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

Kate Rothwell has a totally bitchin’ contest that you should enter. If you don’t participate, she has a list of threats, and I have no doubt--NO DOUBT--that she will have no trouble carrying out all of them in the inimitable ruthless Rothwell fashion.

So please. Think of the doughnut, and those lonely Bosnia socks.

Queens, Princesses, Duchesses, Marchionesses, Countesses, Viscountesses and Baronesses, and members of the Court of Bitchery, We have a Winner in the haiku contest!

In a stunning and slightly amusing tie, PC Cast and her Phabulous Daughter have won the haiku contest, garnering equal numbers of votes for their haikus, number #4 and #5:

Ode to Mantittyfruit

4.
Succulent, firm flesh
Manfruit waiting to be plucked
Nipple dew…so sweet

5.
Hair on man titties?
Nay! (gasp) Abomination!
My Dear Sweet Lord – WAX.

So without further ado, we hereby crown PC Cast and her daughter:

We also had a number of honorable mention votes for E. D’Trix’s #11 and #12, so congratulations on fine efforts as well. We seem to all be suckers for anything that makes the baby Jesus cry. 

Update: It’s official: I’m a retard, and I should not attempt to read complex sentences before 10 a.m. The sentence is fine as-is. Disregard this entry entirely, or just use it as proof of my general retardedness.




I’ve heard a lot of buzz about Lori Handeland’s Blue Moon, so off I toddled to Amazon.com to see if the book featured one of those nifty “Look Inside This Book!” features. And whaddaya know, it did.

However, I have been completely unable to read past the first sentence. Check it out:

The summer I discovered the world was not black-and-white--the way I liked it--but a host of annoying shades of gray was the summer a lot more changed than my vision.

Don’t believe me? See for yourself.

Trying to figure out this sentence is breaking my brain.

People who have read this book and grammarians in general: Am I missing something here? Or is the sentence at least two different sentences squished together with some critical words missing? Or is the Amazon.com scan completely wonky?

I need to know. If the sentence in the book is exactly as the Amazon.com page presents it, I can’t read the book. I can’t. That first sentence haunts me. It makes no sense.

Now that a great many of us are Smart Bitches, thanks to the membership feature of this here site, I have a question to the general Bitchery: What is your A book?

I don’t necessarily mean your all-time favorite, since sometimes the book you call your most lovely favorite is a book wherein you must acknowledge the flaws in the structure or plotting or character, and love the book despite its imperfections.

I mean the book that made you go, “Well, beat me with a donkey’s ass, that was a fucking awesome romance novel!”

For me, there are desperately few of these books: Bitten by Kelley Armstrong is one of my A books, because it just knocked me over and I still think about it. It was also the book that created my utter fascination with paranormal romance. 

Also, Kinsale’s Flowers from the Storm, because this book beat down the weeds in the side yard of the estate of romance and created a whole new field of readng for me: The Holy-Shit Good Romance. Can you imagine the editor’s meeting for that one? “No, really, he’s a immoral, licentious duke, but he had a stroke, and she’s a Quaker, so he’s locked in an institution unable to communicate clearly, and she’s locked in to a different institution that she loves but feels she is betraying - hey, where are you going? This is too a romance!”

I’m still working on my “All About Sarah” entry (I have twice as many cats plus a dog so I have to take a lot more pictures) but since one of the questions is about my A book, I want to know- what’s yours? 

I know, I know--the RWA has suspended the graphics standards, they have an ad hoc committee studying the issue, yadda yadda yadda. But I came across this image for Cory Doctorow’s Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town and was struck by two things:

1. It’s really, really beautiful. Which isn’t a surprise, because it seems that the artist is Dave McKean, who’s done some really, really cool stuff, including illustrating one of my all-time favorite children’s books, The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish (written by the absolutely squee-worthy Neil Gaiman).

2. This cover would not have passed the (now-suspended) RWA cover standards.

There’s some sort of lesson here, I guess. Somewhere.

Also: Cory Doctorow utilizes a Creative Commons License, whereby you can download his books for free. How cool is that? SO FUCKING COOL. Just for that, I’m going to go check out his books from the library (no e-book reader for me, and no comfy chair, so reading books on the computer is not feasible) and if I like ‘em, I’ll definitely buy them.

I say this as if this is in any way different from the way I usually do things, ha!

Thanks are due to Vanessa Jaye, because if it hadn’t been for her blog, I wouldn’t have noticed the cover and a pretty nifty new-to-me writer.

Addendum:

I found more smut. I might add more as the mood hits me.