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Monthly Archives: May 2008

Reading Habits

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In Megan’s recent post on To Have and to Hold she talked about needing to have just the right bookmark before starting a book. It got me thinking about reading habits.

I am afraid my children and I are not fussy at all about bookmarks. In fact, all of us are so eager to dive into a good book we forget to provide ourselves with one. In my kids’ books I’ve found “bookmarks” including facial tissue (unused, thankfully!), doll clothing, hair ties. I’m not much better. If I can’t find an appointment reminder postcard, I just search all of our current books. Yesterday I thought I lost the case for my reading glasses; later I found it stuck in a book. The silly thing is that I have so many nice bookmarks: beaded and bejeweled ones I’ve gotten as gifts, author bookmarks I’ve gotten at conference booksignings. Every once in a while I make an effort to remember to use them…

In our household, the bathroom is a favorite reading location. Where else can you be truly alone? My oldest stayed in the bathroom over 45 minutes after bringing home the first Harry Potter. We finally had to send a search party… I also like to read in the kitchen, if I’m eating a meal by myself (we’ve got a rule about trying to be sociable at meals) or if I’m waiting for water to boil. I’ve come close to ruining dinner a few times but the good thing is my kids would understand and forgive me!

Sometimes on the weekends when I’m sick of the honey-do list, I will actually sit down, either on the couch in our family room or (now that the weather’s nice) on our closed porch, and just read for an hour or two. Heaven!

I can read any number of non-fiction books at a time but I can only read one novel. I can’t read romance at all while I’m actively writing. It’s not because I worry that someone else’s voice will infect mine. (I’ve never caught myself writing like someone else–I’d have to work really hard to do that, I think.) It’s really because when I’m reading or writing romance, I like to identify with the heroine and fall in love with the hero. I just can’t do that with two couples at once! So I read romance in between drafts.

I used to finish every book I started. If I didn’t like the beginning, I always hoped (for my sake and the author’s) that it would get better. I’ve finally realized that it hardly ever does. I don’t mind if the plot develops slowly but the characters must interest me. If not, I don’t bother finishing. Life is too short and my TBR list is too long!

So how about you? Do you have any reading quirks? What are your favorite places and times to read? Can you read multiple books at once? Do you always finish? Do share!

Elena

http://www.elenagreene.com/

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Regency Cats

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I have been talking about getting a cat for a while now… Probably a little kitten, who will be a perfect angel and never miss the litter box, and who’ll do the dishes without being reminded and all that other perfect kitten stuff.

And after saying “we should really get a kitten soon” for quite a while, we finally have a date: next weekend.

As it has been several years now, we are surely over the death of our last perfect kitty. He, too, never missed the litter box, could play the complete works of Shakespeare on the piano, and would have done the dishes without a reminder had he only possessed thumbs and the ability to understand English.

(And just to prove how unbiased I am, I will now reveal the fact that one of my sainted cat’s previous housemates referred to him as S.O.S., short for “Spawn of Satan.” Just another example of how not everyone loves Shakespeare.)

With all this cat cogitation going on, I’ve been thinking about cats during the Regency.

Because they certainly had cats. They even had spoiled little pet cats, like my perfect kitten will be. (Though I suspect that Regency kittens played Mrs. Radcliffe on their pianofortes, and helped with painting fire screens.)

There have been plenty of kittens in Regencies — particularly Regency novellas, which (if you think about it) are already kitten-sized. But I’ve done little actual research into the lives of perfect Regency cats.

And I’ve always wondered what they did for litter-boxes. With no clumping litter, did they bother? Did they just make the cat go outside?

Does anyone know?

(By the way, I just thought I should mention that my sainted ex-kitty always refused to play that “thrice the brindled cat hath mewed” part on the piano. I think he didn’t understand that brindled merely meant tabby — which he was, complete with the “M” on his forehead which stood for Multitudes of Mischief — but instead thought that brindled was some sort of slur against cats, perhaps one meaning “refuses to do the dishes until he’s allowed to finish off all the ice cream.”)

Oh, and if you have any cat information, either Regency or nowadays, please share!

All comments welcome!

And be sure to stop by next Tuesday, when we will be discussing the movie Clueless!

Cara
Cara King, who can only play Cymbeline on the kazoo

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Bookshelves

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Diane Report:

Number of pages written since past rant of two weeks ago: I have no idea
Daily average: I have no idea
Daily goal: totally not met
Number of pages to go: 139
New Daily Goal: 20 pages
New Deadline: June 16 (I broke down and asked for 2 more weeks)

Megan’s talk of organizing bookshelves got me to wishing for time to organize mine. I’m still in crazy mode of writing (see above) which automatically increases my desire to organize my bookshelves. I believe the urge will pass as soon as the book is turned in.

Speaking of bookshelves, I was in my local Borders Express recently and again got burned up. They shelve the Romance novels against the side wall, floor to ceiling. This makes it impossible for a woman of average height (me) to reach or even see the top shelves, and nearly as difficult to reach what is on the bottom. There is a stool nearby to climb on to reach the top shelf but even I am wary of falling. It is far easier to confine my search to books within easy reach.

This means, of course, that authors such as Gaelen Foley and Elizabeth Hoyt were unreachable and thus were less likely to sell.

