I was tagged by vaguepositivity for a book meme, which I'm crossposting here, too.

Rules: In a text post, list 10 books that have stayed with you in some way. Don’t take but a few minutes, and don’t think too hard - they don’t have to be the “right” or “great” works, just the ones that have touched you. Tag 10 friends, including me, so I’ll see your list.

1. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum – The first book I remember reading by myself (I was 6/7) and THEN, I found out there were MORE. I ended up getting an Inter-library Loan from the main Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh before I turned 8. My mom had to sign for it and my grandmother paid the fee, but I got my hands on Ozma of Oz.

2. The Secret of the Old Clock, Carolyn Keene – Nancy Drew #1. I read my way through these for a solid year or two. I had the yellow hardback versions, but my grandmother still had my mom's original series, so I read all those, too. I know they're formulaic and trite, but 40 years ago, there really weren't many books with a competent female protagonist, let alone one who saved the day. See also: Trixie Belden.

3. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain – I read it too young, but it's a rollicking good adventure, and then I read it as an adult and really understood what he was writing about and it works on both levels.

4. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott – I read, I write, I am Jo. (And I'm in the minority of being okay with the Professor v. Laurie.)

5. Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, Dee Brown – I was way too young for this, but it was on my parents' bookshelves and I had free reign. I still can't watch a Hollywood Western.

6. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte – My love of gothic romances, let me show you it.

7. Bride of the MacHugh, Jan Cox Speas – I was into Highland clans and politics and romance waaaaaaay before Outlander.

8. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston – This is not the first book you think of for a suburban, Southern county library book club, but bless the director, she not only got this on the list, but also booked a discussion leader who didn't at all back down from the genteel, polite, racist reactions to the book.

9. The Mists of Avalon -- Professional fan fic ftw.

10. Beloved, Toni Morrison – I was in such a book hangover from this that I could barely function for a week, and nobody I knew had read it. Oh, for the agonies that the internet actually solved.

I'm supposed to tag people but I have no idea if you've already done this or not, so if you haven't feel free to play along!

Well, more like the April reading meme, but roll with me...

finished
When a Scot Ties the Knot, Tessa Dare -- I... really should have loved this one, but for a really long time, I thought it was going to go DNF. I liked all the disparate parts (her, him, the castle, people finding a home, etc, etc) but I dislike the trope TD used to get them together, and only finished by skipping over the parts with sex (not that it was badly written per se, just that I don't like the set-up used to get them naked.) Finished, though.

White Night, Jim Butcher -- I'm still trundling through the Dresden audiobooks (I only started reading them b/c the HoB loved them and kept wanting me to read), but as advertised, I do think they're getting better. I can remember how the middle part of the early books just draaaaaaaggged on, but now things keep moving along. Also, I think there are enough side characters I really like to keep all the books populated with a favorite. In this case, both Marcone and Thomas are around, which is perfect for me. Harry's idea of how to mentor/teach Molly makes me want to smack him, but I do feel that's actually consistent with his character. Also, wow with the Harry/Marcone in this one. 

Scandal Wears Satin, Loretta Chase -- Book #2 of her Dressmakers series, which suffers, I think, from the HEA of the first book. The stakes aren't nearly as high in this one--no one is going to starve if things don't work out. Everyone is in reaction mode, b/c the big issue affects a side character and only spills over to the h/h by proxy. Still: LC. A favorite for a reason.

Arabella, Georgette Heyer -- An old favorite, but on audiobook this time through. It suffered a bit in how the narrator read Beaumaris and how that just didn't match up with how he's sounded in my head for lo these many years. 

March, Geraldine Brooks -- I went into this knowing that Brooks based the character of Mr. March was based on Bronson Alcott, who is not my favorite authorial parent (to say the least!) I'm actually pretty shocked that I not only finished this, but enjoyed the journey. I feel like I found personal letters & journals of people I'd only known as a child, with all the good & bad that seeing them through adult eyes implies. 

