Catch of the Day by Kristan Higgins

You can view this book’s Amazon detail page here.

Started reading:: 9th May 2008
Finished reading:: 10th May 2008

My Comments

I have a lot of thoughts about this book, and it’s hard to know where to start. First impression is probably a good place. I was surprised this book was written in first person, but it was a pleasant surprise, because honestly, when done well, I prefer first person over third. I love how it puts you completely inside the protagonist’s head. No matter how skilled the author, third person will always have a distancing effect that a well-written first person story doesn’t.

Then, after the prologue was done, it became first person, present tense, and I was a bit taken aback. I’ve only read one other novel in present tense that I can remember (Chocolat) and I really didn’t enjoy it much. In CATCH OF THE DAY, though, I got so swept up in the story that the present tense aspect only jarred me every once in a while. There are just some situations that are unavoidably awkward in present tense, but overall, while I don’t think it added anything to the story, it didn’t detract from it, either.

Now for the good stuff. Higgins has a voice that I can only call delightful. This book was an absolute pleasure to read from beginning to end. A lot about this book reminded me of Jennifer Crusie. It wasn’t as funny or quirky as a Crusie novel, but it had the same kind of easy and confident prose, the same compelling character dynamics, and a similar sense of humor. There’s a fairly big cast of characters, and Higgins doesn’t take any shortcuts with the characterization. It’s so hard these days to find a fun contemporary romance with real substance. Higgins nailed it, and for that, she’s now on my auto-buy list.

I did have a quibble, though, and I can’t decide if it’s a minor or major one. As a story about the heroine, this is pure perfection. As a romance, it’s…not. There’s a lethal combination in this book of a first person narrative and a shy, reserved, and non-talkative hero. I kept waiting for the moment where the hero would open up and we’d actually get to know him a little bit, but it never happened. Add to this the fact that this is a sweet, kisses-only romance, and I ended up feeling cheated on the romance. And I do believe that the first person aspect made the shut bedroom door a lot worse, because once that door shut and in the next scene it was the “next morning,” I felt like I’d been roughly and abruptly kicked out of the heroine’s head. I have no problem reading a romance with no sex, but I do have a problem with being completely shut out from such an important part of the h/h’s relationship when the rest of the story showed so little of them together.

I think we’re in the middle of a trend heading towards more and more cross-genre novels, and more and more publishers slapping the label of romance on any story with romantic elements simply because romance sells better. I’d be insulting all romance readers to say that we don’t want to read these novels, but we do want to know what to expect out of a story, and when it says “romance” on the spine and what’s between the covers delivers something else, there’s bound to be angry readers. If I had to label CATCH OF THE DAY, I’d call it women’s fiction, not romance. There are very strong romantic elements, but ultimately, I felt that I’d read a story about the heroine, about her growth and her search for happiness. Everyone else were sidekicks, including the hero, and that’s why I can’t call it a romance. The reason I wasn’t disappointed was because it was still romantically satisfying….but I still can’t call it a romance.

But hey, I’m really not complaining. I found a new auto-buy author, that writes fun, light, feel-good contemporaries with real characters dealing with real issues. No vampires, no villains, and no stupid, forced comedy. This is a pretty big deal, and I couldn’t be any happier. I hope Higgins sells well so she can keep writing, because she’s going places, and I’m totally going along for the ride.

May 11th, 2008 - Posted in contemporary romance | | 0 Comments

Feline fitness

Courtesy of Walt, these two awesome videos of cats on treadmills. I have a feeling that my boys would react more like the cat in the second video…

May 8th, 2008 - Posted in contemporary romance | | 2 Comments

It’s the weekend!

Saturday afternoon. End is in sight. We have a few errands to run tomorrow and Monday, but for the most part, I expect we’ll be in front of the TV. Watching it. And playing Mario Kart on the Wii. DH bought the game last weekend, and we’ve played it at night whenever we’ve had time, which has been far too little. I’d never played it before, so let’s just say that I finally sympathize with this cartoon, titled “Fucking Blue Shells”:

Blue Shells are the devil. Mario Kart is da bomb.

