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 bette...

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 lo...

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.