The Iron Duke, Meljean Brook -- Despite my love of steampunk, I had somehow not managed to read this one (which is sort of the ur-steampunk romance) until this most recent 24-Hour Readathon. The world-building is really fantastic and Brook manages not to info-dump it all at once. I think I could have gone with a bit more character development and the end felt rushed (in that we had this glorious ride of a build-up but then the HEA almost happens off screen, but that's possibly because it was more of an action-adventure with a romantic subplot that grew all kinds of crazy) but I did really enjoy it.

You Are A Badass, Jen Sincero -- sigh. I really need to not take random recommendations to heart. The non-stop advice to Be on the right 'frequency to engage' with the universe/spirit/god/etc was bad enough but then there was the part about how people are depressed so they can get attention & that was enough of that. DNF.

Come As You Are, Emily Nagoski -- Given that I grew up in a Catholic family (sex is only for baby-making) during the sexual revolution of the 70s (if it feels good, do it), I kinda feel like it's a miracle I have at least a semi-adjusted attitude toward sex. This book would have been invaluable to college-aged!me (less guilt! better orgasms!), but it was still fascinating to all grown up me.

Level Up, Cathy Yardley -- Short contemporary romance that ultimately felt really disposable. Plus points for a Hispanic, computer geek of a heroine, and even more plus points for the group of friends she finds herself in the middle of (I want a bookstore like the one in the center of the plot), but everything moved so quickly that I'm having trouble recalling details even though I only just finished it. 

now
Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates -- The library just delivered my hold, which is great timing given that we (#2Son and I) just finished his first Black Panther (and loved it.)

Small Favor, Jim Butcher -- #10 of the Dresden Files. I'm rolling my eyes (Luccio, REALLY?), but still listening. 

The Bollywood Bride, Sonali Dev -- I just started, but there's a lot of backstory being alluded to.

next
The Raven King, as soon as I can get my butt to the library!

Catching up on the Wednesday reading meme…

( it's been a while )

It’s Wednesday, which has been my long-time work-from-home day, so I’m sitting in the living room, enjoying the lit-up tree and the money pit my collection of Department 56 houses in the pre-dawn darkness. The cat got her Christmas present early (a catnip infused scratching board three times as big as she is herself) and is literally rolling on it, enjoying the good life (and, with a bit of luck, not tearing up my furniture.)

Wednesday also means the book/reading meme, yeah? This week, I come armed with visual aids! (and apologies to those who’ve already seen this on facebook—I know there’s some overlap.)

finished
Re-reads of the holiday parts of Winter Solstice and Coming Home, Rosamunde Pilcher, and a re-listen to The Twelve Clues of Christmas, Rhys Bowen, also for the holiday fluff. I swear I went and looked for something new to take care of my need for treacle, but every time I searched for ‘holiday’ I’d end up with David Sedaris, which, while amusing and topical, was not what I was looking for. I totally agree with his skewering of the holiday excesses, but while I’m in the middle of trying to pull off yet another balancing act between expectations and something meaningful, I don’t need him snarking in my ear about the very idiocies I’m trying to avoid.

So. ::breathes deep:: I went back to the familiar. At least I didn’t fall all the way into the abyss and haul out the Jan Karon?

now
Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna, David King – a little non-fiction to go along with all the Regencies I tend to default to.

I also got re-started listening to Proven Guilty, the Dresden book I abandoned for the fluff. At some point, I will run out of audiobooks in this series and my ears will not know what to do w/o James Marsters.

next
The promised visual aid, ( behind the cut )

And now is the time I go take a page out of Fly Lady and get dressed down to my shoes and see how much tidying and decluttering I can do with my phone in my pocket on speaker and mute and the day’s conference calls in the background.

♥ Have a good day, everyone.

mecurtin asked me what my favorite cookbooks are... which, y'all, I have a LOT ("") of those to choose from--4 physical shelves and then another dozen or so on my e-devices, and that's after a couple of years of culling and donating to the Dugout Club's tag sale fundraiser. I have ones that have one or two totally knock-out recipes, I have Ina and Nigella and Martha and Tyler Florence and Mark Bittman, but the ones that have the most half-destroyed pages are:

The Way To Cook, Julia Child -- Classic Julia, for when I want to know how to make a quiche or soups or coq au vin or any of a dozen not-too-complicated dishes that my mother never would have dared to make (she is not inspired in the kitchen.) Also, this is serious chocolate mousse.

Baking: From My Home To Yours, Dorie Greenspan -- I checked this one out of the library at least 6 times (at 3-6 weeks a pop) before I broke down and bought it. (I didn't think I needed a baking book, but then I thought I should probably let someone else have a crack at the library's copy.) I've lost track of how many batches of World Peace Cookies I've made over the years.

The (New) Best Recipe, Cooks Illustrated -- I had the original version and ended up with the revised edition as well.
It takes 3 pages to get to the actual recipe, but by the time you do, you know every single variable in the cooking equation and why it didn't work.

Great Food Fast, Everyday Food -- This one's great b/c I can turn a kid loose on a recipe and have it turn out almost every time. I can also walk into the house at 6 and have dinner on the table by 7ish even if I'm picking recipes based on what I know I have in the house.

My Calabria, Rosetta Constantino -- My grandmother's family is from Calabria, and betweeen how none of my mom's generation of cousins really cared about cooking and how none of the sisters (my grandmother and her sisters, I mean) ever really cooked from a recipe, no one knew how to make anything. Oh, y'all it was so sad--we had scraps of paper with notes like start with 10# flour and the people writing stuff down had no clue how things were supposed to fit together and the people doing the talking didn't understand that they had to be super-basic and even being someone who always messed around in the kitchen, I couldn't make things work. This book was published a couple of years ago and when I started leafing through it, all of a sudden a fair number of those scraps of recipes started to make sense.

Honorable mention goes to The Silver Palate Cookbook, which I have in the original, paperback edition from the early 1980s. I don't really cook from it now, but oh my goodness, this was the first cookbook I ever owned that was inspiring. The dinner parties that came from this book! I remember sitting at my tiny, 2-person kitchen table with the (landline) phone tucked between my shoulder and my ear, leafing through pages with a dear friend doing the same on her end of the call, deciding if we wanted to try the salmon mousse *and* the phyllo spinach triangles for the same party. (The answer was YES. Tres (80s) chic!) I am terribly nostalgic about it, about the veal scallops with the mustard cream sauce and the lemon chicken and the Mediterranean chicken salad and, and, and...

finished
The Raven Boys, Maggie Stiefvater – Wow, I really ended up liking this! Yes, it was a lot of set-up and there are obviously things in motion that haven’t been resolved, but I found more than enough to love with the characters and the early-arc plot resolution. Also, I found myself stopping several times and just admiring how *much* info MS could get into a conversation or a thought, all without a single ‘as you know, Bob’ in sight. The next book is on my hold list at the library and will hopefully arrive without too much delay.

Fangirl, Rainbow Rowell – Another one that I really liked, though I can confess to you all that I skipped right over Cath’s fic excerpts, not because I found them boring or tedious, but because I really don’t need another fandom in my life right now! (Plus, I kept getting sidetracked with wanting to hunt down the equivalent HP fic that I vaguely remembered reading back in the day.) I rationalized this as being okay because I already know how awesome fic is; I don’t need a refresher course (::eyes the 4 pages of recs in AO3 that I still need to write up::) Also, I really loved Reagan. All the hearts for her and her badass attitude. I can now show my face at the library again!

Act Like It, Lucy Parker – Oh, you guysssssss: this is the fake dating book of my dreaaaaams. There is Shakespeare! A mom who does mom-like things w/o being an overbearing bitch! The male protag is semi-horrified at the female protag’s rather small and less than opulent flat and, rather than being embarrassed, she basically tells him to get a life! She also tells him off every time she thinks (correctly) that he is acting like an ass and he doesn’t woobify her professional ambitions! And there is the greatest birthday present ever. EVER. In short, I inhaled this one like the best, just bittersweet enough chocolate out there.


now
Carry On: The Rise and Fall of Simon Snow, Rainbow Rowell – Right, right, I know I said I didn’t need another fandom, but … I can’t resist.

