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Wynded Words

~ Home of author Sarah Wynde

Category Archives: Books

Florida and KU

21 Monday Oct 2019

Posted by wyndes in Books, Marketing and promotion, Self-publishing, Travel

≈ 3 Comments

Tropical Storm Nestor inspired me to hurry to Florida. I really didn’t want to have to drive through the storm, so Thursday turned into a long driving day, and I managed to reach Mount Dora by midday on Friday.

I spent Thursday night at a free county park in Georgia, Barrington County Park. It would have been much nicer if a neighbor hadn’t needed to run his generator all night long and if an off-leash black Lab hadn’t really wanted to investigate Zelda, far beyond what Z was comfortable with. Sigh. And it was half an hour off the highway, so added an hour to my overall drive. Next time, I think I’d just sleep at a truck stop or a Walmart. But it was a nice drive down exciting dirt roads and good to get off the highway for a while.

I’ve since had a lovely weekend with my dad and stepmom in Mount Dora. We didn’t do much, but it’s nice to be here. Upon arriving, I told my dad that for Christmas I wanted enough storage to download a ton of books to a device, enough so I really can carry a library with me, not just have a library available in the cloud. My extended time without internet was fine, except my book supply with too limited. He promptly handed me a card for my Fire tablet and I spent Saturday morning downloading approximately 500 books.

Yay, reading material! Boo, temptation! I’m trying to resist the impulse to reread everything I own by Robin McKinley, Dick Francis, and Kathleen Gilles Seidel, all of which I’d kind of forgotten about because they were buried so deep in my Kindle library.

Meanwhile, I wanted to mention that Cici is part of Magical Escapes, a Kindle Unlimited book promotion this month. If you’re a Kindle Unlimited subscriber and like fantasy, lots of interesting titles are included in the group. And if you’re not a KU subscriber, you still might find some books you like! I downloaded several, but with all the driving, I haven’t had a chance to read them yet. (Also, I admit, Robin McKinley is distracting me. I’m rereading Rose Daughter for the umpteenth time. It’s not in KU, but the Kindle edition is available for $2.99, which is a good deal, IMO.)

Dear Self, Have Fun

19 Thursday Sep 2019

Posted by wyndes in Books, Writing

≈ 11 Comments

I looked outside this morning and the fog was so dense that I couldn’t see past the middle of the driveway. I thought, “Oooh, how beautiful, I want to go for a walk,” and then I paused and thought for a minute. 

The river has fog every morning, little wisps of it that trickle along the water’s surface like ghosts. I’ve enjoyed watching it and I’ve also noticed that the colder the morning, the more fog there seems to be on the river. That’s not entirely true — there was one crisp, clear, sparkly morning that reminded me of the taste of autumn apples and it wasn’t foggy at all. But mostly, fog & chill, they go together. 

So before I opened the van door, I asked Alexa for a weather report. Ha. 36 degrees! It is time to dig out the winter coat, I suppose. Fortunately, my time in Arcata seems to have overwritten the Florida in me or maybe my upstate New York roots are finally returning — the cold hasn’t been bothering me much, although I am definitely not spending as much time sitting outside writing as I imagined I would. That’s okay, though, because the view from the van window is lovely and I’m perfectly happy to be cozy inside my van while I write. 

By about 7:30, the sun shining through had turned the fog into a mass of gold at the end of the driveway. At 8, it was dancing wisps along the river again. And now, 9:30, it’s gone, but all the colors of the day are bright and intense — blues, greens, even the oranges of the leaves in the tree out front. 

I have noticed that the cold is making me crave carbs. Yesterday I was determined to eat salads: I’ve got mixed greens, arugula, radishes, cucumber, and pea pods, all closing in on a week old or older. I hate wasting food, so it was time to eat my veggies. But lunchtime rolled around and well, a warm rice bowl with tomatoes from the garden, oregano (also from the garden), and goat cheese just seemed so much nicer. I could have thrown a few other vegetables into it but I just wasn’t in the mood. For dinner, another rice bowl with steak, cilantro, and chili garlic sauce won over green salad. I think my mistake was buying summer vegetables — food I associate with cold salads on hot days — when it just doesn’t feel like summer to me. Today, salad for lunch. Definitely. Well, maybe. 

