night time pain medication - I refuse to take it during the day because I can't stand the thought of sleeping since I've been doing so much of it lately.

Oh, and though I've started to catch up slightly at the site, it turns out that several of the emails I sent to authors who had won in our annual reader poll didn't get through. When I sent a second batch today, I heard from two authors - both on aol - who never received the first emails. Generally I hear back from everyone in a day or two. I sent the original emails on Sunday right after our pollster, Shelley Dodge, and I finalized the poll results, late because she's been sick and injured, and now I might not have the responses in time to post them on March 1st. Given that it's the 7th anniversary of my column, I'd hate to miss my self-imposed publishing date, but given that I haven't heard back from most authors yet, I may not have a choice.

Hopefully I'll be able to catch you all up on the books I've been reading tomorrow or so.

Before I'm done bitching, though, I'll share some more news about the site. We've had major technical problems since last week. Just as we were to go online w/our annual cover poll, we discovered a delay in the server's ability to accept the ballot forms. When I talked to tech help, they discovered a server-wide problem that took hours to resolve, and if I hadn't brought it to their attention, goodness knows when they would have resolved it. That problem, though, manifested itself in two additional ways, one of which has yet to be resolved - our in-house message boards (Reader to Reader and Writer's News). Since Friday the ability to post and/or read messages on these boards has diminished to close to 0%, and though tech help is usually good at resolving things, they thought they had it fixed before they went home for the weekend Friday and in fact it was not fixed, was not fixed throughout the weekend, and continues not to work as of tonight - Monday night at 10:30. This kind of thing used to make me absolutely crazy and stressed out, but I can't make it work and am trying not to blow a fuse over it.

I'd like to say I'll be going to sleep now, but prednisone makes me wired and I probably won't be asleep until two or so. At least I won't have to get up at 6:30 to fix breakfast and take my daughter to school, but we had an ice day today and school is cancelled for tomorrow as well. I'm assuming the steering committee meeting I was supposed to attend at the school tomorrow at 5:30 is also cancelled. I hope the sun comes out tomorrow and warms things up enough for some of the ice to melt so that my husband can get the car out of the garage, out of the alley, and to the pharmacy for drugs and the grocery store for food. And to think that on Saturday it was 70 degrees. But that's Texas for you.

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

January 31, 2003

laurielikesbooks Blog for January 2003

laurielikesbooks.blog-city.com — January 2003

Uncapable of Making a Decision (Don't you just hate that?)

I wish my first post of the new year weren't so impotent and incompetent, but it is! This whole blog/message board thing is driving me crazy. I've received a number of emails with proposed solutions, people continued to post on the MB until the midni

I'm going to list the problems and proposed solutions as I see them, and as others have pointed them out to me. The most worrisome is that I'm trying to have my cake and eat it too. What do I mean by that? One of my major online peeves are authors who use venues to lash out against online critics. By never naming names in this blog, I hoped I could avoid being guilty of the same, but when spillage occurs on the AAR site itself, I think I end up being guilty even if I don't post w/in those threads, which I've tried not to do.

So one solution was to create a blog-specific MB only linked to from the blog, but as a cyber-friend and at least one other reader pointed out, this is not altogether different from having my cake and eating it too, which means I'd be guilty. So that won't work.

Well, what about the posting of emails w/in the blog from readers who read blog entries? Aside from creating a lot of work for me, is this all that different from having a blog-specific MB? After all, the idea of my blog was not to ask people to publically sympathize w/me - that's what those authors do that I think is wrong. But some who've contacted me think this would be different from a MB, so it's still under consideration.

There are two drastic suggestions, albeit one is far more drastic than the other. The least drastic would be to remove links to the blog from AAR's home page and What's New? page. The only remaining link would be from my bio, which is buried pretty far in the site. Newcomers would have difficulty finding it, but existing blog readers would be able to bookmark and return to the blog. If done in conjunction w/deleting any posts that appear on AAR regarding the blog, this one gives me a "guilt-free" rating, but a number of people have pointed out that the issues I raise in the blog should be fodder for "official" discussion.

The most drastic option would be to stop blogging altogether. One of the advantages of doing a blog is that it seems intimate and personal even though, of course, that's no more than an illusion. I think a reason I freak when I see MB threads about blog content is that it takes it from the intimate and puts it in a very public forum. Since I follow different rules for posting in my blog than I do at AAR, that's definitely a problem.

The final option would be to leave it as is as of midnight last night. Existing links stay in place but any MB posts would be deleted. And yet isn't it hypocritical? Here's the agonizing answer to that. A poster yesterday to the Potpourri MB asked the following: "If a poster had read the letter on the Holt Uncensored site and raised it for comment here would that be okay or not once you discussed it in your blog?" My answer had to be that it would be alright as long as none of the repercussions I mentioned in my blog were MB fodder. Even as I wrote that it sounded silly, and it sounds more silly every time I consider it.

Clearly I remain utterly conflicted about this and will be giving it more thought in the days to come. I realize I'm being incredibly pathetic about this because I don't generally dither like a moron about things. I like to think of myself as a fairly decisive individual. Oh well.

Hope your new year is a good one!

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

More Indecision

I'm experimenting with a commenting script that will allow readers to leave a "shout out." I've got an email into the person who developed the script because I can't as yet figure out how to change "shout out" to "leave a mes

I've received a variety of email since bringing into the open my dilemma of "what to do about the blog?" Last night my husband and I opened a nice bottle of wine and I asked for his opinion. Like one of my most trusted friends at AAR, he thinks the links on our home page and What's New? page to the blog should be removed, and my AAR-colleague isn't sure it should stop at that. At the very least, I'll be removing those links.

But the email from my AAR-colleague and two additional reader emails have me thinking more and more seriously about the "having my cake and eating it too" thing I've tried to avoid. As one of these emailers put it: "Do you honestly believe that as publisher of AAR you can get away with saying or doing anything anywhere on the web that's public at this point that won't be connected to AAR sooner or later?"

So I'm definitely thinking about doing away w/that aspect of the blog, although what's interesting to me is that AAR has always, to some extent, reflected the toils and troubles with building and maintaining a web site that so goes against the grain of how many believe the online romance community believe it should be. Tortous grammar aside, I can recall writing column segments throughout the history of the ATBF/LN&V column detailing how it's offended others, and sharing my anxiety and general angst as the site began to take off and grow.

I've just been going through all my bloggings to date, trying to determine which ones would be "verboten" if I stopped posting behind-the-scenes stuff here. It isn't all that easy to do as many of the bloggings are a mix of site-related, reading-related, and even personal "stuff." Some of the site-related stuff I can imagine would be "okay" to continue to post, but then we get into the whole idea of self-censoring, which is something I do at AAR all day long. Sigh. I'm going to continue to think about this. Given that I've found a commenting script, you all can weigh in and let me know what you think if you haven't already. One thing to keep in mind is this: there's a good chance the Pat Holt thingie would have been front and center at AAR if I didn't have this blog. As it was, it was only peripheral - isn't that a good thing? I really don't know.