May 3rd, 2008 - Posted in misc. | | 0 Comments

Sex in Georgian England by A.D. Harvey

You can view this book’s Amazon detail page here.

Tags: history, non-fiction, research books

Started reading:: 26th April 2008
Finished reading:: 29th April 2008

My Comments

What did I learn in this book?

That until the 19th century, artists thought the perfection of the female form did not include nipples with accurately depicted areolas.

In the 18th century England, to have sex naked was an oddity.

Before the 18th century, it was thought that women were the more lustful sex. This attitude extended to whores, so that it was assumed women entered prostitution for lascivious reasons. Throughout the century, these ideas gravitated in the opposite direction, to where women became asexual and prostitutes became victims (who could be reformed) rather than evil seductresses.

Society, on the whole, was far more concerned with innocents being seduced than they were with women being raped. Probably because rape happened to the lower classes while there was this notion that young girls of the middle and upper classes were at high risk for “seduction.” Oh the horrors!

The author also suggested that the 18th century was responsible for introducing men’s obsession with virgins and women’s breasts.

And this is just a small sample of the fascinating information found in this book. In short, it was pretty darned awesome. Highly recommended, even as just an entertaining read.

April 29th, 2008 - Posted in non-fiction/research | | 0 Comments

Disorderly Women in Eighteenth-Century London: Prostitution and Control in the Metropolis, 1730-1830 by Tony Henderson

You can view this book’s Amazon detail page here.

Tags: history, non-fiction, research books

Started reading:: 17th April 2008
Finished reading:: 26th April 2008

My Comments

This is an academic work, based on the author’s Ph.D. thesis on the same topic, and as such it’s very different from the other research books I’ve read on the topic. Instead of anecdotes and detailed observations, this one’s full of numbers and analyses. It’s short and to the point, and I think I would have benefited from reading this before anything else, because it would have given me a deeper understanding of the aforementioned anecdotes of the other books I’ve read during the past few months.

In any case, this gives a broad view of the topic of prostitutes in 18th century London. Who they were, where they came from, how they worked. A huge chunk is devoted to how the authorities thought of and dealt with them. And the last part illuminates contemporary attitudes toward prostitutes and how it changed during the course of the century. This was an extremely valuable resource for me. God bless the UNLV library!

April 26th, 2008 - Posted in non-fiction/research | | 0 Comments

Since I have nothing else to talk about

see more crazy cat pics

I might as well tell an amusing cat story. The LOLcat above is only mildly appropriate to the story–I mostly just posted it because I used to think there was no thing worse to my cats than a water bottle. As this story illustrates, I was wrong.

Monday we barbecued, and since we were going to spend some time outside, figured we might as well let the cats roam the back yard. They really like to stalk things back there, especially little defenseless insects, and they also like to pretend that they’re going to catch the occasional bird that flies by. Two days before, I’d let them out while I sat down back there to do some reading, and that time Monster (aka Shithead) found it appropriate to escape from the yard by running underneath the gate. Since our gate is padlocked, I had to run inside the house and go through the front door to go after him. Every time this has happened, he’s gone no farther than the front patio. I’m not sure why. Maybe he thinks the world ends there?

So while we were barbecueing, I was armed with a water bottle. If you make the nozzle thin, that thing will spray pretty darned far. And it confused the hell out of the cats, too, because they’re not used to being sprayed with water outside. Each time I did it (usually when Murmur was trying to eat the leaves on our daylilies), he’d jump, run about ten feet, and then look around like he was thinking, “WTF? Where did that come from?”

And then chaos struck.

