Kate Rothwell's Blog, page 44

reviewing when I'd rather be reading

I keep thinking of how to describe the way some books are annoying me lately. But there is no way in hell I'm putting this stuff down on the interweb. Not only is it not my job, but it's not what I want to be in the world. I want to love the books. I want to clutch them tight to my bosom and whisper about all the pleasure they've given me.

Only now that we've come this far, I wonder if any of you were as annoyed by the heroine in True Blue as I was? I'm not aiming for the creative snark, here,...

sbd a day late a big load of books

There have been kids around which means I read a lot. Easy to read, difficult to write with interruptions.

What I've read:

Compromising Positions by Jenna Baley-Burke This was a freebie from Amazon. Maybe I have low expectations from the freebies (I've gotten a lot of them lately and they've been almost all uniformly predictable and uniformly bad) but this was a great surprise. The hero and heroine were Romancelandia fluff--he's gorgeous and rich, she's attractive and in great shape to boot...

bah, humbug,,,,,

Yet another great review for The Gentleman and The Rogue!

And yet another letter I wrote this week pointing out that Bonnie Dee didn't write that book on her own. (ARe left off Summer Devon with Seducing Stephen)

Hey, Bonnie could have written those books alone -- but she didn't.

And I didn't get annoyed the first couple of times Summer got left off a review or listing, but when I was reading that JERR review (which is great, but I'm not sure about their policy about reproducing it, so I won't)...

sbd labor day

Oooo I love that Jennifer Crusie book I just read. Yeah, it had ghosts, and I'm not big on ghosts, but so what. The characters were as good as they come. I wrote a review over at Amazon, but it's not up yet.

I read my first Clive Cussler and was taken aback by the clunky writing and cliches. We learned the hair and eye color of every character and the horse power of every vehicle, and considering it was set in 1906, there were a heck of a lot of vehicles discussed. Purple prose, too. I seriou...

Internet mysteries

Please to be explaining this, mr. google translate.

We put in the line "su conejo te ama" and the translation came back "Your pussy loves you."
No, said Mike, conejo means rabbit. So I took away all the words leaving only "conejo" and sure enough, when it was all alone, it was "rabbit"

THEN I added it all back, word by word and ended up with "Your bunny loves you."

WTF.

My guess is that google can do the obscene thing and rabbit is what women call their . . . pussies. But what's with the bunny? H...

sbd

I'm listening to The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake and enjoying it, but I enjoyed it more before I looked up the author and discovered all the prizes and whatnot she got.

Maybe it's a case of being left out of the party, but I frequently get a sense of "what am I missing here?" when I discover that an author is hailed as somehow super-uber-author. Same thing happened with the Olive Kitteridge book. I don't get what sets that writing apart. The word choices? The book structure? The sense of ...

hey YO!

should I talk about mockingjay? No, posted a short thing over at goodreads.
how's about whining about the end of summer? Naw, I do that every year and it's not really whine worthy.

How about this? A Chihuahua playing pool AND making little noises.

best moment of vacation

There was this traffic jam on 495 that was a giant party. We all got out of our cars and walked around and talked to each other. As far as the eye could see cars, not moving. People wandering around.

Every now and then an emergency vehicle came zooming down the breakdown lane, giving us something to talk about (and making the people hanging around on the rail very nervous). There was a kid from a couple cars up jumping rope for at least ten minutes without missing. Someone else hauled out a tv...

local cheap writers group in search of

It's that time of year again, when I start searching for guests for CORW.

1. someone who can talk about setting up a blog and other web presences for authors. I suppose that means. . . hell. I have no idea because every year, in nearly every way, my own internet presence shrinks.
And if there's talk about "branding" I break into hives. Except this isn't a talk for me so never mind that.

2. someone who can tell us all about POD/self-publishing vs vanity press/fate of MMPB/. . . in other words,...

what happens when the non-detail oriented goes hunting for details

The dogs spread themselves flat on the wooden floor so they can get as cool as possible. They take up a lot of room and their panting leaves small drool puddles everywhere they go...is that why these are the dog days of summer? Or is it something to do with the dog star? I'd look it up but I'm all researched out.

I spent way too much time researching Germanic titles of nobility. Too much time
1. because I should have been doing something else--not because I resented all the hunting through book...