Quilts and Books

Back in December, an article appeared in the UK's Guardian noting the 100th anniversary of Mills & Boon Publishers. Julie Bindel penned the now infamous words "mysogynistic hate speech" in her description of M&B books. She targeted in particular Louise Allen's Virgin Slave, Barbarian King. Reaction from romance readers around the blogosphere was swift and vocal. Much of the discussion is neatly summarized on the Teach Me Tonight blog and can be found in the December archive. One result of Bindel's attack on VSBK was the coordination of several reviews in early January and a nifty literary analysis, also at Teach Me Tonight.

So, like the sheep I am I read this book the first of January, intending to post my own review, but I didn't get around to it right away. Then SBTB broke the news about Cassie Edward's plagiarism, and VSBK fell by the wayside. I decided to go ahead and post my review as part of my attempt to catch up and get into a better rhyt…

Back in mid-December I purchased a half dozen or so Christmas-themed books to read over my Christmas break. I was also the happy recipient of a gift from Angie of two Christmas novellas when I left a comment on her blog. I had a few other books TBR that coincidentally took place around Christmas. It was fun to have the holiday hopping up all over the place while I read. So here are a few of the more memorable ones:

The Down Home Zombie Blues / Linnea Sinclair

Given the positive response on several reader blogs it can hardly be a surprise that I liked it, too. Frankly, I haven’t read anything by Ms. Sinclair yet that I haven’t liked. Her books are fast-paced adventure stories with great touches of humor in spots. Best of all her heroines are strong women who are in charge. What I particularly admired about this book was the way we were looking at present-day Earth through the eyes of an alien. We learn about Jorie’s world indirectly as she puzzles through “odd” human behavior. I love th…

Gee, has it really been nearly a month since I posted anything here? I guess so. I've certainly read a few books that have been worth writing about, but I just couldn't summon the energy to write about them. Probably because I was doing a fair bit of sewing between books. Since I'm working on a variety of projects nothing's finished yet. But here's a picture of a small top I finished the other night. This was from a kit I bought on a shop hop last summer and only took me a couple of hours to put together.


I also made a whole bunch of ornaments for various folks. Here are samples of the 3 different ones I made:



Next up, but not tonight, a brief review of some of the more interesting books I read during my Christmas vacation.

Usually I'm a snob about pre-printed panels, but even I couldn't resist this one. I'm a sucker for anything nativity-related for my Christmas decorating. This panel is by Nancy Halvorsen (who doesn't seem to have her own web site, or else I'd link to it) and there's a whole group of fabrics that go with it. I just bought the panel and straight line quilted around the boxes. Sometime after Christmas when I take it down, I'll quilt around the motifs in the boxes to give it a more textured look, but now it's good enough to hang up for what's left of the holidays. This was a very quick little project and very fun. My panel is flannel and I forgot how much lint it leaves behind in my machine. I'll have to give it a good cleaning on Saturday.

I have to take an ornament to a Christmas party Saturday night. I found this free pattern tonight and I'll make it on Saturday. I'll make two. One for the party and one for me!

While I love historicals, I admit that I've tended to avoid American historicals and Westerns. I find I'm rather squeamish about the less savory aspects of our history here in the US. Our historical landscape is littered with broken promises and inhumane behavior. On all sides. We human beings are incredibly cruel to one another (one only has to read the daily paper) and there are days when I just don't want to think about it. But extreme circumstances create great tension for an author to use and it can be well worth it to invest in a book like Rising Wind.

RW takes place in 1774 when the American Revolution was brewing and colonists were in conflict with several native tribes as the colonists moved further and further west. Connor, a former bondsman sent over from Scotland, and Carrie, daughter of a British officer, meet in Williamsburg and are quickly attracted to one another. They are thrown together as they journey into the frontier to Fort Savannah to meet up with Ca…

Anna Campbell's first book,
Claiming the Courtesan was an unusual, dark, and controversial book. I read it and blogged about it last spring. I found that one to be a compelling, well-written book and I was anxious to read this one.

Untouched is a very different book, although dark in its own way. The hero, Matthew (a Marquess) has been held in captivity for 9 years while his uncle/guardian convinced the world that Matthew is insane. Thus the uncle has control over Matthew's considerable fortune and property. Matthew lives in a "cottage" that is on what must be a rather large piece of land, surrounded by an unscalable wall. He lives in relative comfort and is able to maintain a scientific correspondence with the outside world. For reasons that aren't entirely clear (or else I missed the reasons), the uncle decides to procure a prostitute for Matthew. Two stereotypically evil henchmen are sent to Bristol to bring back the prostitute. Instead, they accidentally bring…

Looking at the list to the right, I've read a lot of books this month, but I guess none had so much of an impact that I wanted to take the time to write about them. I have some interesting reads coming up; maybe those will prompt me to post another review. I have JR Ward's Lover Unbound that I got from the library and will have to read in the next week before it's due. Given some of the lukewarm to nasty reviews it received I can't say I'm anxious to get started. But I have liked the previous books in the series, so I hope my reaction isn't the same as others'. It's a thick sucker, too--just over 500 pages! If I'm going to devote that much time it had better be worth it. Anna Campbell's sophomore effort is due Tuesday. I pre-bought it from Fictionwise, so I assume I can download it at midnight tomorrow. Untouched sounds interesting and I'll probably interrupt LU to read that as soon as I've got it loaded into my PDA.

I've had that pic…