Proven Guilty, Jim Butcher – The horror movie Dresden… which is reminding me of the Supernatural episode with the haunted house, Don’t Fear the Reaper, and Jared in a towel. What was that creature called?

When A Scot Ties The Knot, Tessa Dare – This popped up on sale at amazon and I was weak and snatched it up despite my semi-serious vow not to buy anything until the TBR pile becomes something less than teeteringly high. But… Tessa Dare. And Scotland. And a castle. I repeat, I am weak.

next
My ILL of Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna just came in, so that’s probably next.


Also, I am still open for questions/topics on the December Posting Meme, come give me something to talk about: DW or LJ.

It’s been raining in ATL for something like 2 weeks, lots of gray skies and terrible traffic. And I think there was enough water that we had some minor leaking in the basement, ugh.

Anyway, it started clearing up yesterday and there is blue sky visible today, \o/.

Lots of stuff has been going on, but that would require me to process and organize it all in order to write about it, so I will stick with thanking everyone for the birthday good wishes (♥ to you all) and just go for a catch-up for the Wednesday book meme.

finished
Neanderthal Seeks Human, Penny Reid - Contemporary romance that skated a little too close to the To Stupid To Live trope in the beginning, even though the protagonist is actually very intelligent. There’s a difference between social anxiety/Aspergers and utter obliviousness, and we came perilously close to the latter in a couple of instances (specifically, when the protagonist is self-loathingly certain that the reason nothing happened with the gorgeous guy she’s in lust with is because he knows he’s way out of her league and is offended she would even think that something might happen, rather than the guy being horrified at the implication that he would start something with a date-rape-drugged woman he’s just rescued.) Said guy is also a little toooo Alpha for my tastes, but not so much that he’s tipped over into asshole territory. The real joy of this book is Janie’s interior monologues, which range far and wide and random, and how she consciously works through her social anxiety with some very good mental health techniques, AND how that frequently ties into her being good at what it is that she does. There’s obviously more to come (lots of background details that are dying to be expanded) and I think I’ll add the sequels to Ye Olde TBR stack. (I whispersynced this one and I thought Jennifer Grace did a good job dealing with Janie’s first person internal monologues, but I have to admit this is the first book I’ve ever listened to on a sped-up playback. It was just taking *forever* to get through chapters at 1x speed.)

Dead Beat, Jim Butcher – Book 7? 8? of the Dresden Files, aka, the one with the zombies. I think this is my favorite of the series so far. I like this circle of found family Dresden has accumulated around him and the zombification he managed to pull off was pretty awesome. I still wished for a 2x4 to club some sense into him occasionally, but it wouldn’t be a Dresden book w/o that feeling. Also, James Marsters is still excellent at the narration of the audiobooks.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving, narrated by Tom Mison – As part of my Embrace-The-Season strategy for getting through the upcoming winter, I binged watched/read/listened to Halloween-themed media and this was a fabulous kitchen / treadmill accompaniment. It’s been decades since I had to read this for school, and it is MUCH BETTER to have Ichabod himself narrating it rather than disinterested, unengaged high school freshmen.


now
The Raven Boys, Maggie Stiefvater – I’m only a few chapters in, but the library wants it back shortly, so it’s moving to the front of the line.

Proven Guilty, Jim Butcher/James Marsters narrating – The next of the Dresden audiobooks, and at this point, my commute is Not Right w/o Marsters’ Dresden in my ears.


next
Fangirl and Carry On: The Rise and Fall of Simon Snow, Rainbow Rowell – The library came through with both of these super quickly, which made the librarians so happy when I picked them up that I am ducking them whenever I go in for another reason because they want to know what I thought of them. Ugh, social pressure. :/

Hour 8 and 2 books down, \o/ (Malice at the Palace and Black Widow: Forever Red) and I enjoyed them both.