In writing news, my word count for the month has finally hit positive numbers. Not much in the way of numbers, but positive ones. That sounds terrible, but it’s really not. When I got here, I started reading from the beginning and then revising. Basically, I just completed a first revision round, even though I haven’t written the ending yet. If this was Grace, that would have taken me six months and I’d be thinking about starting over again from scratch, but instead I can say that I like what I’ve got. I’ve got to find the ending still, but I’m going to get there, and soon, too. Although in terms of useless notes, the last phrase in my final file of notes is “sacrificial volcano virgin?” What the heck? I have no idea what I was thinking there. 

I read a useful book this week: Dear Writer, You Need to Quit, by Becca Syme. I look at a lot of writing books on Amazon, and often read the Look Inside, then either turn away or think, eh, well, maybe someday. Sometimes I add them to my wish list. Sometimes I buy them, and add them to my immense To Be Read pile. This one, I read the Look Inside, purchased the book, then read the book. That almost never happens. But I’m glad I did. The book does not actually suggest that one should quit writing, although she does suggest quitting lots of other things, including “Quit Trying to Be Like Everyone Else” and “Quit Focusing on Your Weaknesses.” Were those my two favorite chapters? Maybe. 

After I finished, I reread Cici. Cici is the only book of mine that is a comfort reread for me, a story where on a rainy or a sad or a sick day, I read just so I can be part of that other world for a while. She makes me laugh. She still makes me laugh, even though I’ve read her dozens of times and know every twist — actually every phrase! — inside and out. And sure, I get critical the way I do with my other books — clunky line, repetition, a little slow here, etc.,  — the editor brain never shuts off. But not in a way that ruins my enjoyment. 

Cici has sold less than 300 copies, earned considerably less than $1000. From a business point of view, it makes absolutely no sense to write more books like Cici. But Cici brings me joy. And you know, life is better when you focus on what brings you joy and not on what earns you money. Obviously, starvation, homelessness, pain & suffering are all not likely to bring me joy, so I’d like to avoid total penury. But for the moment I’m going to accept the permission to quit trying to be like everyone else (not that I ever tried very hard, tbh) and write what brings me joy. 

I’m also going to quit ignoring the past. (Another chapter I liked.) My favorite of my books = my fastest-written book. My most well-reviewed book = my second fastest-written book. When I let go and let my intuition take me places, it takes me to interesting stories. When I try to follow the rules — three-act structure, character development, instigating events, blah-blah-blah — well, I’m not going to say the stories are bad, because I don’t think any of my stories are bad, and if I did I wouldn’t have published them. But I don’t gain anything from writing painstakingly and plotting carefully. 

Does Fen change in A Precarious Magic? Does she go from one place at the beginning to another at the end? Does she have an appropriate character arc for a main character? 

Honestly, do I care? Is she fun to read and do I have fun writing about her? Yes and yes. That’s the only question I’m going to focus on today and tomorrow and for as many future days as I can remember this.

Change is hard, so I know I will forget. Which means I’ll go back to letting the undercurrents of worry — (Will people like this? Will I disappoint them? Will they criticize me?) — push me around. I don’t want to care about those things and I try not to think about them, but they are much too firmly rooted in the instincts of every Former Good Girl for me to ever truly let go of them. But I’ve added a note, QTP, Question the Premise, to my whiteboard and hopefully it will remind me to reread Dear Writer whenever those undercurrents get too strong. 

And now, back to work. I feel like I owe you a snippet for sitting through this, but I’m much too deep into spoiler territory. Would reading the first chapter be fun? Or seeing the cover, maybe? Let me know!

Good intentions

13 Friday Sep 2019

Posted by wyndes in Books, Personal, Vanlife

≈ 4 Comments

On Monday, I meant to write a blog post. But I decided it needed a picture to go with it, so I got my camera out. Playing with my camera was so fully distracting that I never got around to the writing.