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

A Couple of Fixes

Two brief mentions: Images of Cawdor Castle, off-line briefly, have been uploaded once again. Sorry about the error. And, "Shout outs" are posted publically. Whether or not I continue to use this technology is something I'm continuing to th

Two brief mentions: Images of Cawdor Castle, off-line briefly, have been uploaded once again. Sorry about the error. And, "Shout outs" are posted publically. Whether or not I continue to use this technology is something I'm continuing to think about, just as I continue to think about the direction of my blog. I've been looking at some other blogs on the 'Net and while at the edge, I don't think I've gone over it yet.

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

Weird Movies I Have Known

Sometimes talking a thing through really helps. I had a long talk with my ATBF co-columnist (and dear friend) Robin Uncapher last night after she and her family returned from their Christmas "vacation" and between that and answering a particular reader email, I've been able to put things in perspective. First of all, on a good day, AAR proper has more than 4,000 unique visitors, which means that more than 4,000 individual people visit AAR during a 24-hour period. (The unique visitor statistic should not be confused with the number of hits AAR receives; if an individual visits AAR twice in a day and visits 10 pages each time, they will account for 20 hits.) I believe that the average number of unique visitors to this blog is roughly 175, which means only 4% of our readership is visiting the blog.

I like that, I like that very much because it does more to provide that illusion of intimacy I've been talking about in recent bloggings. More importantly, though, is that my talk with Robin helped me see something. Ever since the RWA newsletter article came out and the Pat Holt incident occurred, I've been stressed. Having written my responses to both, I'm waiting for them to be published. I can't do a thing about either other than write those letters and so I've been feeling powerless, particularly since there continue to be repercussions from both. One thing that I can control, however, is what I publish, both at AAR and here in my blog. And so I think I've subconsciously settled on obsessing about them because they are in my control while the other two, which are major concerns, are not.

With that out of the way, I thought I'd change course today. In a November blogging I wrote about the oddest books I'd ever read. Reading about which actor may take over for Richard Harris as Dumbledore in the Harry Potter films, particularly since one of them appeared in a very odd film indeed, made me think about the weirdest movies I've ever seen.

One recent actor to be mentioned is the Irish actor Michael Gambon, recently in the fabulous Gosford Park. He also starred in Peter Greenaway's 1989 The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover, surely one of the strangest movies ever made. Here's the blurb I found at the Internet Movie Database:

"The wife of a barbaric crime boss engages in a secretive romance with a gentle bookseller between meals at her husband's restaurant. Food, colour coding, sex, murder, torture and cannibalism are the exotic fare in this beautifully filmed but brutally uncompromising modern fable which has been interpreted as an allegory for Thatcherism."

One of Gambon's co-stars in this film is the brilliant actress Helen Mirren. She also starred with Gambon in Gosford Park, but was also featured in the incredibly disturbing The Comfort of Strangers, along with Christopher Walken, Rupert Everett, and Natasha Richardson. This snippet from the IMDB only hints at how bizarre the movie is:

"An English couple holiday in Venice to sort out their relationship. There is some friction and distance between them, and we also sense they are being watched. One evening, they lose their way looking for a restaurant, and a stranger invites them to accompany him. He plies them with wine and grotesque stories from his childhood. They leave disoriented, physically ill, and morally repelled. But, next day, when the stranger sees them in the piazza, they accept an invitation to his sumptuous flat. After this visit, the pair find the depth to face questions about each other, only to be drawn back into the mysterious and menacing fantasies of the stranger and his mate."

Walken has a history of playing nutty characters, but even with all the whack-jobs he's played, he's shown some real comic genius. There are those who caught his hilarious spots as The Continental on Saturday Night Live, but who could forget his role as Diane Keaton's psycho-driving younger brother in Annie Hall?

A.S. Byatt, whose recent film Possession didn't get nearly enough credit, wrote the novel Angels and Insects. It was adapted for the screen in a 1995 release starring Kristin Scott Thomas. The IMBD blurb doesn't reveal a most shocking scene, and neither will I:

"The movie is a study of an aristocratic family in the Victorian England. William Adamson, a young scientist, is introduced into the aristocratic family Alabaster by reverend Alabaster who is also fascinated by insects. William marries the older daughter of the family and studies the amounts of insects in the garden of the villa. His - for the aristocrats - strange behaviours reveal at the same time their own failures and passions."

A truly wonderful and romantic movie that is also quite odd, and made by a filmmaker known for his quirky movies - Alan Rudolph (another of his films is The Moderns) - is 1984's Choose Me. Starring Genvieve Bujold, Keith Carradine, and Lesley Ann Warren, Choose Me tells the story of: "Several lost-soul night-owls, including a nightclub owner, a talkback radio relationships counseller, and an itinerant stranger have encounters that expose their contradictions and anxieties about love and acceptance." (courtesy of the IMDB) I can't be sure, but I think, after watching the metamorphesis of Bujold's character in this film, that I fell in love with the world of vampires because soon after seeing this movie for the first time I read Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, something which I would normally never have picked up to read.

Actress Mimi Rogers, who starred in the wonderful but little-seen Bulletproof Heart (aka Killer) with Anthony LaPaglia, appeared with David Duchovny in a 1991 movie so upsetting my husband still hasn't forgiven me for making him sit through it - The Rapture. I don't think what's said about this movie at the IMDB is particularly helpful, so here's a link to the Roger Ebert review. (LaPaglia also starred in a "so bad it's good" movie Paperback Romance.)

Just as The Rapture was a profoundly upsetting religious movie, so was - dare I say it? - Demi Moore's The Seventh Sign. I remember this movie was almost universally panned when it was released in 1988, but I found it intriguing. Here's the IMDB blurb:

"round the world, the signs of the apocalypse--as outlined in the Book of Revelations--seem to be coming to pass in the wake of a mysterious wanderer. Father Lucci, the Vatican Emissary assigned to investigate, dismisses the occurrences as natural, but Abby Quinn, a young American woman, has reason to fear they're real--and that the unfolding events may spell disaster for her unborn child."

I'll mention one more religious movie that fascinated me: Jesus of Montreal. Here's the IMDB blurb: "A group of actors putting on an interpretive Passion Play in Montreal begin to experience a meshing of their characters and their private lives as the production takes form against the growing opposition of the Catholic church." Although this is a sub-titled movie, it's extremely watchable, but more than a little surreal as what's happening in real life impacts the production.

I've already mentioned a couple of other weird, so-bad-they're-good movies in a previous blogging - She and Cherry 2000 - but I'll provide more detailed information here. She was released in 1985 and starred Sandahl Bergman. The IMDB blurb says: "In a backward post-apocalyptic world, She aids two brothers' quest to rescue their kidnapped sister. Along the way, they battle orgiastic werewolves, a psychic communist, a tutu-wearing giant, a mad scientist, and gladiators before standing against the odds to defeat the evil Norks." Cherry 2000, starring Melanie Griffith, was released in 1987. Here's the IMDB blurb:

"In the future, a man travels to the ends of the earth to find that the perfect woman is always under his nose. When successful businessman Sam Treadwell finds that his android wife, Cherry model 2000 has blown a fuse, he hires sexy renegade tracker E. Johnson to find her exact duplicate. But as their journey to replace his perfect mate leads them into the treacherous and lawless region of 'The Zone', Treadwell learns the hard way that the perfect woman is made not of computer chips and diodes, but of real flesh and blood!"

I'm running out of time now, so I'm simply going to list a few more movies that are quirky, odd, or downright bizarre:

Metropolitan by Whit Stillman
Working Girls by Lizzie Borden (not to be confused with Mike Nichols' Working Girl)
The Hotel New Hampshire by Tony Richardson (based on the John Irving novel of the same name - somehow watching brother-sister incest is different than reading about it)
The Sailor Who Fell From Grace to the Sea by Lewis John Carlino (although based upon a novel written by the Japanes Yukio Mishimi, I came away after seeing this movie thinking that the English are surely decadent, and this was when I was 15!)
The Hunger, directed by Tony Scott and starring David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve, and Susan Sarandon (Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence also starred David Bowie, and the scene of his execution as a POW in that movie is incredibly powerful)

At a later date I plan to list some of my favorite unusual plays, such as Wallace Shawn's Aunt Dan and Lemon....

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

Watching, Reading, and Often Laughing

I've followed a fairly odd schedule on Tuesday nights, at least since late summer after discovering Changing Rooms, because Tuesday nights were mini-marathons of the show. After dinner, I'd put the TV on, grab my Newsweek, Time, and Entertainment Weekly magazines, and read them while listening to (and occasionally actually watching) three hours worth of episodes. I tried hard to finish before 10 because that's when So Graham Norton comes on for an hour, and laughing out loud isn't particularly conducive to reading.

But then season two of The Osbournes began, and interfered with my neat little schedule, and then when What Not to Wear started airing episodes at the same time, things got messed up. And last night there was no mini-marathon of Changing Rooms, so when I gathered my magazines and turned on the TV at 8:30, I was at a loss. I could easily fill the 8:30 - 9:00 slot with History International's documentary on Henry VIII, but what to do at 9 if I wanted to watch The Osbournes at 9:30? Could I limit myself to the first half-only of the documentary Castles and Dungeons on History International or should I give up on Ozzy, which hasn't been nearly as fun this year as last year anyway?

Ozzy lost. When the castle documentary opened with images of the Welsh castles my husband and I visited on our trip to the UK in 2001, I was hooked. Even the fabulous local castle guide at one of the castles was featured on the show, although I was surprised that the documentary's American narrator used American pronunciations for the castles' names as opposed to the Welsh.

All in all, it was a terrific hour, and a brief discussion at the end about the gorgeous AlcÃ¡zar of Segovia in Spain gave me today's Castle of the Week.

The second half hour of So Graham Norton was particularly bizarre last night; two of his guests were conceptual artists Gilbert and George. I had never heard of them, but they create art using fecal material that they gather by pooping in their hands. One of their pieces required something like 600 poops - I kid you not - and their work sells for the equivalent of $90,000. Yes, the English really are a decadent lot!

I had some trouble sleeping last night and used the awake-time to finish off my Entertainment Weekly, which has a new feature column by Time columnist Joel Stein. I've enjoyed his work for a few years now, ever since he and the fabulously funny Calvin Trillin shared column space in Time's "Notebook" section. Stein is like the smart-ass Jewish friend you had in college. While his newest EW column wasn't as brilliant as his Poop-scooping Ozzy? Shoplifting Winona? The biggest winners of 2002 were losers. column, published late in December, merely-average-Joel-Stein is better than most. If you like Joe Queenan and haven't read Stein yet, give him a shot.

What particularly tickled me in this new issue of EW was Owen Gleiberman's review of Pinocchio, directed by and starring Roberto Benigni. Gleiberman's grade for the movie is a big fat "F," and here are my favorite parts of his review:

"In Roberto Benigni's Pinocchio, the beloved/insipid Italian director and clown skips through rooms like a hypomanic elf while the gee-whiz voice of Breckin Meyer...."
"His Pinocchio is meant to be adorable, but he comes off as less an enchanted puppet than as a harmlessly deranged middle-aged man prancing about in the kind of froufrou cream-colored pantsuit that Dinah Shore retired to her back closet in 1977."
"...the shoddy fake sets and general tone of rustic medieval rib nudging are enough to make you wish that someone would stop Roberto Benigni before he commits wooden whimsy again."

Right now I'm working on finishing the second of two traditional Regency Romances I've been reading. I should blog about both tomorrow.

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

Wal-Mart

Yesterday I read an article about Wal-Mart in Time magazine. Something I read in it struck a chord. Last month an author posted on one of our message boards the results of a survey done by RWA that indicated 20% of readers buy their books at discount

Yesterday I read an article about Wal-Mart in Time magazine. Something I read in it struck a chord. Last month an author posted on one of our message boards the results of a survey done by RWA that indicated 20% of readers buy their books at discount stores such as Wal-Mart. The author was trying to make the point that rather than some authors getting upset about negative reviews and reader comments, they ought to be more concerned about the influence of stores such as Wal-Mart in terms of which books they stock and therefore sell.

This author said it far batter than I, so I'm pasting most of her post here:

I'm an author and a member of RWA. I don't mean to insult anyone here by posting anonymously. I want to comment on ______ belief that comments on online message boards and online reviews hurt her sales to the point she had to write Pat Holt a letter.
I'm always one to say that if you can't take the heat, don't come over here and read the message boards. But to address the fear that bad online buzz hurts sales--RWA just sent all of us a survey, where they'd tabulated the results of a poll of romance readers. I don't have it in front of me, but it was a significant number of readers. Of those, only 4 percent buy their books online. I would guess many of those are the same consumers who use online sites such as this one to make buying decisions. Four percent! If you slice that down by the number who'd actually buy or not buy based on a message board flame war *at this site* you've cut that down even further. I'm not a statistician but that's a very small number. And yet, the "threat" of online sites such as AAR has aroused so much passion.
In the same survey, it says that 20% of readers buy their books at big discount stores like WalMart. Twenty percent! And yet when recently Anderson, who is WalMart's sole supplier of books, decided not to carry a romance because they didn't like the subject matter, it didn't even rate one line in the RWR, which is supposed to be an industry magazine. All I heard at my local chapter meeting of authors was a sniffy, "I don't see what all the fuss is about. WalMart doesn't carry my books either." (for the non-industry types here, their books weren't declined because of content, mind you, but because of typical marketing factors, which is a very different issue indeed.)
So, authors, what's the bigger threat: A huge chain with enormous impact sanitizing our reading choices? Or some passionate posters on a message board on a single website with, according to RWA, very little impact on sales? I know we women are emotional, but I think we're battling the mouse when we really need to be battling the mammoth, and that's really, really dumb.

But getting back to the Time article itself. Most of you no doubt know how successful Wal-Mart is; indeed, during the just-finished holiday shopping season, Wal-Mart sales were up while other retailers were down. So its influence cannot be denied, and according to a retail analyst, Wal-Mart's "goal is to have a 30% share of every major business they are in."

Interesting, huh?

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

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The Phantom Tollbooth, A Reckless Bargain, & A Prudent Match

My daughter is (re)reading Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth (illustrated by Jules Feiffer) for her fifth grade Literary Analysis class so I decided it would be a great time to reread this book for myself. This is one of my favorite books. I first read it in junior high school for fun, and I've bought copies for each of my nieces and nephews as they've grown up. The copy I own now is so old that it was printed before they began to print ISBN numbers, but it's in better shape than her "lived-in" personal copy of the book (not to be confused with the copy we had to buy her for school). I've mentioned many times that I'm fanatical about keeping my books in great shape; even though I've passed on to my daughter a love for reading, I've not passed on the idea that books should be kept as pristine as possible. Her books generally become "well-loved" by their second reading, and often literally fall apart after several more rereads, which is why we've gone through three copies of the Harry Potter books, Which Witch (by Eva Ibbotson), among others.

