Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

Total number of books I own:

Sarah:
This number has greatly dropped since I’m moving next week, and in a fit of cleaning fury I dumped more than half my romance paperbacks, and more than half my other books as well. I’d have to estimate that I started with well over 400 and have dropped to the 150 range. Of course, this just means - I can buy more books once I am confronted with those sad and empty shelves.

Candy:
Ummm. Loads. 2,385. OK, that was a number I just pulled out of my ass. Seriously, I have no idea, but I have two shelves stacked double-deep with nothing but paperbacks, plus a two mini shelves full of an assortment of children’s books and paperbacks, plus two BIG shelves full of hardcovers and trade paperbacks. And I have a couple hundred other books in storage back in Malaysia, most of which I inherited from my siblings.

Last book I bought:

Sarah:
The Fearless Pregnancy by Victoria Clayton - sorry, not a romance. This book, should you be pregnant like me, will get you through the first trimester with a lot less anxiety.

Candy:
I needed to get my oil changed and forgot to bring along the book I was reading, so I ran into Borders real quick and bought Fool For Love by Eloisa James because it was there and I was mildly curious about what happened to Esme and Sebastian.

And yes, I’m the kind of person who will buy a paperback just because she has to wait 20 minutes in the Jiffy Lube waiting room, and the thought of being book-less terrifies her. THIS, ladies and gentlemen, is how a person’s TBR pile can start to spiral out of control.

Last book(s) I read:

Sarah:
The Fearless Pregnancy - Victoria Clayton

Mr. Impossible - Loretta Chase

Beyond Seduction - Emma Holly

The Pregnancy Bible - Keith Eddelman, Joanne Stone

Candy
The last book I finished was White Tigress by Jade Lee. I’m currently switching between Vera Nazarian’s Lords of the Rainbow and Fool For Love by Eloisa James. Poor Fabric of the Cosmos is getting short shrift.

Five books that mean a lot to me:

Sarah:
The Fearless Pregnancy: I’ve referred back to it constantly the past few months and it has done a lot to adjust my attitude about being pregnant.

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant: Acknowledges the male-centric telling of most bible stories, casts the story of Dinah, Jacob, Rachel and Leah in an entirely different light, and forced me to think more about the matriarchs of the old testament, and whether I should accept their stories as told.

Lamb: the Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore: I love Christopher Moore’s books. He’s so clever, absurd, and hysterical - The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove had tears running down my face I laughed so hard. But Lamb was not only funny, it completely changed the way I thought of and understood Christ, which is a tricky issue for me, as I converted to Judaism six years ago. Biff, Christ’s childhood pal, is resurrected by the angels to fill in the missing years of the gospel’s telling of Jesus’ life, specifically, puberty and adolescence, and in doing so reveals a human teenager and young adult who has to deal with damn huge responsibilties. It was amazing, and even though I knew what was going to happen, I cried at the end, then tied my husband down and made him read it.

Bitten by Kelley Armstrong: didn’t change the way I think about God, redemption, or the role of women in history, but reminded me that a good solid romance will make me cry and laugh - and reminded me that there are some out there. This book revitalized my interest and love of romance, after too many stumbles into poorly written novels. This book also ended up being half of the inspiration for my conversation with Candy that ended up as SBTB - there is a lot of good romance out there, and a lot of people who read it - discuss!

I have to think of a fifth? Without looking at my bookshelves? No way. I’ll have to add one later.

Candy:
Hmmm. OK, the first five that come to mind:

Something Wonderful by Judith McNaught: The first romance novel I learned to like. No, “like” is too lukewarm a word. I loved it. I devoured it. I read it in one big gulp, then I turned to page one and started re-reading it, then I re-read the good bits over and over.

Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh: Started my love affair with reading books written in dialect.

A Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth: It’s a parable about slavery. It’s a crazy seafaring adventure. It’s a revenge tale. It’s about the importance of appearances and social class in 18th-century England. It’s about the idea that wealth is a blessing from God, which to some people means that becoming wealthy by any means necessary is a Godly activity. It’s about an attempt to create a utopian multi-racial society. In short, it has it all, and I tend to talk about this book a lot.

The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton: You know, I didn’t really like to read when I was a kid. I mean, I liked it OK, but the TV still ruled supreme. Then I picked this up when I was 7 or 8 years old. Holy crap. Gnomes. Fairies. Elves. The Saucepan Man. A new magical land at the top of the tree every few days, and you had no idea if the land was going to be something awesome or something kind of creepy. I was hooked on reading from then on. By the time I was 10 or so I grew very disillusioned with Blyton because of her simplistic morality and the overt jingoism in her books (British is Best!) and switched to “edgier” kid’s authors like Roald Dahl and Joan Aiken, but I credit this book for starting me on the slippery slope to bibliophilia.

Warrior Scarlet by Rosemary Sutcliff: Another children’s book. This one’s set in ancient Britain. The hero, Drem, is a boy with a withered arm and it chronicles his struggles to kill his first wolf to prove his worthiness to his clan. It also features a very neat love story. Probably responsible for sparking my ongoing fascination with historical fiction of all kinds.

I have so many more I want to add… The Jungle Book, and my first Dragonlance book (SHUT UP, I was 13 at the time and it started my love affair with fantasy which in turn bloomed into a love affair with science fiction), The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (taught me that narrators are not necessarily trustworthy, a truly mind-boggling concept for an 11-year-old), Misery by Stephen King, Huckleberry Finn, The Twits by Roald Dahl....

Tag 5 people to do this:

Buh. Who hasn’t been tagged yet? Errr.

1. HelenKay
2. Monica
3. Angie (see? I didn’t call you Brianna this time!)
4. Giselle
5. Beth K., Slayer of Foley

Don’t laugh too hard, because this is like admitting I had a perm, pegged jeans, leg warmers and a torn sweatshirt in grade school (I totally did, too), but my auto-buys used to include Judith McNaught, Catherine Coulter and Jude Deveraux. McNaught pretty much disappeared off the earth for awhile, Coulter got a younger stunt-double to pose on her cover photos and started writing crap-ass contemporary romantic suspense that wasn’t in the least suspenseful, and Deveraux, well, after An Angel for Emily I about cried. What happened?! She used to be so much better. Of course, now I go back and read her books and think, “Well, maybe they weren’t as good as I thought.”

I also used to auto-buy Julie Garwood and Julia Quinn, but never got back into Garwood. Quinn’s early Bridgertons remain among my favorite books but of late her plots have gotten more dark and sad than light and funny. I used to look to Quinn novels when I wanted to giggle and grin at the end, but To Sir Phillip, With Love was quite serious, and dealt with abuse and depression. Since the title sounded to me like a play on “From Justin, to Kelly,” I expected lighter fare. Other past auto-buys included Sandra Brown and even at one small time, Kathleen Woodiwiss.

Now my auto-buys are much more cautious. It takes more to earn that status with me, especially after Coulter and Deveraux started producing written-by-committee hardcover crapfrests. Do I add Emma Holly to that list, with a caveat to only buy her contemporaries? I wasn’t too crazy about her historicals. I feel reasonably certain that filling up the B(n)F queue with Gaffney and Chase would not end in disappointment - so now I have to evaluate my other auto-buys, and examine my borrowing queue for past transgressions into the ‘maybe this author will be consistently good even though her last books were terrible’ hopefulness. I tend to give authors waaaay to much room to disappoint me if they’ve written a book I liked, and then three or more that I didn’t enjoy. It’s like being a fan of a consistently-losing baseball team, which I am (Go Pirates!).

So - who is on your auto-buy list? Who got dumped off the auto-buy track when they changed the formula? Who do you wish would go back to their old ways, or go rehire that old editor that made their books so wonderful?