On Tuesday, I meant to write a blog post. But I’m using Freedom, an app to block my internet access, and I forgot to enable web exceptions, which meant I didn’t have access to my own website. Oops.

On Wednesday, I meant to write a blog post. But I started reading Debra Dunbar’s Imp series, quite casually — you know, just a quick hour of reading before I started my day — and I … just didn’t stop. Ten books in the series, and I kept going until I was finished.

On Thursday, I meant to write a blog post, but I was still busy reading books with demons and angels in them.

Today is Friday. I cleaned the van, washed and refilled my water jugs, dumped the tanks, refilled the propane, did my grocery shopping for the week, picked up the mail, and now I am finally writing a blog post. Mostly just so I can resist the temptation to keep binge-reading, though. My two days of reading have put me well behind on what I am supposed to be doing, aka writing a book. Speaking of which… I believe it’s time to get back to that. I’m still hoping to finish writing by the end of the month, but my daily word count goal is growing by the day. Despite all that I have already achieved today, I’d really like today to be a day that makes my word count lower instead of higher, which means it’s time to focus on Fen.

How to Cook…

03 Tuesday Sep 2019

Posted by wyndes in Books, Food, Recipes

≈ 3 Comments

Immediate one-click purchase for me today: How to Cook Without a Book

This is the updated version of a cookbook that I’ve given to half a dozen people over the years. The original was so important to me and so formative that it was one of the five books that I kept physical copies of when I got rid of all my belongings. (Two of the others were the edition of Winnie-the-Pooh that my parents gave to me for my fifth birthday and The White Dragon, by Anne McCaffrey, with a note inside congratulating me on having read 100 books in 6th grade. Just so you understand how steep the competition was to be in that tiny category.)

The Kindle edition is on sale today, September 3, 2019, and honestly, if you’ve ever thought that you wanted to be a better cook, this is a cookbook that can get you there. Not without doing the work, of course. I know that at least a couple copies that I gave away sat on bookshelves, unopened, and it won’t teach you a thing if you’re not actually going to read it and try out the recipes.

But one of the copies that I sent out into the world found its way to a college student who now writes a cooking blog. That thought always pleases me, because the only thing better than learning to cook is encouraging someone else to learn to cook. There’s a bumper sticker on the wall by the door at the house where I’m driveway camping/house-sitting that says, “Heal the world, Cook dinner tonight.” And now I’m doubting myself, but feeling too lazy to run inside to see whether I got it exactly right. I got the concept right, thought, even if the words aren’t exact.

Anyway, cookbook. Highly, highly recommended.

Bet Me for $1.99

04 Tuesday Dec 2018

Posted by wyndes in Books, Reviews

≈ 6 Comments

My favorite romance novel of all time is available in Kindle on Amazon today (December 4th, 2018) for $1.99: Bet Me by Jennifer Cruisie

Now I’m second-guessing myself, though — is it really my favorite of all time? There have been others I have loved along the way. There was an Elspeth Thane book, sadly not available as an ebook, that I adored as a teenager. (The fact that it is about ghosts might have had something to do with my future leanings.) There’s a Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign, that doesn’t call itself a romance but really is. There are definitely books outside the romance category by Robin McKinley and Sharon Shinn and others that might be slightly higher on my favorites list.

But you know, now that I’ve analyzed this question deeply, I’m going to say yes, Bet Me, still my favorite romance novel of all time. I love the relationships between the characters, the representation of male friendship, the way that the hero/heroine support each other in stressful family situations, the way the hero encourages the heroine to enjoy food, and absolutely the humor. So much the humor. Also, though, the actual romance — the attraction between the characters is fun. So much “romance” these days feels like obligatory lust followed by insta-amazing sex and I find that seriously boring. Cal and Min are attracted to one another, wish they weren’t, still are. It’s appealing. And now I’m going to go read a good book all morning. 🙂

More reading than writing

22 Monday Oct 2018

Posted by wyndes in Books, Pennsylvania, Randomness, RV, Writing

≈ 7 Comments

I told my brother this morning that today should be the day I start south. And then, thoughtfully, that yesterday probably should have been. It is cold in Pennsylvania right now and I am so underprepared for cold weather. The van is quite cozy — its heater works beautifully — but bundling up in a multitude of layers every time I step outside is a PITA.

This is why people own winter coats.

I, however, do not own a winter coat and while I could buy one, of course, I haven’t wanted a mostly useless object cluttering up the van. I’m probably going to have to reconsider that position in the next few months, though. I’m not sure yet what this winter is going to bring — possibly a lot more driving hours than I will actually appreciate — but a winter coat might become a necessity.

Anyway, despite the cold, I’m not heading south yet. My niece is in her school play, opening night this Thursday, and I’m going to stick around long enough to see her perform. I’d be tempted to stick around for Halloween, too — she’s going to be some sort of skeleton pirate, and the preliminary make-up experiments have been impressively horrifying while also cute as anything — but it’s too cold and I have too much to do in Florida.

Also, I’ve gone over three weeks without dumping the tanks, and that’s too long. I’ll be staying inside the house for the next couple of days, partially because of the cold but mostly because I’ve hit the point where I really, truly, positively can’t use the toilet again until I dump the black tank, so it is definitely time to find myself a campground. I told my dad yesterday that the details of my future home fantasies were narrowing down to “running water.” Sure, a room with a view, nearby yoga, affordable cost-of-living, those are all nice. But running water is glorious.

Also, yesterday, I ordered a 50-pod pack of black-tank sanitizer pods from Amazon. Given that I can and often do go about two weeks without dumping the tanks, and I still have four or five pods left from the pack I’ve been using, that means I’ve got about two years worth of black-tank sanitizing ahead of me. My shopping subconscious possibly knows more about my future home plans than my conscious mind is willing to admit to.

Writing has been going horribly badly of late. I hate every word I write. Some of that is author love. I read The Spymaster’s Lady by Joanna Bourne a couple of weeks ago. Someone online said that it was their favorite book of all time, their comfort read, so I checked it out from the library. It sat on my Libby bookshelf for over two weeks, because I don’t read much historical romance and I was dubious at best. Finally, when I had only a couple of days left, I started to read. A few chapters in, I was hating it, almost on the verge of giving up, when suddenly, there was a twist. A really good, really fun, totally implausible but super cool twist. I gobbled down the rest of the book, reached the end, started over again while trying to read more slowly, reached the end, and started over again! Not often that I read a book three times in a row.

I actually still wasn’t sure how I felt about it. It definitely wouldn’t make it onto my favorite book ever list or even anywhere close, largely because the sex is… well, pre-#metoo, if that’s sufficient explanation. But the writing was still fantastic, even if the romance was a prime example of questionable consent issues. But I promptly put all the rest of her books on hold at the library. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, while I was waiting, Amazon sent me a gift card, and I didn’t hesitate. (Incidentally, The Spymaster’s Lady is $2.99 on Kindle at the moment, so if you do like historical romance, it’s a deal.) So over the course of the past ten days or so, I’ve read all of Joanna Bourne’s books.

For a little while, they sunk me into the depths of despair. She’s an incredible writer — her plots are completely fun, with levels of implausibility that you just don’t care about at all. Seriously, lost heiresses, spy schools, amnesia, they’ve got it all. But she sets them in worlds with so many vivid, concrete, sensory details that they feel real. Then she adds smart characters who actually behave like smart people (most of them anyway); language and metaphors that fit the point of view; and a sense of wry humor. They made me want to give up on being a writer entirely.

Then, fortunately, I think, I read her very first book, which was not available at my library but was available at Amazon. The most important thing to know about that book is that it was originally published in 1983. The second most important to know about it is that you really, really, really don’t want to read it as an example of her writing. Probably, you really don’t want to read it at all. I’m actually a little surprised that she let it be re-issued. But it comforted me. I will not give up on being a writer quite yet.