I'll be writing a DIK Review of The Phantom Tollbooth when I finish rereading it, but as I got into it last night, I was reminded how perfect the book is not only for bookies, but for wordies; it may, in fact, be the penultimate wordie's book. /p>

The Phantom Tollbooth is my third book of the new year. The first and second were traditional Regencies - A Reckless Bargain by Elizabeth Powell and Laura Matthews' A Prudent Match (as the book no longer in print, I've not provided an Amazon link). The former was granted DIK status by Megan Frampton, one of our new reviewers, while the latter received grades of C+ and D+ from Robin Uncapher and Ellen Micheletti respectively.

I don't generally buy books that get negative reviews from my AAR colleagues, but had bought the Matthews book before it was reviewed back in 2000. It had sat on the Regency section of my library for over two years, and it was what I grabbed the other day on my way out of the house. After reading the first few chapters while sitting in a doctor's waiting room, I came home and checked out our review and discovered that neither Robin nor Ellen had much good to say about it. My tastes are quite different from Robin's; where Ellen is concerned I often like the same books she likes (although to a lesser extent than she likes them).

A Prudent Match is very explicit sexually for a traditional Regency, but since much of the plot surrounds the heroine's fears of the marriage bed, the extra sensuality was appropriate. Here's a thumbnail sketch of the book: After a lengthy engagement to a young man who died in India and left her a small fortune, Prudence Stockworth marries William, Baron Ledbetter, in what she believes is a marriage of convenience. William is no stranger to Prudence; they'd met during her come-out some years before and his masculine attentions frightened her. This much is made clear fairly early in the story. What becomes apparent as the book progresses is that although William is in need of Prudence's dowry, his feelings for her are not typical to MOC stories. The reader is presented with what I'd call emotional red-herrings from William; at one point early on he muses on mistresses and decides that to keep one after marriage would be too expensive.

I appreciated this sort of mundane thinking; it's typical of the book, which centers around Prudence and William's day-to-day lives as they come to know one another. This isn't a plot-driven romance. Instead it is entirely character driven and the reader comes to know these virtual strangers as they become better acquainted. There's no sub-plot involving mayhem - the only mystery involves a bequest his mother made to the local church that takes an unfortunate turn late in the story. It's well integrated, though, because it brings Prudence's underlying fears of abandonment to the forefront.

William is fairly high-handed, but he's also pretty reasonable when confronted with Prudence's gentle stubbornness. As he patiently woos his wife, she begins to come alive. I particularly liked that he adored her wild head of hair and encouraged her to showcase rather than tame it. And though teaching his wife about the joys of sex during her period was rather icky to me, it's one of the few historically-set romances I've ever read that even broaches the topic.

Both Robin and Ellen criticized the book for a lack of chemistry outside the bedroom, and though this is not a book that zings, I found it had a nicely quiet sensibility. But I can see how others would find it too quiet. It took me longer to read than expected because it was so easy to put down.

In the end, I can say that I enjoyed A Prudent Match far more than Ellen; as for how far apart my grade is from Robin's is something I'm still thinking about. My feeling is that once I write about A Reckless Bargain and assign a grade for it, I'll be better able to assign a grade to the Matthews' book.

I wasn't sure whether or not to buy A Reckless Bargain. Megan loved it, but the only other book we've reviewed for Elizabeth Powell earned a D+ from Blythe. Still, the premise interested me and I picked up the book last weekend, began to read it immediately, and finished it in one sitting.

25-year-old widowed Kit Mallory lives a simple life in the English countryside, far different from the life she lived in India with her wealthy Cit husband. On the voyage back to England she nursed and befriended the Dowager Duchess of Wexcombe, one of those flamboyant and unconventional older characters often found in romance novels. The dowager's grandson - the current duke - believes Kit may have undue influence on his grandmother and after trying to pay her off failed, enlists his cousin, Nicholas Darcy, Marquess of Bainbridge, to seduce Kit and separate her from his grandmother.

When the dowager invites Kit to the ducal estate she is loathe to come, but how can she deny her friend? Once ensconced at the estate, Kit is treated shabbily by the duke, his wife, and her sister. The only one to show her any consideration at all is Nicholas, and the chemistry between them is both exciting and scary.

Nicholas isn't totally convinced Kit's the she-devil, but he loves his grandmother enough to give his cousin's plan a try. A rift between the dowager and the duke develops over her globe-trotting ways and Kit's proposed solution presents Nicholas with the opportunity to test her intentions toward his grandmother. What doesn't fit in his plan is falling in love with Kit. Unfortunately, the duke is a prig and the duke's sister-in-law is as bitchy as they come. Kit is destroyed when the Big Secret is revealed to her, and things only get worse from there. How can Nicholas win Kit after her humiliation?

A Reckless Bargain follows a more typical romance novel path than A Prudent Match. That said, it's not a book of stereotypes, although most of the characters are familiar types. I've a penchant for misunderstood heroines, and Kit couldn't be more different than the gold-digger she's believed to be. The author does a wonderful job bringing Kit and Nicholas together, ripping them apart, and then bringing the two back together for a fitting finale. This is an emotional read - not a two-hanky read but certainly worthy of a single hanky.

This book does not earn DIK status from me, however. If I could give it a B and half a plus, I would. But that's silly and there isn't a half a plus to give. I recommend A Reckless Bargain but I'm not begging anyone to read it. So I'll settle for a straight B, which leads me back to A Prudent Match, which is not nearly as good. It's somewhere between a C+ and B-, but there's no grade for that, so I've got to give it the B- if for no other reason than the author presented me with something I hadn't read before even though she didn't totally succeed.

I realized after reading this past paragraph that it's rather absurd to go through these machinations to come up with a grade when all I'm going to do is input it into my database. So what if one book is a B-- and the other a B 1/2+? But then, you already know I'm obsessive when it comes to reading. Oh well, I'll check in after I finish The Phantom Tollbooth, which I do recommend heartily to one and all - adults and children, men and women. All you need in order to fall in love with Juster's classic is a sense of the absurd and a sense of humor.

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

A Slice of Life and a Bit of Advice

My daughter returned to school Wednesday after a seemingly endless 3-week Christmas break, and not a moment too soon for me. Still, when I picked her up from school Friday afternoon, it was clear we needed some time apart, so I called my husband and

My daughter returned to school Wednesday after a seemingly endless 3-week Christmas break, and not a moment too soon for me. Still, when I picked her up from school Friday afternoon, it was clear we needed some time apart, so I called my husband and informed him that he would be taking her shoe shopping Saturday afternoon. "Why am I being punished," he asked? My response? "You should share in the joy that is shoe shopping and finding appropriate footwear for a 10-year-old child with adult-length but exceedingly narrow feet."