When I first encountered this new shelving, the cashiers told me it was a corporate decision. Whoever made the decision certainly did not think it through that it was possibly not a good idea to make the best-selling genre hard to reach, especially when women are the most likely purchasers and most likely to be too short to reach the top shelves. “You can ask a cashier to help,” I was told, but when was the last time you saw cashiers wandering around the bookstore waiting to climb up on a stool for you? And would you be likely to ask them to browse the shelves for you? What’s more, some romance readers like to browse with a little more privacy, not out in plain view so everyone in the store can see you are looking at books with “man-titty” covers (as Janet would call them).

I can see it all now…the stores will sell fewer romance novels and will thereby convince the corporate decision-makers that romance novels are not selling as well as they used to. Then they will decrease the shelf space for romance novels and order fewer of them, thereby making the sales go down even more.

When I first saw this I asked the cashiers for a phone number to call to complain. They gave me a corporate number, they said, but it was a wrong phone number. This time I didn’t bother to ask because the unhappy-looking cashier who waited on me had been reading “Resumes for Dummies” and I supposed he didn’t want to hear me rant about romance novels.

Has anyone else encountered shelving like this? What do you think is most conducive to selling romance novels?
And (totally self-serving question) does shelving Harlequin Historicals in with the other Harlequin series books make it easier to find them or more difficult?

On this Memorial Day take a moment from your fun and remember all soldiers who dedicated their lives to their country — like my father!)

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To Have And To Hold

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Okay, so I freely admit to being a little compulsive when it comes to certain things: I won’t start reading a book unless I have a bookmark in hand. And it can’t be just any bookmark; the bookmark has to suit the book, using my own idiosyncratic categorization system (IOW, mystery bookmarks do not get put with mysteries; it’s far more complicated than that).

So I know it’s a little nutty to be so obsessive about the way the books are organized, but I am, and they are. I spent some time a few weeks ago getting *my* books in order. My father-in-law, a former contractor, built me a bookshelf specially for my paperbacks, and he accommodated my heinous habit of double-stacking. I had thrown the books in there when I first got the shelf, and only now have gotten to organize it the way I wanted to.

But now? Now is BLISS!

I’m posting pictures, which is really about as exciting as seeing stills of someone singing, but IT’S WHAT I’M BLOGGING ABOUT, PEOPLE! Which might say something about how exciting this topic is also, but I digress.

So I organized these pbs not alphabetically, but in a more Frampton-specific fashion: Friends (Myretta Robens, Carolyn Jewel, Tracy MacNish, Meljean Brook, Colleen Gleason) are at eye-level with Loretta Chase (an annual dinner friend) and Eloisa James (a ‘gave me a blurb, says hi at conferences’ friend). The Riskies‘ books are, of course, mixed in there also but that darn Jane Lockwood had to come out in trade pb, which screwed me up a little. I know there are more friends up there, but that is off the top of my head. As everything is.

Anne Stuart‘s books are both back and front because I think I must have about sixty of them, and I am KEEPING them ALL!

Books I want to read are in front, keepers are in the back. Collections are always together–Lee Child, Bernard Cornwell, Mary Balogh–regardless of whether I’ve read them all or just some.

And the reward? Every time I look at my bookcase, it feels like a little piece of zen is unleashed in my heart. I cannot overstate just how delightful and amazing it is to have space for the books, and that they are put away just the way I like them (the last pic is of non-romance, since I have a sizeable noir bleeding into gritty mystery collection, too).

Do you organize your books? How do you do it? Do you think about it a lot, or just have “R” and “TBR” piles?

Megan

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A bit of everything

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First off, some news. The Rules of Gentility won the 2008 HOLT Award for Best Romantic Comedy, woohoo! I have a lovely silver wotsit that I think would look cool on the xmas tree.

Next is that I have sold a novella for an anthology tentatively titled Bespelling Jane, paranormal takes on Jane Austen, with the following Big Girls: Mary Balogh, Susan Krinard, and Colleen Gleason! All I know at the moment is that it will be published by Harlequin sometime in the future, and mine is a contemporary take on Emma. Since I haven’t written it yet, I can’t tell you a whole lot more…

Here are some pics of my visit to England a couple of weeks ago, me with my brother Martin, my nephew Tom and his lovely girlfriend Sam, at a pub overlooking the Avon Gorge and Brunel’s famous Clifton suspension bridge.

And I wondered what everyone was reading these days. I’ve just read two superb books. Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin is about a female forensic doctor, set in twelfth century England. Yes, it sounds unlikely but it’s so well done I had very few come on! moments. (Sorry, I still don’t believe that there was a Body Farm in Sicily using pig carcasses when most of the doctors were Jewish.) It’s beautifully written, and the dialogue is amazing–the characters don’t speak in pseudo-medieval talk, but Franklin captures both a believable local dialect and the speech of churchmen and crusaders.

The other one is Saturday by Ian McEwan (who wrote Atonement), about one day–on the eve of the Iraq invasion–in the life of a surgeon and his family. His son is a blues musician and his daughter Daisy a poet, and I liked this passage, which defines the achievement of this wonderful book:

But is there a lifetime’s satisfaction in twelve bars of three obvious chords? Perhaps it’s one of those cases of a microcosm giving you the whole world. Like a Spode dinner plate. Or a single cell. Or, as Daisy says, like a Jane Austen novel.

What have you read and enjoyed recently?

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