And that does mean I should get back to it. At about 5:30 this morning, I had an idea about where I’d gone wrong with Fen, and why I was so stuck. I knew, knew, knew that I should get up and open my computer and write it down, but it was so cozy in my nest of blankets. I promised myself I’d remember it. Ha. But maybe when I stare at the file for a while, it will come back to me.

Off I go to stare.

Radio Silence

21 Sunday Jan 2018

Posted by wyndes in Books, Personal, Reviews, Vanlife

≈ 8 Comments

This is the longest I’ve gone without posting to my blog in at least two years. I’m hitting the point where staying silent is easier than breaking my silence, which is sort of silly. I have no real reason for not posting, I just decided to give myself a break. And continuing my break is easier than connecting my phone and looking at the pictures I’ve taken or thinking about what I had to share.

Realistically, too, it’s been sort of a boring couple of weeks. Not uneventful, but the events have been things like taking Serenity in for service and discovering that she had a leak in the transmission; taking the dogs to the vet and finding out that yes, B is dying, and yes, said death is getting closer every day; taking myself to the dentist and getting a cap replaced. (Was it a cap or a crown, I wonder? I don’t actually know the difference.)

Not exactly the most scintillating or joyful of events, none of them, although the first was fixed under warranty, the second was not a surprise, and the third is actually kind of a relief. The cap (or crown) was loose on a front tooth and I was getting tired of feeling like a six-year-old, poking it with my tongue and wondering when it would fall out.

On the other hand, I also had a lovely dinner with my brother, dad and stepmom in Sarasota; went to the Ringling Museum for the first time; enjoyed dinner and writing time with some of my local writing friends; cooked sous vide honey mustard chicken and quinoa for some other friends; and worked on my writing, my taxes, and some book translations.

Life, in other words, has been happening. Some good, some bad, some fun, some sad. And that was an entirely unintentional Dr. Seuss imitation. I haven’t started writing with long streams of semi-colons mixed with sentence fragments in my fiction, just in case you’re worried about this trend!

Actually, probably the most interesting thing that has been going on — at least to me — is that I’m re-working how I use the space in the van. Shortly after New Year’s, I got myself a queen-size memory foam mattress topper. I’d hit the point where I felt like I had to do something about how horribly I was sleeping, and the something was not going to be using sleeping pills. I’ve spent the days since experimenting with how to most conveniently fit it into my limited space and the answer is, it doesn’t conveniently fit into my limited space. Period.

On the other hand, I’ve actually slept several hours in a row since it entered my life and so it is staying in my life. But my “office” and my “bed” — aka the positions in which I sat when I was writing/not writing — just don’t work the same way. You’d think that it wouldn’t be a big deal to just sit in a different way/place, but in fact, figuring out how to get comfortable writing with an unwieldy memory foam mattress topper taking up a ton of room has been difficult. Figuring out how to snuggle down into reading comfort has been much easier.

As a result, in the past ten days, I’ve read:

The Dark Days Club (A Lady Helen Novel) – Slow going and not one where I have any interest in reading the sequels, even though the story felt like set-up for the series more than it did a stand-alone.

The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are – Interesting reading, although I suspect it would have been far more useful for me about ten years ago. Still, I do still struggle with perfectionism, so I’ll probably be trying to follow some of her advice.

Shatter Me – Not for me, but it had a great cover.

Ink and Bone (The Great Library) – Pulled me in, didn’t let me go. The moment I finished, I went looking for the sequels. I’m on the library waitlist for both of them. I thought at first it was going to be a Harry Potter knock-off, but a) I have no real objection to that, as long as it’s done well, and b) I was totally wrong, with the exception of the characters meeting in a school-type setting. Totally wrong. If you like fantasy, this one is engrossing, interesting, suspenseful, and maybe a little on the dark side, in a late Harry Potter kind of way.