After insisting that I write out a specific list of stores, shoe types, heel heighths, and dollars - to which I said, "If you can find two pairs of sneakers and and a pair of other shoes/boots that fit and look appropriate for a ten-year-old, just buy them!" - the two of them left on their quest. I took a long shower and settled down with my new EW and the remote control. As I was flipping I came across MTV and a mini-marathon of The Osbournes second season. As I had missed some of the episodes, I decided to catch up. Luckily the latest column (sorry I can't provide a link - can't find one) for Joel Stein (whom I mentioned in a previous blogging) was up to his usual standards. After he mentions his experience as a commentator for the VHI show I Love the 80's and his insatiable need to be famous, he writes that he called the show's producer to ask if he could appear on an I Love the 90's series, where he could "cleverly ask how someone could drink a whiskey drink, a vodka drink, a lager drink, and a cider drink - twice - and still get up again." Whenever I "get" a pop culture reference to something "after my time," I'm always impressed with myself , particularly since when my husband came home later and didn't know of or remember the Chumbawamba song.

My husband and daughter returned home victorious - with two pairs of sneakers and a pair of boots) just in time for a repeat of the most recent Osbournes episode, and while she went to prepare for a sleepover at her friend's house, I cajoled my husband into watching Ozzy, Sharon and the gang along with me. Smells Like Teen Spirits was the best episode of the year, as far as I'm concerned. Here are the highlights:

17-year-old Kelly Osbourne has gone overboard in her party-hardy mode and relays how she was nearly attacked by a cabbie driving her home the night before, but escaped and ran down the street to the nearest bar. Although clearly upset, Sharon quips that so much has happened to Kelly in 24 hours... "I haven't even taken a sh_t in 48 hours."
Sharon's father Don comes for a visit from jolly old England. They've been estranged, I believe, since she married Ozzy (didn't her dad used to manage Ozzy?), but her colon cancer has brought the two of them back together, and there is clearly a lot of love between them. They dissolve into giggles when he does a Norm Crosby on "chemotherapy" and when Sharon tells him her kids think Tony Curtis once called her a whore.
Ozzy is on a burrito binge and is seen driving to Chipoltle, a chain of high-priced burrito bars. Seems one isn't enough - he'll get one to eat now and another for later. At the same time we see Sharon, son Jack, and Kelly at L.A.'s famous Nate 'n' Al's deli where she compares and contrasts her teenage hijinks against those of her kids. All she did was sneak off to the movies, not get banned from bars.
I wasn't nearly as taken as Jack when wholesome teen-singer Mandy Moore partied at his house, but that's just me. Far more interesting was watching Ozzy work out to Tina Turner and later Bette Midler. Who knew he had such middle of the road tastes?
Another scene between Sharon and her dad is destined to become a classic. She recounts the time Kelly called a child-abuse hotline to complain that Sharon had hit her. The counselor asked what precipitated the smack, and after Kelly shared what she'd said/done, the counselor told Kelly Sharon was right to smack her. By the time Sharon tells her dad "they should have a hotline for parents whose children abuse them," I admit I was LOL. Whether it's during this scene or another when Don quips "I can see why the first one left," in reference to Sharon and Ozzy's oldest daughter who moved out of the house rather than be on the show, I dissolved into tears of laughter.
Watching Ozzy lecture Kelly on drinking is one of those ironic yet classic Osbourne family moments. Watching him shuffle off to the kitchen to eat his other burrito and get so full he's ill from it is yet another classic moment - whenever Ozzy or Sharon engages in something "normal," there's always a twist to it.
Kelly hasn't listened to Ozzy and Sharon can't sleep knowing her daughter is out doing something she oughtn't. What's a mum to do? Why, clean the fridge in the middle of the night. She goes at it like a fiend. When Kelly eventually comes home, she spends part of her night being as sick as my college roommate used to get when we were freshmen.
Perhaps my favorite scene was when Kelly realizes her drinking makes her unhappy. She comes to this conclusion after telling Sharon how horrible she feels the morning after. Sharon, with her sly wit, proceeds to tell Kelly she should eat some butter, perhaps bacon and eggs, and sauage, among other foods guaranteed to make her stomach roil. You can see Kelly becoming ill from this mention of foodstuffs. As a mother, I'm going to try and remember Sharon's version of child psychology. Absolutely brilliant.
The episode ends as Ozzy eats another burrito - he's promised his binge is complete.

After laughing so hard for 30 minutes I had a horrible coughing attack - a remnant of this fall's illness. Then we drove our daughter to her sleep-over and enjoyed Part I of our "evening out," which was a lengthy trip to Borders, where my husband and I picked out several CD's, including one he refuses to listen to even though I actually like a couple of the songs (it's the "clean" version of The Eminem Show). Even though I warn him that if he doesn't stay current on music, it'll be tougher to stay close to our daughter, he says he draws the line at Eminem. Even my telling him that some of the songs are very good and that if we listen to the music with her we can talk through his misogynistic whining about how bad everyone is to him, he doesn't budge.

After we finish our music selection, we go to the mystery section. I've noticed that AAR Reviewer Jane Jorgenson and I have similar tastes, and she's noticed it too. Since she enjoys mysteries, I asked her a few weeks ago for some recommendations - unfortunately I didn't know we'd be going to the bookstore and don't have them with me, so I'll have to go it alone. I decide to start with a food mystery, and end up picking up Diane Mott Davidson's Sticks and Scones, and since it's a newish entry in a long-lived series, I also picked up the earliest entry in the series they had - Dying for Chocolate. I'll let you know if I like them. This is a major step for me. I've never read a mystery before, although I'm still quite proud that many years ago I won grand prize at a "mystery dinner party" we attended.

Then we had a terrific dinner at The Blue Mesa, a Mexican restaurant a cut above the usual Tex-Mex fare and when we finished, made our way to the movies to see About Schmidt, starring Jack Nicholson. Nicholson brilliantly portrays a 66-year-old man who has just retired as an insurance executive. He's dissatisfied with his wife (she's old, she smells) and the man his daughter is about to marry, and begins to share these sentiments in letters to a 6-year-old boy from Tanzania whom he "adopts" after watching a television commercial. When his wife dies abruptly, he is lost; after he discovers his wife had a long-ago affair with his closest friend, he goes a little crazy. He plans to drive the new Winnebago (he made his wife pay for part of it out of her own money, the daughter complains to Schmidt when she chides him for being so selfish) to Denver from Omaha and spend some time with his daughter before the wedding, but she can't spare the extra time for her dad. Instead, he drives throughout the midwest and has "experiences" before arriving at his daughter's prospective mother-in-law's house. The family his daughter is marrying into, to put it mildly, isn't typical, but then with Kathy Bates as the mother and Howard Hessman as the father, that's no surprise. Dylan McDermott plays Schmidt's ponytailed son-in-law-to-be, and all three supporting "characters" are wonderful in their roles. The reason for Bates and Hessman's divorce will shock you as surely as it shocked Schmidt, and an hilarious scene in a hot-tub is made all the more funny by Bates' courage as an actress in the scene. To say more would be a spoiler.

This is a wonderful movie and I heartily recommend it, not only for the story, but for the acting, which is superb and without vanity.

I've droned on long enough, but having an entire day that's fun is such a rarity in my life that I tend to go overboard. Sorry. Oh, wait... there was one "blight" on the day - I must have blocked it out as traumatic for a moment. It happened while we were in line to buy our movie tickets. I happened to say to my husband, "I can't believe anyone would see Just Married" when the man in front of us turned around and said, "That's what we came to see." Utterly embarrassed, I apologized and told the man and his wife that I hoped they enjoyed the movie. Never one to let a zinger go by unzung, my husband turned to me and said, "That's almost as bad as "the Bloom incident," referring to a horrible faux pas I'd committed shortly after we married. We'd been invited to a party of some business associates and while waiting in the buffet line with the hosts, I was asked about the worst wedding gift we'd received. After telling our hosts about the cornball clock we'd received with our wedding invitation as its face, I noticed they had a similar clock lovingly displayed on their sideboard. Oops.

Every once in awhile it's a good thing to say something you regret because it serves as a reminder to zip the lip more often. That's my advice for the day.

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

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Mom's Live for This and I'm Tired!

I heard from Pat Holt today just before she sent out her latest newsletter to explain she's holding my letter, and her response to it, for her next column due to length. Given that patience is not my long suit, I'm not thrilled, but there's not much

One of my goals for 2003 is to read 100 books, as compared to the 91 I read in 2002. So far I've read almost five - I'm still working on The Phantom Tollbooth, although I did finish the two Diane Mott Davidson mysteries I mentioned in my last blogging. I'll write about them tomorrow, along with some thoughts on The Phantom Tollbooth, which I'll also be writing up as a DIK.

My daughter came home from school today quite upset that, after having typed in her name in a search engine at school today, a page of the stories she wrote as a very young child popped up. I keep the page extremely well hidden at AAR; it's only accessible via my bio page, and she's known in the back of her mind that the page is online, but being confronted with it in front of her class was embarrassing. First she asked me to take it down immediately...just a moment ago she said she wants to "look at it" first. The reason why I rarely refer to my daughter or husband by their names is just for this reason. She doesn't know it yet because I told her I'm "thinking it over," but I'll be removing the page asap, even though I think it's sad that she's one of these kids who is embarrassed to even consider that she ever was five.

I took the day off from updating AAR today - I'm frankly pooped and suffering from "post-project" headache after yesterday's massive posting. Robin finds her yearly buried treasures/year in reading column the most difficult to write, and it's an exhausting process for me to work with her to finalize it and then prepare it for uploading. Not to mention it coincides with an annual contest and the kick off of our annual reader poll, which posed extra problems this year relating to one of our "ghost" domains.

AAR's main domain is likesbooks.com, secured before I changed the site and its name to All About Romance from The Archives of Laurie Likes Books. When I made that change I tried to buy allaboutromance.com but couldn't - it took two years before I secured the domain. At the same time I tried to secure allaboutromance.net, but the squatter who bought it wanted $20,000. It took me three years to get the domain. I call both "ghost" domains because they don't really exist. I do all the uploading to likesbooks.com, and for a fee, my host created virtual sites at the other domains that, when accessed, show all the material I upload at likesbooks.com. Unfortunately, when I try to perform certain functions or set up forms - aka ballots - they've got to do something at their end to make it all work. I discovered Tuesday morning that while the ballot form worked at likesbooks.com and allaboutromance.com, it didn't work at allaboutromance.net. It took six hours of testing, calling, and pure frustration to get the thing in working order at all three domains; at one point it stopped working at each and then both of the first two.

Robin and I are thrilled that the new column was so keenly anticipated; within an hour of posting it we'd already had 200 hits, and by that time I'd already received the first few ballots. I just checked the column again - we're already up to nearly 800 hits, and it's just been a little over 24 hours since I did yesterday's update. We've also already received dozens of ballots (none bogus so far) - including my own. I was surprised just how hard it was to fill out the ballot, even though I'd read so few 2002-published romances! Shelley will start her database for tracking the ballots this weekend, and hopefully it'll run more smoothly than it has in the past, when she and I would huddle over our computer screens, phones in hand, double-checking totals.

That's all for now; I'll be back tomorrow with some discussion of those two mysteries.

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

Dying for Chocolate, Sticks & Scones, and the Mavs

Earlier in the week I read two mysteries by Diane Mott Davidson - Dying for Chocolate and Sticks and Scones. These are the first two mysteries I've ever read - they are not on the list of suggested reads my AAR colleague Jane Jorgenson suggested beca

I should have waited for my next bookstore visit because I didn't find these books all that great, although I did whip through them incredibly quickly. Dying for Chocolate is the second book in a series of mysteries featuring Goldy Bear, a divorced woman in her 30's who lives in the small Colorado enclave of Aspen Meadow with her son. She's a caterer who left her abusive doctor/husband after seven years of marriage and, in this installment, she's no longer dating policeman Tom Schulz, whom she apparently met in the first book of the series - Catering to Nobody. Instead she's sort of been seeing an old college friend - psychiatrist Phillip Miller - that is until he drives his BMW into a truck as she's watching in horror. What could have caused the good doctor to drive so erratically in the last minutes of his life? As Goldy tries to solve this mystery, she must cope with the demands of being the on-staff cook for a bizarre "retired" terrorism expert and his perfectly perfect wife, the young man staying with the family who has a huge chip on his shoulder where Goldy is concerned, continuing threats made by her oh-so-mean ex-husband, and the care and feeding of her son.

I'm not sure what I expected in a food mystery such as this - the author has been called a cross between Mary Higgins Clark and Betty Crocker - but I had problems with it regardless. First was the whole evil-ex-husband, who had far more access to his son than I thought believable given his violent - and documented - history with his ex-wives. Even in a small town where money talks, it seemed unrealistic that he would have the typical divorced father's every-Wednesday-every-other-weekend with his son. And then there's the unusual relationship Goldy has with Tom Schultz in this book; why in hell does he call her "Miss G?" This complaint continues in the later book, Sticks and Scones, where the two are married!

As far as whodunit and why, I had a pretty fair idea who the villain was, although I hadn't a clue why the good doctor was killed. There are a fair amount of red herrings, but something that made little sense to me was a scene right near the end wherein the villain does something to Goldy and a third person that I saw coming a mile away... and Goldy should have as well. Of course, had she seen it, this last-minute scene wouldn't have happened, but for a smart woman with a talent for solving mysteries, she sure was dumb, and very nearly (and literally) TSTL.

Sticks and Scones takes place a few years (and several books) later. Tom Schultz is married to "Miss G," her son is a teen, and her ex-husband is supposed to be in prison for assault. It all hits the fan pretty quickly when Tom is out of town on a case. The front window of their home is shot out, the ex-husband is let out of prison early on good behavior, Goldy discovers the dead body of one of the suspects in Tom's case, after which Tom is ambushed and shot . Will Goldy and her son (and later, Tom, when he gets out of the hospital) be safe staying at the transported medieval English castle/hotel where she's been hired to cater a couple of events?

There's a large number of nasty folks who populate Aspen Meadow, and most of them don't seem to care for Goldy, which means she's always struggling with her catering business. The owners of the castle seem harmless, but they're odd; when he's not making preserves and jellies he's digging up facts about Elizabethan cuisine, and when the wife's not scrubbing some surface clean... well, she's always scrubbing some surface clean. The ex-husband is even more threatening in this book, but his prison record and the restraining order Goldy's got against him don't seem to count for much. He even threatens her in front of the police, which seems odd given she's married to a cop and they tend to look after their own.

