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

The Art of Romance will be a book – thank heavens! My coffee table has a burp rag, some clickers, a graham cracker, and a copy of Bar Mitzvah Disco, but does it have a paperback collection of the visual history of Mills & Boon romance covers? No! It is lacking! Oh, the sorrow! The woe!

You can order your own copy of the book, which is due out October 2008. It traces the development of the genre and provides a visual history of one of our favorite elements, the cover art. Thanks to BB for the link.

And if cover art wasn’t enough joy for your eyeballs, here is an EXTREMELY NSFW OMGHOLYCRAP link (that I saved for Saturday for that very reason) provided with thoughtful care by Sarah (not me, another Sarah). Two words that express limitless pleasure: Naked rugby. Members of New Zealand’s national team, All Blacks, participated in a nude rugby match for charity. Yeah, yeah charity. I wanna know what the Haka looked like performed by full monty rugby players.

And if nude bottoms are not on your work agenda today, try this, courtesy of Debunot: “What did you do today?” “Oh, I rescued a family of baby ducks who were jumping off an awning.” So cute my teeth hurt. *le sigh*

Speaking of teeth hurting, if this cake were mine I’d never eat it. No matter how much I wanted cake. (Thanks to Miri for the link).

Too much sweet and Selleck? Then I’ll smack you silly with a slightly late link to the Purple Prose winner for worst sex scene, from Rebecca Miller’s The Private Lives of Pippa Lee:

a pleasure ballooned from her sex, swelled to fill her body until it burst, the sensation running down her legs, and she cried out, her head falling lifeless on the mattress, her body lank as the neck of a dead swan.

That’s just comedy freaking gold right there. Wow. Dead swans and sex balloons. It’s like Lisa Frank mixed with hardcore porn.

Attention! The following link will suck up an hour of your day. If you don’t have an hour to spend, maybe this isn’t the link you ought to be clicking on.

From Bitchery reader Robin comes the Time Suck of the Week: FictionDB.com. Robin was in the process of restocking her library with Nora Roberts books. The FictionDB “has become invaluable in this task because it takes a book like “Courting Catherine” which is long out of print, and lists ever ISBN associated with it (including audio) and where it can now be found.”

Robin likes to use it for research, especially when hunting down the backlist of a favorite author, for work or for her own beleaguered bookshelves. Well, I don’t know for sure that Robin’s shelves are beleaguered or just a little weary, but I presume her shelves are like mine.

You can subscribe to the DB for about $3 a month and access all the free features plus a few extras: you can keep track of wishlists, TBRs, ratings, and notes, and sell your books through the site.

But even the free version is a book nerd’s paradise, especially the romance section. Enjoy.

Just remember. You’re not going to get that hour back.

There’s nothing sexier than the process of pipetting. No, that’s wrong. How about a ballad touting the sexy miracle that is an automatic pippeting machine?

It’s called EP Motion baby. How can you resist lyrics like:

Pipetting all those well-plates, baby, sends your thumbs into overdrive
And spending long nights in the lab makes it hard for your love to thrive....

DNA
RNA
Proteins
Cell Cultures
Less reagents
Faster workflow
Saves you money
Well, well, well

Well, well, well indeed. Enjoy that, romance science geeks.

But wait, there’s more!

Thanks to Tina who gave me the heads up about this one: Joss Whedon wrote a musical. Neil Patrick Harris stars in the lead role.

Do I need to say more?

How about: Act I and Act II are free online now, with Act III going up July 19. 

Go forth and bask in the awesome. 

HaBO: “A Steaming Pile of Poo”

This HaBO request from Rosemary nearly made me spit out my coffee. Help this poor woman out, while I go get more coffee?

Here’s what I remember.

1. She’s a librarian taking a booze-cruise sort of thing when the boat ends up being shipwrecked on a deserted island.
2. He’s a SEAL or Green Beret or some crap like that.
3. She’s a virgin (of course).
4. He chases her through the jungle and is about to throw her down and rape her (cuz she’s beeeeeyyyoootiful) when she gets her period and he realizes that it freaks her out to lose her virginity on her period, so he backs off. (But the author makes a point to say that he’s down with riding the tide.)
5. He takes her to the grotto (with the waterfall) and cleans her up as a way to say “sorry for the attempted rape,” but also tells her, “As soon as the crimson wave passes, I’m banging you.”
6. To continue being nice to her he makes her a comb out of a shell of some sort and combs out her hair, but whenever he reaches a tangle, he just pulls out his big knife and cuts the knot off.
7. He makes some sort of nature-pad out of moss (after making her some new panties out of leaves or some plant debris because he TORE OFF THE OTHER ONES.)
8. Pulling out works for them as a form of birth control.
9. They’re eventually rescued and she goes back to the library, and he finds her and her crazy looking hair in the stacks one day and blah blah blah, HEA.

(All dialog was paraphrased by me.)

The book came out in ‘89-’92 since I remember reading it in World History junior year of high school, and it had a purple cover. It was the second romance novel I ever read, and tainted me against contemporary novels for the rest of my life. I apparently have pretty severe masochistic tendencies since I want to reread this steaming pile of poo. Can anyone help me out?

Rosemary: there are so many good contemporary romances, many which do not feature shipwrecked menstruating librarians being chased through the underbrush.