Steel’s Edge (The Edge, Book 4) Also read Fate’s Edge, which means I have now officially read everything Ilona Andrews has published. These two aren’t my favorites (I like the Innkeeper series best, I think) but I enjoyed them while reading. And the fact that I’ve read all of the authors’ books — four or five series, at least twenty books — says something.

Neogenesis (Liaden Universe®) – The classic example, for me, of a series that I keep reading because I know the characters too well to stop. If you haven’t read the first 20-some books in the series, you definitely don’t want to start here. If you have read the first 20-some books, you’re probably wondering why nothing much ever seems to happen in these books anymore, even in the one where huge ongoing plot threads get tied up. Or at least I was.

Wild Horses – Modern Dick Francis but also classic Dick Francis. I’m not sure how I missed reading it when it first came out, but I enjoyed it.

I feel like I’m missing something in this list, but if I can’t remember it, it probably isn’t worth recommending. Not that I’m recommending all of these! But if you need something to read, Ink and Bone (The Great Library) is worth a try. If you’re not caught by the end of the first chapter, in which a truly grievous crime is committed, I’ll be surprised. Well, not if you’re not a fantasy reader. But if you liked Harry Potter or The Hunger Games, Ink and Bones is worth adding to your TBR pile.

And now I think I’ll get back to my TBW pile (To Be Written). It gets longer all the time, but I am definitely writing! In between reading, anyway.

Food52 Genius Recipes Cookbook

17 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by wyndes in Books, Food, Reviews

≈ 2 Comments

I bought this cookbook last week and I’m loving it. I’ve only read as far as the salad section, but I’ve already marked a few recipes to try and also picked up a few techniques to improve my salad dressings. And I tried the fried eggs with vinegar which sounds, let’s face it, disgusting, but was actually quite delicious.

Anyway, just posting this because the Kindle version is currently on sale for $2.99 (which is the version I bought) and is well worth the price if you are interested in cooking and like reading cookbooks. (The image is an Amazon Associates link, so you can click on it to see the book on Amazon.)

Another NaNoWriMo Ends

30 Thursday Nov 2017

Posted by wyndes in Books, Personal, Reviews

≈ 3 Comments

Today is the last day of NaNoWriMo. All around the country, people are finishing up 50,000 words of writing and then celebrating with their NaNoWriMo friends. I think maybe one of my friends will make it: she’s still got a few thousand words to go, but she’s taken the day off work to write and she’s motivated. I came nowhere close, of course.

Instead I read. This month’s book list, in reverse order as best I remember:

Nora Roberts’ books used to be an auto-buy for me, each a reliable three hours of light entertainment. They were rarely memorable — I could re-read one a year later and still enjoy it, because so little of it had stuck with me, but I did enjoy the reading. Somewhere in the last few years the books started feeling bland so I largely stopped, but this one was on sale on Amazon, so I gave it a try. And I enjoyed it — it was light entertainment, pure popcorn, but the ranch in Montana was an interesting place to hang out for a few hours.

Total impulse buy. I enjoyed one of his previous books (Blue Like Jazz) and this showed up in some book ad in my email. I started reading the Look Inside and was interested enough to keep going. I think it’s really written for a male audience and I’m not sure I got much out of it — Brene Brown on vulnerability covered this ground in a far more interesting and entertaining way, I think — but I didn’t regret the time spent.

I’ve bought books by Penny Reid when they were on sale or free via BookBub ads. She writes entertaining, humorous romance. I’ve absolutely hated a couple of them. She wrote one with a married couple where I was seriously rooting for the heroine to dump the hero — I think it’s the only romance I can remember where the only happy ending I could envision was the one where the hero died. Badly. Miserably. In flames. Alas, it did not end that way.

But I still read it all the way through, which made it better than a vast number of the cheap or free books that I quit reading, label DNF, and hope never to look at again. This one was pretty solid: I’d give it a B, and while I did not enjoy all aspects of it, it was good enough that I considered reading others.