I didn't have a clue whodunit, or why, which is good, I suppose, but I came away with the feeling I often get when I've finished a romance with a dastardly villain. Bad people in romances (and mysteries, I suppose), are incredibly brilliant, don't you think? They plan for long periods of time, coincidences aren't really coincidences, and nobody but the protagonist is ever able to match them in terms of cunning. After re-reading this paragraph, I've come to the conclusion that mysteries probably aren't for me, but I will try a couple of the titles Jane suggested to see if they're better. After all, she's just about the only AAR Reviewer whose taste is anywhere near my own!

Tomorrow I'll be writing my review of The Phantom Tollbooth, and my daughter, who'll be tested on the book next week, has promised to help. It's a lot of fun to talk about the book with her; every time she's read it, she "gets" more and more of the word-play, which is nice.

She told me on the way home from school today that her school raised more money than any other private school in the whole state for UNICEF, which means the Dallas Mavericks will be coming to her school in a couple of months and will autograph anything they want. She says she's not even embarrassed that I'll be asking her to get Steve Nash's autograph on something for me, which is an accomplishment in and of itself; she's at that age when I'm a huge embarrassment to her simply for existing. Yes, she's a tween.

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

Reality TV and Me

I've sunk to a new low... I started watching Joe Millionaire. I admit that I was an avid watcher of The Real World for several years and would sometimes watch marathon showings of various seasons when I had the chance. And then came the first Survivo

I've sunk to a new low... I started watching Joe Millionaire.

I admit that I was an avid watcher of The Real World for several years and would sometimes watch marathon showings of various seasons when I had the chance. And then came the first Survivor. My daughter and I were immediately hooked, but my husband refused to join us as we watched every Wednesday that first Survivor summer.

I don't know that many of my AAR colleagues watched Richard Hatch demolish the competition in the South China Sea, but it was one of two of the four full "season's" worth of shows I watched in which the right person won, as far as I'm concerned. By the time the second series began in the Australian Outback, we were beginning to talk about it on our internal discussion loop, and by the end, when Tina stole the prize from the ever-gentlemanly (and hunky!) Colby, I know at least one of our group threw a final episode party for her family.

When the third "season" began in Africa, my daughter began to lose interest and I wasn't sure I was up to watching after having been in a prolonged post-September 11 funk, but some of my friends from AAR promised me it would ease my troubled mind, and we set up an alliance on the now-defunct Survivor Deadpool site. At one point I moved so high in the standings that my competitive nature began to take over, and when the inevitable fall occurred a couple of weeks later (when I dropped from 15th to 90 in the overall standings), I realized I'd begun to take the show and the game far too seriously. When I was invited to join an "exclusive" alliance for those in the top 100 (by this time thousands were playing the game), I realized the game was no longer enjoyable and I declined. I finished playing the game to keep our original alliance together for the rest of the series, but retired from future play knowing I cared about how well I did far too much. Still, I was very glad when Ethan won; he deserved it.

We'd started debating among ourselves just how long the show could sustain our interests, and the interests of the American viewing public. Way back when we were enthralled in the second "season," I'd surmised it would probably last five or six "seasons" but that interest would wane by about the fourth or fifth. I didn't have to watch the fourth season - in the South Pacific - by myself; by then my husband threw in the towel and watched with me, although to this day he'll deny he was intrigued by any of it. I was thoroughly disillusioned by Vecepia's deceit toward Kathy and trace my growing discontent with the show to Vecepia's win.

I gave up on Survivor Thailand just a couple of weeks before its conclusion, although my heart wasn't in it from the start, and I don't plan on watching Survivor in the Amazon. After overdosing on the hideous Anne Nicole show this fall, I told myself I'd never again sink that low! I'd been so proud not to have watched either of the two "seasons" of The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, either of the two skanky Temptation Islands beyond a very quick scan one evening early on, or Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire!

But then an AAR friend started talking at length about Joe Millionaire. Even though I'd sworn not to watch it, I remembered everything she'd said (which was fascinating in a car-accident rubber-necking kind of way) and when I turned on my TV last Thursday and noticed an encore presentation of the first two hours, I got sucked in. And tonight I forced my long-suffering husband to watch the latest episode. I've gotta say, Melissa M continues to impress me. If I didn't know Evan was supposedly a $19,000-a-year man, I'd be rooting for her to land him, not only because she's the least traditionally attractive of the women, but because she's presented herself well, smoking aside. But Sarah got a kiss on the lips tonight and Melissa M only got a peck on the cheek.

My husband thinks the joke's on us - that "Joe" may really be a millionaire, but if he is, he's as uncouth as Allison found him to be tonight. It was really fun to watch Melissa Jo talk about her Paris "date" with Evan at dinner and the Moulin Rouge - she thought they hit it off and he found they had nothing in common and no spark. He also had nada with Zora, so I was shocked when she didn't get the boot and Allison did, although his eliminating her speaks to more character and insight than I'd given him credit for.

Still, the entire premise of this show is so hideous I feel guilty even watching it. It shows women in a very unflattering light - not only these individual women, but all women, even those of us who don't cat-fight, aren't gold-diggers, and don't judge a man by his looks or the size of his wallet. If they were going to go down that route, wouldn't Fox have produced a better show with an average-looking "Joe?" Or an ugly one?

What reality TV are you watching? From here on out, it's only the second season of American Idol, primarily because my daughter wants to watch it. Since they botched Kelly Clarkson's career following her well-deserved win in the first season of the show (see my blogging for September 5) by giving her a crappy single and her first CD hasn't been released and the new season starts tomorrow, I'm not impressed. At least Dunkleman's history. Hopefully Simon won't be a parody of himself, but I've my doubts, particularly since Paula Abdul has hired someone to write "zingers" for her. Oh well, that's what we do in America - we take a good thing and run it into the ground.

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

Chillin'

After last minute changes to satisfy length requirements of the new Pat Holt column, I can finally relax. One of the two issues weighing heavily on my mind for a couple of months now has been handled. (Still to come? My letter to the editor in Februa

In the end Pat had to excerpt my letter. And so we settled on a compromise: the letter in its entirety has also been posted to a page at AAR with links to and from the germaine Holt Uncensored columns. In this way those who read the letter in either newsletter or web form can read the remainder at AAR, then return to the Holt site. Pat deserves kudos simply for putting up with my craziness as I sweated over multiple versions - thank you, Pat!

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

My Work Here is Done

The web version of the Pat Holt Uncensored column mentioned in my last blogging is now online at the Holt Uncensored site. TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

The web version of the Pat Holt Uncensored column mentioned in my last blogging is now online at the Holt Uncensored site.

