( hooray for cute dresses )
- 20:00 Wondering what is a good torrent client for Mac OS X? Azureus's new Vuze is for the birds. #
- 20:02 @galateadia You are one seriously connected woman. Congratulations, and welcome to Theda! #
- 14:02 ... Another migraine. Now with spots! #
Author: Jude Deveraux
Genre/Historical Period: Contemporary
Grade/Rating: A
( quick overview of book )
Summary/Review: Fun book with mystery and romance. One of her better contemporary books.
Part of a Series?: no
Would I recommend this book?: Yes
Planning to read anything else by this author?: Yes
Today, I bought two books — as a datum for the question, "Does blogging help a writer sell books?" I bought What Burns Within for no other reason than I find author Sandra Ruttan's crime fiction-themed blog entertaining. Then I saw the Hard Case Crime Bloch books were out, and even better they were collected in one volume as a double. I have a special weakness for doubles — I like doubles the way my autistic cousin Taki likes license plate numbers that add up to a prime (Whee! *handflaphandflap*) but I have a complaint. The covers are friggin' awful.
The Ruttan looks virtually self-published, with the stock image of a lick of flame that carries over artlessly to the spine over a dead black background, the Baby's First Font choices, and 1974-called-and-it-wants-its-texture-bac
The Bloch books are just ruined. The usual retro look is in play, except that as this book has two front covers, the barcode was just plopped onto one of them. Not only does that annoy because it signals somewhat arbitrarily that Spiderweb is the B-title, it was useless. When I put the book down on the counter — Shooting Star side up, of course, because I could not bear to look at the other — the cashier opened the front cover and scanned the barcode on the interior flap anyway.
Don't let these horrible scars dissaude you from checking out the books though! Take pity on poor Ruttan and poor dead Bloch!

Title: Viking
Author: Fabio
Genre: Historical
After the hilarious post about his other book "the Pirate" I went to Amazon to buy my own Fabio book. I will tell you now I'm glad I only paid a penny for this thing! Three hundred pages of raging bitch is not my idea of a good book. (there are 404pages of book) It takes that long for Reyna to stop trying to eviscerate Viktor. Everything he says she has to have the opposite opinion. It took me nearly a week to read this because it didn't become interesting until chapter thirty. Viktor is really a movie actor from our time that was transported, via burning longship, into the past.
On a lighter note here are some humorous quotes from the book.
"And he was aroused--more aroused than he had ever felt in his entire life, as if a log were suddenly lodged in his leggings." (142 of hardcover edition)
A log? Are you kidding me?!
"He winked down at her enraged countenance. 'You're not on the pill, are you, love?' He teased." (143) Ha ha she doesn't understand that idiot.
"'Tis so large!" (233) I nearly peed myself with laughter when she said that.
"'What do I do now?' she asked half frantic. "Darling, you've already done it. Just relax and enjoy your ride.'" (239)
There is a part in the book where Reyna gets horny after watching a fox give birth. It was a little disturbing.
"Naked, Viktor crawled in among eleven squirming dogs, and finally squeezed in next to his wife. He glanced up at Geri, who was panting in his face, while Thor's wagging tail was whacking the crown of his head. Meanwhile, four of the cubs began to leap about and chirp eagerly at his and Reyna's feet, one of them chewing on Viktor's toes through the pelts.
Viktor scowled murderously. 'Reyna, this is ridiculous. I feel like I'm making love to you in a kennel, with eleven dogs serving as voyeurs. This will never work--'
'Twill work,' she said huskily, drawing him closer.
'Come here, my husband, and I will show you how two bodies can share the space of one.'
'Hmm...' he murmured, already thoroughly enjoying the demonstration." (340) Creepy much?
If you feel the need to punish yourself I recommend reading this book.
- Location:my room
- Mood:
annoyed - Music:Talk Dirty to Me--Poison
Title: Smuggler's Bride
Author: Darlene Marshall
Genre: Historical: Victorian/Edwardian
I just finished this book in one day and really enjoyed it! Has anyone else read these books? They all take place around St. Augustine, FL in the early 1800's. Cute story with forced marriage scenario and mistaken identities. A short book, really loved the way it all turned out - I just sped through it!
Julia, a shipping heiress (who's parents we read about in the previous book, Pirate's Price) is mistakenly kidnapped and brought to be a servant for Rand Washburn, a notorious smuggler (we think) in the backwoods of the Florida panhandle and winds up being his bride against her will. This book has a lot of likable characters and a dreamy hero - though I would like to see what happens with one of the side characters, James Crane, he was interesting material, I'd like to read his story eventually, he deserves a love interest. My Review.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as5Vhyn40
Here are some more photos, various self-portraits this time. Far from all these are very authentic vintage-looking, but I think and hope they fit the theme enough to be welcome anyway.

( +9 )
Author : Asher Wismer
“I invented a time machine,” said Professor Rudnicki morosely. The whiskey in front of him glinted, a cylindrical crystal promising amnesia.
My hands moved on their own, needing no guidance, wiping a glass that would never be clean. I looked skeptical. “Isn’t time travel impossible, except to the extreme relative future?”
“That’s what they say.” Rudnicki gulped the shot and motioned for another. I poured it.
“Time is relative to our senses, space doubly so. What we perceive to be real is in fact the simple accumulation of expectation; we expect the glass to hold the whiskey, and we expect the whiskey to get us drunk, but only AFTER we drink it.”
“That’s deep, professor.” I hear stuff like this every day; hard not to, when you tend bar near MIT. You pick up the odd scientific fact, and one of the ones I knew about was that time-past was a fixed animal; nothing could penetrate that which has already passed.
“Oh, they want you to believe that, but it’s not true. All you need is to be able to see past Newton, past the expected… so I did. The human mind is the ultimate time travel machine; it sees into the past without leaving the present. All I had to do was replicate that function. And it worked! I never thought it would go so wrong.”
“What went wrong, professor?” The second shot sat untouched; he kept reaching for it, then pulling away.
“I tested the machine yesterday, multiple times, setting it for no more than hours past. It worked perfectly; the memory of the machine and its contents appeared in my memory right when it should have.”
“Memory?”
“When something appears out of nowhere in my past, I expect to remember it,” he said irritably. “Anyway, I showed it to my colleague, Doctor Smith, and he insisted on giving it a test run with himself as the subject.”
“What happened, did it explode or something?”
“I do not create machines that explode! That pastime is reserved for the likes of Nobel; all my work is for the human good.”
“So what went wrong?”
“In my haste to perfect the time matrix, that which allows a physical object to recreate itself in the past, I ignored Newton entirely. Conservation of mass and energy, the laws of inertia. Reaching the past is one thing; reaching the past and remaining on Earth is another.”
“You mean…”
He grabbed the shot now, threw it back like a man just in from a convent. “Yes, exactly. The Earth is in constant rotation, the solar system in constant movement. A body at rest tends to stay at rest, a body in motion stays in motion… and our motion today is in a different physical spot in the universe than it was fifty years ago.”
My hands failed me for the first time in my career. The glass shattered. Rubnicki smiled grimly.
“He must have appeared right in empty space, in the same relative spot that the Earth would occupy fifty years in the future.”
He stood, no signs of intoxication in his stance, and dropped a ten on the bar.
“Keep the change.”
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