Loved this book! Bought it via a Bookbub ad (I think) and gobbled it down in about six hours of steady reading. It was the kind of book where every interruption was annoying and I was so interested that every spare minute I pulled up my phone to read again. It’s about disasters, how we function in them, what happens to our brains, why some people are better at coping with disaster then others. The stories were fascinating, but so was the science.

Random factoid: On 9/11, women were almost twice as likely to get injured while evacuating. “Was it a question of strength? Confidence? Fear? No, says lead investigator Robyn Gershon. ‘It was the shoes.'”

High heels and disasters do not mix well.

J.D. Robb = Nora Roberts, and I have the same reaction. Not willing to buy at full price. I’ll wait through the library’s interminable hold list (up to six months, easily) and borrow, or find them at a thrift store or garage sale when they’re older. But this one was on sale for $3.99, which is just about the right price for me. I read it, I enjoyed it, the total implausibility bothered me a little, but mostly it’s about characters who are fun to spend time with.

Fairly sure this must have been free at some point for it to have been on my Kindle. I include it because I did read it. I won’t be reading the sequels, though.

I have adored some books by Sarina Bowen. Truly loved them, so much so that I gave them five star reviews on Amazon. Her sex scenes are too graphic for my taste but her characterizations are terrific. She’s the kind of author who can write a drug addict hero, fresh out of jail, and make you actually root for him, which is an amazing accomplishment.

This book, however, is one that I knew I wouldn’t like, and I was right. I was really glad that the library had it and I got to read it, though. I’m sure at some point, when I desperately wanted something to read, I would have bought it and then I would have been really annoyed. As it was, I read it, wincing and grimacing and wishing it was different.

I did finish it, though, and the author remains on my “will seriously consider buying books by” list, which is where most of my favorite authors live. I only have a very few who make it onto the “auto-buy” list.

And Lois McMaster Bujold is one of my very few auto-buys. I don’t even read the blurbs on her books, I just buy them, because I know that I will want to reread them. The Penric series of novellas aren’t ones that I love, but they’re interesting and I will keep reading them as long as she keeps writing them, I suspect.

I made a major, major mistake with this book. I had it and the other books in the same series on hold at the library and when this one (#6 in the series) came in, I decided that I could read the series out of order. Bad idea! Don’t do that!

But do read the series if you get a chance, because it is really worth reading. Fun, smart, fantasy-mysteries, sort of a combination of Harry Potter and a police-procedural in a multi-cultural modern London. Terrific books. Read them, but read the series in order.

I like Pratchett, but this book took a long time to grow on me. By the end, though, it was a warm, fuzzy, Christmas pleasure. Library book, but I can imagine re-reading.

Another of the Peter Grant/Rivers of London fantasy-mystery series.

I am not sure whether to include this book because I honestly don’t remember whether I finished it. I got it from the library, and it’s really early Pratchett, published originally in 1983, and… well, it shows. Times change, writers get better, and unless you’re madly in love with Discworld, start with the later books and skip this one.

Another of the Peter Grant/Rivers of London series. The fact that the series is showing up three times in this list should tell you how much I like it!

I came very close to spending $12 on this book because I wanted to read it so badly, but I found it at the library, much to my delight. It would have been worth the $12, though, because it is really good. It reads like a classic, some combination of Anne of Green Gables and Ngaio Marsh. Not Marsh because it’s a mystery, but Marsh because it has that WWII English feel, the bombs dropping on London and the stiff upper lip, devastation but at the same time, survival.

I don’t want to spoil it, but I cried serious tears while reading it and yet finished with that happy book feeling, where you’ve gotten to spend the afternoon in a place where you still want to live for a while. I recommend it highly. And if there’s a sequel, I probably won’t hesitate to buy it, even if it does cost $12 or more.

Library book. YA, so I am not the target market. But I’m going to say that this is the single best book I’ve read all year. It’s the one that will most live in my memory, the one that thoroughly gripped me while reading and still has a hold on me weeks later. I wish I could add star graphics to this image, but I’ll just try a little emphasis to make sure it’s obvious how much I liked it!