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

Gotta Love the Osbournes

My fascination with The Osbournes continues. There were two episodes on Tuesday night and both were hiliarous in a horrifying way. I don't think I'll ever forget the moment Kelly stepped in dog doo, but then, who could forget the scene in which Ozzy philosophizes about how drummers are weird? Much of the focus for this episode is on Kelly and her band rehearsing; the drummer Kelly hired is a friend she met at the mall and the girl, according to Kelly's "concertmaster," the Energizer Bunny would have been an improvement. So Sharon - in bed and suffering the effects of her chemo - stages a bloodless coup to get rid of the friend by paying her off with a $10,000 check. One of the "sub-plots" for this episode are Jack and Dill's bizarre relationship, which culimates when they start wrestling, both with their shirts off, Jack's stomach fat causing his pants to slip down... if I didn't know better, I'd have thought I was watching Queer as Folk with ugly guys. The other sub-plot involves the Osbourne psycho pets. One of the doggies has taken a liking to one of the kitties and Sharon is convinced there's been an interspecies rape, although, according to the housekeeper, the vet says that would be an impossibility. As one of the cameras caught the action on tape, I can say that though the dog tried, he failed in his lustful attempt.

As for the other episode, it too focused quite a bit on Kelly, who doesn't seem to understand that when you are being paid to do things, it's your responsibility to do them. Sharon, still obviously so ill she can't get out of bed, tries to counsel and protect Kelly, but Kelly throws tantrum after tantrum... not a pretty picture. Sharon finally sends Ozzy to talk to Kelly, but she screams at him and he shuffles back to tell Sharon he'll not do that again.

There's a moment in this episode that I will never forget. Kelly has gone to New York for an engagement and for a reason that currently escapes my memory, meets up with Puff Daddy aka P Diddy, who promises to buy her a diamond bracelet. What a normal mum would do under these circumstances is unclear, but Sharon's reaction is hilarious. She begins to fantasize about P Diddy marrying Kelly, which is one thing, but it's entirely another when she starts salivating over the idea of his penis, which she imagines is all oiled up. She goes on, it seems, for some time about P Diddy and his beautiful penis... isn't that just how your mother would react?

On the reading front, I've finally gotten around to reading Stephanie Lauren's Devil's Bride. I realize everybody else read it four years ago, but I wasn't ready to read it until now. I'm nearly finished and will report on it here shortly.

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

The Bar Cynster

I'm doing extremely well in trying to achieve my goal of reading 100 books this year; I'm in the middle of my eighth book already. The two books most recently read were both written by Stephanie Laurens - Devil's Bride, and its immediate sequel, A Rake's Vow. I enjoyed both, but was surprised I didn't like them better, particularly the former, which received DIK status at AAR. I'm still trying to figure out whether it's a case of first as favorites in action (I read All About Love a couple of years ago and gave it a B+, whereas my grade for Devil is a B and for Rake a B-) or inflated expectations. A third possibility was suggested by Blythe Barnhill, which I'll be fleshing out more fully in the next At the Back Fence column. But for the purposes of this blogging, I'll simply state that while neither book seemed padded, they were both somewhat too long, lending themselves to a kind of repetition even though I can't point to any particular scene(s) and say they were duplications of other scenes. And, given how much I enjoyed the heroes from both books, I'm surprised I didn't like them better, although it does occur to me that far too many heroes in romance novels seem incredibly dense when it comes to realizing that women need to hear those "three little words," you know? This criticism has more to do with Rake than Devil, particularly since hero Vane was fairly astute in figuring out why Patience saw him as an "elegant gentleman" like her father instead of the stalwart hero he really was. Since he figured that out fairly easily, why couldn't he figure out that she needed to hear him say he loved her?

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

Elizabeth Young, Chick Lit, and more on Ozzy and Sharon

I've finished my eighth book of the year, and while I'm pleased about that, I wish I'd have liked book number eight more than I did, particularly since AAR Reviewer Heidi Haglin liked it so much her grade was a B+. My grade for Elizabeth Young's A Promising Man (and About Time, Too) was a C+. Young's book is Brit Chick Lit, and after having read several of these novels by now, I've decided this genre of fiction really isn't for me. I'll be explaining the reasons more fully in the February 1st issue of At the Back Fence, but what struck me about Heidi's review was that what she found wanting in the book was why I enjoyed it, and what she particularly liked I didn't.

Here's the back-cover blurb from A Promising Man:

From the fire-hot author of ASKING FOR TROUBLE comes a second irresistibly funny and romantic novel, in which we meet the delightfully wicked Harriet and John, who are matched as perfectly as scones and clotted cream -- if only Harriet would let herself indulge.
Up to her eyeballs in her friends' dramas, Harriet Grey has no time for her own, let alone getting entangled with John Mackenzie. And though it's been ages since she's met one of the most gorgeous men London has to offer, it seems John's entangled with someone else. Or is he?
Though they say all's fair in love, Harriet isn't about to complicate her life -- or risk her heart. But the persistent John seems to pop up everywhere she turns, and soon she's agreeing to meet him for a cocktail to repay a favor. After all, what harm can come out of one innocent little drink? Maybe a few breathtaking kisses, some suspiciously lingering embraces, and a wonderful weak-kneed dizziness that most definitely is not the flu. And that's before she finds herself all alone with John at Christmas....

At just over 400 pages in a trade-size format, I didn't get into this book until some time after page 300. The secondary characters Heidi so enjoyed never seemed real to me, and the hero, whom Heidi felt she didn't get to know, seemed more like a real person than anyone else in the book, save the heroine. In classic Chick Lit fashion, heroine Harriet Grey is in her 20's, isn't tremendously ambitious, lives communally, and many of her friends are similarly drifting through their lives. While Harriet doesn't drink as much as many Chick Lit heroines do and actually behaves responsibly more often than most heroines of the other Chick Lit novels I've read, the meandering nature of the plot bored me.

Very little actually happened throughout much of the book. I enjoy a good character-driven book as much as the next person, but only when the characters are of interest to me. The secondary characters in this book did not. And while there were humorous moments to be sure - Harriet's nickname for her nemesis is the Witch of Narnia, and I always enjoy a smart put-down - it's only after 300 pages, when her relationship with hero John MacKenzie grows into something substantial, that I became fully engaged in the outcome. Given that Chick Lit novels are not romances, this was a problem for me. I was supposed to care about more than Harriet and John getting together and I did not.

Why it is that I couldn't care about the other characters in this book while I do care about the bizarre human beings who are The Osbournes is odd, particularly to my husband, who turned to me last night while I was watching the latest episode, said, "This is disgusting...I don't know you anymore!", and left the den for our bedroom rather than watch one minute more. I'll admit that seeing dog poop all over a house and yard and watching a dog seemingly fellate another dog is a bit much (that was the exact moment when my DH had had enough), but it made me feel so much better about my own sorely lacking housekeeping skills to know that we have no poop on our floors even though we don't life in a multi-million dollar mansion. The irony of seeing people at that income level stepping in dog poop, seeing their lives so out of control, is something I think about when one of our cats misses the litter box by an inch (to let us know he's mad that he can't go outside because it's too cold), or when our kitchen turns into a disaster area the day after we've spent hours straightening up.

I do wish my husband had stayed through the end of the show, though, because what he didn't see was Ozzie's frantic care for Sharon. This, after all, is a man who has so thoroughly abused his body with drugs and alcohol that it's left him a shuffling mess, and yet he's so worried about his wife's recovery from cancer that he carries around bottles of hand disinfectant so she won't come down with an infection in her chemo-driven/low-resistant state.

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

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January 23, 2012

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laurielikesbooks Blog for March 2003

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Teresa Southwick and Elizabeth Lowell

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I Don't Get 'Em

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Eminen

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Wal-Mart

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