That's such a relief--I hate the thought of 'wasting' even an hour of this day on something I don't like. I go through some serious contortions to clear the decks enough to spend an entire day reading. My brain is all worried that I'm going to lose some of the 'magic' of it all.

It's a gloriously beautiful day, so I think I'm going to walk the dog and bring an audiobook along for company (quite possibly offending some neighbors as I don't notice them trying to start a conversation, but that's why I'm married to the super-extrovert. He takes care of all the neighborly relations. :D )

I do have more to say about both books, but later, as I am in a reading thrall and don't really want to come out of it just yet. ;D

Getting out of the house in the morning fast enough to miss the worst of ATL traffic is not something I’m enjoying a lot, but the new office continues to feel very modern. I am looking for the reservable treadmill desks--they could make conference calls a little less of a time suck.

Belated weekly books meme…

finished
Love Irresistibly, Julie James, contemporary romance – I really did enjoy this while I was reading it (it was nice to have a pair of protagonists who felt like actual high-powered, functioning adults with complications) but I swear I could not remember it today, like AT ALL, when I started writing this up, so maybe it wasn’t as great as I thought? At least it did not annoy me to death and gain memorability that way?

Princes At War, nonfiction, British royal family during WWII – remained very readable to the end, and I really loved the large number of excerpts of private correspondence and journals (since published) in the narrative. Mostly, these came from the king’s journal and his correspondence with his mother/brothers, but there were also bits from Churchill, his secretaries, and from other government officials. They added an extra depth to the timeline. And yow, not at all painting a flattering (or even barely non-treasonous) portrait of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

Fangirl’s Guide to the Galaxy, nonfiction – I… liked this, but it only skimmed the surface of the world of fandom in an effort to make it be not so overwhelming to newbies, so I’m clearly not the target audience. HOWEVER, it gets a zillion bonus points for defining a drabble as exactly 100 words, \o/. I feel like I have to wave its banner just for that. /bofq

now
Your Scandalous Ways, Loretta Chase, historical romance – highest of recommendations (and LC is almost always a big hit with me) but I literally just started last night, so I have no real impression.

Dead Beat, Jim Butcher, paranormal mystery – The next of the Dresden Files (#7, I think), again, just started it (and for those just joining the these posts, I’m reading/listening to these because my kids love them and it’s always good for dinner conversation.) As always, though, James Marsters gives great Dresden in the audiobook.

next
The library just came through with Malice at the Palace, which is the next of Rhys Bowen’s Lady Georgie cozy mystery and it’s set during the early events of the Princes at War, so that all feels very serendipitous.

I'm having the kind of week where I actually posted to twitter that my inbox was down under 10 emails, \o/.

...

Yup, I'm telling you, life is just too exciting around here.

Okay, books.

Before I get into the round of finished/reading now/next, it is coming up time for the next 24-hour readathon. I participated in the spring and it was the best day ever. It's also super-laidback and not full of rules, and if you'd like to check it out, here you go: Dewey's 24 Hour Readathon.

finished
Masked Ball at Broxley Manor, Rhys Bowen, audiobook -- sadly, the narrator of this series is like nails on a chalkboard to me, so all further Her Royal Spyness books will have to be consumed the old-fashioned way.

Blood Rites, Jim Butcher (Dresden #6), audiobook -- On the flip side, James Marsters' narration is one of the biggest selling points of this series for me. He keeps me entertained for what is essentially me just listening along for the boys.

now
The Royal We, by the gofug girls -- Surprisingly entertaining and neatly written.

In a (probably doomed) attempt to not have my house show up on Hoarders, I'm also listening to the KonMari book, but I only just started so I have no opinion yet.

next
How To Be A Victorian just popped up on my library queue, so I will be skimming that and seeing what I can borrow and twist for the steampunk romance I'm supposedly writing (in my copious amounts of free time, obvs)