all books all the time

The Taste of Sweet: Our Complicated Love Affair with Our Favorite Treats - Joanne Chen. ( Read more... )

Where the Blind Horse Sings: Love and Healing at an Animal Sanctuary - Kathy Stevens. ( Read more... )

Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships - Tristan Taormino. ( Read more... )

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity - David Allen. ( Read more... )

The Eternal Rose - Gail Dayton. I read the first two books in this trilogy for the pr0n-o-riffic polyamorous bits: Orgasmic multipersoned sex magic! Multiple partners & parents as the norm! It made the painfully awkward names & terminology, & cheesy plot, & sometimes just awful writing bearable.

This book really took the cake, tho', & brought out everything I feared Dayton would do in the earlier books regarding Daryath, the homeland of one of the main characters. Kallista, leader of the Adarans (the people w/polyamorousness being the norm), must bring her ilian (her family) to Daryath on a state visit.

In Daryath, polyamory is seen as perverted; marriage must be between only one man & one woman. There are religious fundamentalists in charge of everything. They have trial-by-combat. The few Daryathi magicians are kept w/in the state temple & their magic can't be used to help the people. It turns out that the Daryathi are secretly keeping Adaran slaves & breeding them in order to try to get their own magicians. Oh, yeah, & it also happens that the reason behind all this is that the Daryathi people are being controlled by demons. But no worries, Kallista & her folks purge the demons & show the Daryathi the errors of their ways.

Did I mention that Our Heroes, the Adarans, are white, & that the Daryathi have dark skin & clumsy faux-Arabic names? Why is this stuff still being done in 2007? (And why did Juno publish it???)

Oh, & at one point, the Adarans must take a Daryathi into their household, & give him a name. Someone says that they have named him Night, "because he's dark." AUGH.

There are also a couple of dodgy sex moments (You're basically unconscious b/c of grief over someone's death? Let's rape you into bringing your mind back into us! And you're not wanting to bond sexually w/the new member of the ilian? Let's force you into it... until you get all turned on by it!).

No Quarter - Tanya Huff. The sequel to Fifth Quarter, which I also read recently. More angst! Less smut, alas. But everyone is still seemingly bisexual & polyamorous, which makes for a satisfying read on that note, at least. I still don't really get the whole Vree/Gyhard thing, but this book was worth a Sunday afternoon read, anyway.

Dead Until Dark - Charlaine Harris. I adore Harris' Southern Vampire books, of which this is the first. I found it just as charming & funny & fun as the first time I read it. I love Harris' sense of humor, & I love that she presents working-class characters that are real, interesting, & likeable--without being smarmed up like, say, Charles DeLint would do. I think these are the vampire books for folks who think they don't like reading about vampires, & the romances for people who think they don't like romances. Or... at least, the romances for people who read fantasy but think they don't like romances, I guess.

Here's a brief plot summary: Sookie Stackhouse is a barmaid in small-town Louisiana. She doesn't really have much of a social life, never mind a sex life, because she's telepathic & most folks know it (even if they won't admit it), which makes things a bit awkward, especially when you're trying to get it on w/someone. Then Bill Compton, vampire, strolls into town. Sookie can't read his mind, which is a blessed relief to her. But of course having a vampire boyfriend brings all kinds of complications, blah blah blah.

Living Dead in Dallas - Charlaine Harris. The second Southern Vampire book. Still intensely great, but unsettling too. The Fellowship of the Sun is a creepy cult church dedicated to violently eradicating vampires; they make their series debut here in a suitably creepy plot about a missing vampire in Dallas. I love Sookie's nerve, & willingness to stand up for herself. Also: more shapeshifters in this one! And more Eric! Even though this book is, I think, the one I like least in the series (in part because it's unsettling), these books have quickly grown to be real comfort books for me. Sookie is such a good person--in the way that you don't see enough these days--that I love reading about her, & I love reading about her slightly wide-eyed forays into sex & discovering supernaturals. And I love that all this comes w/a dollop of odd humor that really does have me laughing out loud (which doesn't happen all that much w/books).