Springsteen Gems

So, I'm tooling around on YouTube and somehow come across...

Jon Stewart praising Bruce Springsteen at the 2009 Kennedy Center Awards?  Awesome.



The Sting performance at the end is fine but I had just watched Springsteen sing it himself so it unfortunately paled in comparison.


Eddie Vedder doing this though?



Made me tear up just like Bruce.

All of the songs in this post are from Springsteen's 9-11 album "The Rising," which I tend to forget about because it makes me cry. I should add it back onto my ipod. They are very beautiful songs.

Man Titty Fun Time!

So, I bought a 90's Johanna Lindsey romance novel at the charity book shop the other day.  The cover looks like this:

And then I flipped to see the splash page and...

Holy crap!  It's a genuine vintage Fabio cover!  I don't think I've ever actually read and/or owned one of those before.  Look at the man titty!!  And what the hell?  Is that a panther?  Why is there a panther?


Just glorious.  I really hope this book can live up to that artwork.

Weekly Reading Wrap-Up

Reading slump!!

I finished one solitary book last week.  For some reason, I decided I was being lazy by reading a bunch of quick romance novels.  So I decided to pick up a thick mass market fantasy novel off of my unread shelves and force myself to finish it.  This was a bad idea on a number of levels.  So, I spent the week mostly slogging through a book I couldn't muster much interest in even though I think I would have enjoyed it if I had read it at another time.  I haven't finished it yet, but I honestly have no desire to do so.  I think I'm going to consider it "read" at this point and throw it into the basement book storage for a while.  I'll finish it one day.

So, the one book I did finish?  A short romance novel, naturally.  Luckily, it was a great one.

"Once A Ferarra Wife..." by Sarah Morgan.

A Sarah Morgan book can fall anywhere on the spectrum between love and hate for me. This one was firmly on the "love" side. It's a great angsty reconciliation romance about a separated married couple who are both desperately in love with each other but also desperately afraid of screwing it all up again and getting hurt. This one's full of anguish and pain but in a glorious way.

The main characters have been separated for two years in the wake of a painful miscarriage.  The heroine has incredibly deep-seated trust issues and her husband let her down when she was at her most vulnerable.  The husband acknowledges that his behavior wasn't ideal but he's pretty pissed off at his wife for abandoning a solid marriage because of one single misstep on his part.  It takes a lot of back and forth to reach middle ground.

I really loved this book.  As soon as I finished it, I desperately wanted to read it again.


Next Up: Lusty steampunk werewolf wild-west vampire hunters... and a rather delightful regency romance.  Those two things have nothing in common.

Movie Trailer of Awesome

I feel like movie trailers have gotten completely uninspiring lately (it doesn't help that the actual movies have done the same thing).

So, imagine my complete delight when I stumbled upon the following while cruising around on the Xbox last night:



Love!

And here's a more normal trailer with a better hint at the actual plot:



Looks seriously promising come August.

Weekly Reading Wrap-Up:

This week's selections were pretty good.  And I spread the love around source-wise.  One was from the library, one from my e-reader, and one off the unread shelves.

First up...

Lucy March's "A Little Night Magic" is a supernatural chick lit novel.  Yeah, I know some people hate the term "chick lit" but I like it so I'm going to use it. 

This was a light book with some dark edges and lots of smart and funny quips.  I liked that the romance had already started before the book did.  The two characters already had a strong friendship established and I thought that base line was set up and then built off of really nicely. 

Overall, I enjoyed the book but I thought it could have been tighter.  Something just felt a little off and too loose with the plotting and storytelling and I'm not exactly sure what.  It was a fun read, and I'll definitely read the next book when it comes out next year, but I'm not sorry I borrowed this one from the library.

"Devil's Bride" by Stephanie Laurens was another $0.99 e-book deal that I had heard good things about.  I'm a sucker for a simple classic-style historical romance and that's exactly what this turned out to be.  I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The plot is basically: Duke meets classy governess.  He pretty much immediately decides that since she's attractive, smart, comes from a noble family, can definitely keep her cool in a sensitive situation, and doesn't appear to be at all intimidated by him... he's totally going to marry her.  As soon as he can convince her to say yes (this takes a lot of work on his part).  There's a very obvious whodunit murder mystery in the works too but the book is mostly wooing and post-wooing bliss.  I found it highly enjoyable.

Also, the classic euphemism-happy historical romance sexy times made me laugh (in a delightfully good way).  A lot.  My favorite bit was when they're making out at one point and the heroine thinks about how she wants him to "fill the molten void within her" and then a few paragraphs later the hero promises to "make that molten heat inside of you explode."  As soon as he said it, my first thought was "How the hell do you know which crazy euphemism she's using inside her head?"  Heh.  Too funny.

  
Julie James' "A Lot Like Love" was so very good.  Julie James kicks ass.  Her books are so slick and fun and they feature smart and sexy professionals who are good at their jobs. 

This one involved an heiress/wine entrepreneur and a rough and tumble FBI agent working an undercover operation together.  Male love interest, Nick, could be a little jerky at times, but his constant deployment of his patented "don't-fuck-with-me-face" never ceased to make me chuckle.  Oh, and he was super adorable on the phone with his mother.  That was a definite plus.

The heroine, Jordan, was also great and I especially loved the loving yet sarcastic interactions she had with her family.  I am super excited that her "Twitter Terrorist" twin brother is the lead in James' next book.  I'm really looking forward to it.

Photoshop Fail

A "Lane Bryant" flyer arrived in my physical mailbox the other day so I nonchalantly flipped through it.

And the following made me yell "Holy photoshop!  That's not how boobs work."

Excessive airbrushing in bra ads is nothing new.  Every bra manufacturer wants you to think their bra will make your boobs look spectacularly globular but that photo?  That's some crazy right there.

Of course, I decided to do a highly scientific study to see how you would accomplish such spectacular boob definition with a plunge bra and a set of D-cups.  The answer?  A magical combination of extreme squishing and poor posture.

I think my work's been done here.

Weekly Reading Wrap-Up:

In an absolutely shocking turn of events, the romance reads were outnumbered this week!  Shocking!(And this post was 4ish days late... not at all shocking)

First up, I picked a book off of my unread shelves and dug into young adult dystopia with Isobelle Carmody's "Obernewtyn."  I'll give the book credit for doing a few interesting things but, for a book as small as it is, it moved superbly slow and was surprisingly dense.  Didn't wow me.  Not even with psychic powers, which I have a weakness for.  It's apparently the first in a series of seven.  I doubt I'll venture any further.

Back to romance!  I love sale books.  I bought the ebook version of Laura Lee Guhrke's "And Then He Kissed Her" last week for $0.99  because that's a price point I like, I read a single blog comment that said it was great, and the premise sounded awesome.  None of those things guarantees an awesome read, but an awesome read is what I got.

The book's set in Victorian England and the main character is a publisher's secretary/aspiring author.  When she finds out her total rake of a boss has never read more than snippets of the manuscripts she's been submitting to him over the years, she decides it's the last straw for her rather safe and stagnant life.  My favorite thing about Emma is that she doesn't make big decisions all willy nilly without thinking about the consequences first.  She makes tough decisions, follows through, and lives with the repercussions.  Emma's awesome.

Her love interest is pretty great himself.  Here are some of his best quotes:

"Why women put all those feathers on their hats nowadays is incomprehensible to me.  You look like you have an ostrich's backside on top of your head."

"Women of virtue are a pain in the ass."

"Tell me, at this point is it acceptable for the woman to dither in this fashion?  Isn't she supposed to just end the poor fellow's suspense and say yes so he knows he hasn't made a thorough idiot of himself?"
"No," she choked. "he deserves to suffer until she's convinced of the depth and sincerity of his affections."

After the awesome that was my previous read, I decided I needed to switch genres or anything I read would be a disappointment.  Perfect time for an Eve Dallas break!

I intended to just read one.  It'd been a while since I'd read one and the murder and mayhem can get a bit much sometimes.  Yeah, I hit a nice streak.  I read "Origin" and "Memory" back to back, took a quick break, and then devoured "Born."  There are babies in 'Born In Death!"  I could not help myself.  All three were really good reads and I can't help but be relieved that none featured psycho rapist/murderers whose only motivation is hatred of women (those are my least favorite cases and Roberts was hitting them often for a while there).

For the last read this week, though not chronologically since I read it on the aforementioned "In Death" break, I successfully got another book off of the unread shelves.  I found myself thinking "I have got to get some of these damn harlequins off the damn shelves" so I picked up "The Disgraced Playboy" fully expecting it to stink since the last few Harlequin's I've read bombed.

Consider me pleasantly surprised. It was quick and it was angsty and overwrought as all get out.  The heroine was strong as steel and I totally cheered when she was finally able to just not give a flying fuck about other people's judgements of her life.  Fun read.


Done for this week!  Expect far less books in the next wrap-up.