My niece loves this book so I told her I would read it. I did not love this book. I don’t like worlds where girls are symbols before they are people. And my niece isn’t old enough for me to want to talk to her about rape culture but I found the boys’ reactions when the girl shows up to be so profoundly disturbing that it appalls me that we live in a world where that goes unnoticed. Or at least doesn’t prohibit it from becoming successful. Not sure I should really say I’ve read the book, either, because I started skimming pretty fast by the end.

This cover is a really different style for a Jayne Anne Krentz book but the content between the covers is just the same: a quick, straightforward, fun romance with elements of setting, food, and character that I enjoy. They’re sort of a female version of a Robert Parker novel — plain dialog, an uncomplicated and not overly dark mystery, a story that relies on friendship and family at its core.

My SIL was rolling her eyes over some of the writing — there’s a scene (I think in this one, possibly in one of the others) where the hero describes the color of the walls as saffron, which really does make him quite the sophisticated color connoisseur for a guy depicted as “all-male” in other places — but I’m not usually so inclined to quibble. I don’t generally buy full-price books by Krentz (or either of her two other pen names, Jayne Anne Castle and Amanda Quick) but I happily read them when they come my way, whether by library, garage sale, or hand-me-down.

Library book. I liked the cover and I’m willing to read kids’ books when they seem successful. I sort of view it as research, because maybe someday I’ll want to write one. I enjoyed this one, but I didn’t love it, probably wouldn’t bother to recommend it, even if I knew anyone of the right age to be the target audience.

I read the first book in this series a long time ago (and then re-read it in October). When I saw that the series had a lot more books, all of them available at the library, I thought I’d give it a try. But after two books, I’ve concluded that it’s not for me. Too violent, too bloody, too many vampires. Which, you know, is probably obvious from the fact that the heroine is a vampire killer. And if you like that kind of thing, it probably is a solid series: it’s quite readable. Just not to my particular taste.

Seanan McGuire is an award-winning fantasy author who I’ve heard a lot about. I tried the first book in her first series, the October Daye series, years ago and didn’t enjoy it — it was too dark for me. When I saw that the library had her InCryptid series, I decided to give them a try. I read five of the books in October, finishing with this one at the beginning of November. Interesting reads. Still a little dark for me, and they made me think a lot about how authors reveal ourselves in our work. But they’ve got good flow, interesting twists and entertaining world-building, so they’re certainly worth the read. I didn’t like them enough to try the other series again, and her science fiction (under the name Mira Grant) looks definitely darker than I want to read, but I liked them enough to read all six books in the series.


I thought this would be a quick post. Ha. I should have known better. Eons ago, back in fifth grade I think it was, my English teacher wrote on my report card that I didn’t read enough. My mother was appalled and called the school to ask what she was talking about. The teacher told her that I had only read two books all semester. My mother pointed out that I read all the time — between classes, walking in the hallways, during lunch — that my head was always in a book. But as far as the teacher was concerned, the only books that counted were the ones I wrote book reports on. As far as I was concerned, there was no way I was wasting my time writing book reports when I could be reading instead. It’s why I’m always sympathetic to people who don’t write book reviews and why I hate asking for them. But it was kind of fun to look back over what I read — enabled by the discovery of a history button in my library app — and be reminded of what my month was in books.

The Zuni Cafe Cookbook on sale

18 Thursday May 2017

Posted by wyndes in Books, Food

≈ 6 Comments

The Zuni Cafe Cookbook: A Compendium of Recipes and Cooking Lessons from San Francisco’s Beloved Restaurant: A Compendium of Recipes and Cooking Lessons from San Francisco’s Beloved Restaurant is on sale today for $1.99.

This was an absolutely formative cookbook for me. I read it cover to cover, learned so much from it, made some of the recipes (the baked artichokes) repeatedly, and was so, so pained to give it up when I moved into the camper. I had to close my eyes to drop it into the library donation box. Actually, I think I rescued it the first time, then closed my eyes the second time. But it’s an absolute bargain for $1.99. I’ve been trying not to buy cookbooks, but I didn’t even pause before hitting click.

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