A bird flew into a tree by the wall in the neighbor’s yard. The cats freaked out. And it just so happens that we have a fountain up against that wall, tall enough for the cats to climb and get up onto the wall. Each time they tried it, I aimed the squirt bottle and fired, and that stopped them…at first. But of course, eventually Monster decided he cared more about the bird than he did about getting wet (he’s never been as disgusted with getting wet as Murmur).

He climbed that fountain in 1.5 seconds, and then he was on the wall.

I jumped out of my chair and started to run toward him, but I’d taken only two steps when…

…the neighbor’s dog spotted Shithead on the wall.

This dog is a big black Lab. He’s aggressive. He fired off a volley of deep, big-mean-dog barks, and he must have charged at the wall, because all of a sudden Monster decided he didn’t like being on the wall so much! Fancy that!

Monster jumped down from the wall (via the fountain), shot past me, and ran around the corner. I ran after him and went around the corner just in time to see him slip under the gate. AGAIN.

So it was like deja vu. I had to run inside the house to the front door. Unlock it. Open it. And there he was.

There was one difference, though.

Instead of me having to go outside and pick him up and carry him inside, this time he was more than happy to come inside all on his own. Fancy that!

He spent the rest of the evening sitting on the back yard patio, glaring at that wall. I think this was the first time he learned that there are scary things out there, things that are bigger than him and can kick his pathetic little ass.

I don’t know that I’ve laughed so hard my entire life.

April 25th, 2008 - Posted in contemporary romance | | 1 Comments

Wits, Wenchers and Wantons — London’s Low Life: Covent Garden in the Eighteenth Century by E.J. Burford

You can view this book’s Amazon detail page here.

Tags: history, non-fiction, research books

Started reading:: 29th March 2008
Finished reading:: 17th April 2008

My Comments

Again, this is more of a general history of Covent Garden and has very little stuff useful to me (e.g. details of daily life) at this point. Learned very little I didn’t know already, but since I’ve already read a bunch of books on the topic, it’s not really fair to judge it on that.

What it is good for is more of a breakdown of the different areas of the Garden, the buildings that were there and when, etc. There are also a lot more illustrations than in the previous books I’ve read. Since I borrowed this from the UNLV library, I’ll have to comb through it again to decide which parts I want to make photocopies of.

I still think that Burford’s style is pretty unengaging (compared to Rubenhold and Linnane), so it was probably harder to slog through this than it could have been.

(Side note: Don’t you love how the title of this book has an em-dash AND a colon? All that’s missing is a semi-colon…)

April 17th, 2008 - Posted in non-fiction/research | | 0 Comments

How to propose…and how not to

Programmer pops question on girlfriend’s video game [Yahoo]

This has the added bonus of letting her know just how big of a geek she’d be marrying, just in case she wasn’t entirely sure. And her man’s obviously smart. As opposed to this guy:

Engagement ring ends up gone with the wind [Reuters]

The best part is that the girlfriend is demanding a new ring. I think she should just forget about it and find a someone who’s not such a complete dumbass.

April 15th, 2008 - Posted in shits & giggles | | 0 Comments

Got time to waste?

Are you a geography whiz?

Map Games

Don’t click unless you are prepared to get hooked…

I did terribly on the US map–apparently I have no clue which states are where. I even hesitated on Colorado, which is awesome, since we’re DRIVING there in June. Perhaps I shouldn’t be the navigator.

The Europe map…ugh! Eastern Europe is a clusterfuck. I did eventually manage to get 90% in less than 2 minutes, but I still guessed on a lot of the Eastern countries and got lucky. It really depends on the order they pop up. The more of the easy ones I can eliminate early, the better.

Off to try capitals!

April 13th, 2008 - Posted in shits & giggles | | 0 Comments

This is why…

…I had to childproof my cupboards for my cats. I’m not sure how they managed this, but the latch on this one is perhaps not as secure as the other ones. And Murmur does like to dig out those plastic grocery bags. Behold, the sight that welcomed me as I came downstairs this morning: