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Category: Reading

Posts in which we talk about reading habits and preferences

Conversion Kit

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Risky Regencies Blog Party! Comment on this post to get the chance to win a copy of Megan Frampton’s A Singular Lady. And don’t forget to enter the Treasure Hunt, too!

It’s a question that comes up over and over again on romance reader message boards, at booksignings, anywhere romance readers are likely to get into discussion: If you could choose just one book for a non-romance reader to read, which one would it be?

So I pose the question to you, only more specifically: If you could pick just one Regency romance to give to an interested, non-romance reading friend, which one would it be? And why?

Would it be Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen? Do you think Austen is ‘cheating’ since it’s a literary classic? Or would you dig out The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer from your keeper pile?
Perhaps you’d press a copy of Flowers From The Storm by Laura Kinsale into her hands (preferably the new un-Fabio edition). Or maybe you’d withdraw a Carla Kelly from the rare book vault, maybe Reforming Lord Ragsdale (my favorite) or Mrs. Drew Plays Her Hand, but only if your friend handed over some stocks or the deed to her house to make sure she’d return them.

Since I’m writing this, and don’t have to choose just one, I’d pick either Mary Balogh’s The Notorious Rake or Loretta Chase’s Lord of Scoundrels. Both are filled with passion, incredible, compelling characters, a believable, deep romance and page-turning drama.

So . . . what’s your pick? And why? And have you ever done it, and with what success?

Thanks for playing!

Megan
www.meganframpton.com

P.S. Don’t forget you can still comment on any of the previous posts this week to win books by other Risky Regencies. Also, be sure to enter the Treasure Hunt for the Grand Prize!

Posted in Giveaways, Reading, Regency | 21 Replies

TSTL? Or just real life?

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TSTL. Too Stupid To Live.

It’s an acronym that pops up in romance discussion-land way more than us authors would like.

Running into the dark, scary castle wearing only a nightgown? TSTL.

Forgetting to charge your cell phone before embarking on a trip with some dodgy nationalists and a rugged, dangerously handsome SEAL? TSTL.

In Regency-land, our heroines can, and do, do stupid things. Like believing a random piece of gossip told by a sketchy person rather than believing the gorgeous hunk who’s been getting her all steamed up for 100 pages. How about thinking she’s completely ugly because she’s got the wrong color hair, even though there’s a gorgeous hunk who keeps popping up from behind the potted palms at Almack’s to ogle her? And what about thinking no-one will ever love her because she’s (eek!) smart.

Well, people are stupid in real life. This is not to defend the TSTL heroine, but to admit I’ve been there.

For example, I am the most gullible person in the world. That time when someone told me “gullible” wasn’t in the dictionary? Fell for it. And later on, when I was purportedly an adult, someone convinced me that survivalists used frozen fish sticks as weapons. Yes, you read that right. Frozen fish sticks. That orange netting construction companies put on the sides of big buildings when they’re getting worked on? Another person convinced me it was to protect suicidal stockbrokers when they jumped out of buildings during stock market crashes.

So–who’s your favorite TSTL heroine, and why? What’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever done?

Thanks for sharing–

Megan

Posted in Reading, Writing | Tagged , | 14 Replies

My latest strap-hanger cliffhanger

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Since my confession last week that I’m a commuter reader, I wanted to tell you about my current sensational read on the train, The Courtesan’s Revenge by Frances Wilson, subtitled Harriette Wilson, the Woman who Blackmailed the King. And what a wild ride it is!

“Revenge writing is a female genre,” comments Wilson. “Men who have been left by women or made cuckolds by rivals either lick their wounds in humiliated silence or start the Trojan Wars.” Harriette Wilson had a grand time gleefully mocking her aristocratic lovers in her infamous Memoirs, published in installments to an enthralled public. Full of inaccuracies, but equally full of life, the Memoirs are the best in creative non-fiction. But her voice is true, impudent, and devastating. Here’s an encounter with the Duke of Wellington (in whom she later inspired the comment “Publish and be damned”):

Wellington called on me, the next morning before I had finished breakfast. I tried him on every subject I could muster. On all, he was inpenetrably taciturn. At last he started an original idea of his own…
“I wonder you do not get married, Harriette.”
(Bye-the-bye, ignorant people are always wondering.)
“Why so?”
Wellington, however, gives no reason for anything unconnected with fighting, at least since the convention of Cintra; and he therefore again became silent. Another burst of attic sentiment burst forth.
“I was thinking of you last night, after I got into bed.”
“How very polite to the Duchess,” I observed.

On another gentleman …[he] had long been our family’s friend, equally at hand to congratulate us on our marriages, our simple fornications, our birthdays, or our unexpected deaths…

As a courtesan she occupied a unique position in society–because she was fashionable, both the respectable and the dissolute were drawn to her. One of my favorite excerpts in the book is an account of a journey she took (to chase down her current protector and the money he owed her) in the company of a friend’s maiden aunt with the family’s full blessing and some emergency updating of the lady’s twenty-five year old wardrobe.

“I am old enough and thank God I am no beauty,” Aunt Martha declared, “and I may do what I please with my little fortune. I have never been ten miles from my native place and I want to see the world!”

Now that’s a mind-boggling thought–Mary Crawford on a road trip with Miss Bates. One of those things you’d never get away with in fiction…

Posted in Reading, Regency, Research | Tagged , , , | 8 Replies

End of an era?

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Well, it’s sort of official…after much hearsay, speculation, whispers and the presence of a huge elephant in the drawing room, NAL editor Laura Cifelli makes this statement on the future of the Signet Regency line in the February edition of Romantic Times:

“The market was no longer sustaining two to three books a month. But we love the program and we believe in our authors, so we are planning on publishing Signet Regency special event titles and reissues in the future.”

Thoughts, reactions, anyone? And maybe this is a good time to talk about our future plans?

Janet

Posted in Reading, Regency | Tagged | 10 Replies

What I Have Been Reading….

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Interesting topic this week, and not an easy one. I can’t
do a favorite reads list for the year, since all of my reading has been done in the last three months or so after recovering from my last deadline. At the moment I’m reading for “research” purposes, mainly to sink myself into the Regency Historical and Romantic suspense genres. My current project is a humorous suspense, but I do plan on writing a Regency historical in the future.

I thought I’d go ahead and comment on the books I’ve read anyway. Since some of these books were published prior to this year, I’m “cheating” there, too.

SO WILD A HEART by Candace Camp. A 2002 book from my TBR Mountain. It contains a mystery with a surprising twist–and I think I am hard to surprise! The characters were interesting, too. Worth the read.

MISS WONDERFUL by Loretta Chase, 2004. Loretta Chase is a star in the genre, so there was no way to go wrong with this choice. This is a humorous book with excellently written characters–not only the hero and heroine, but the heroine’s father. If you want to see characters who come alive, read this book. (MR IMPOSSIBLE is in my TBR pile).

THE PAID COMPANION by Amanda Quick. Generally, I am a fan of Jane Anne Krentz’s contemporaries and have not read many of her historicals, but they are popular, and I thought it best that I read her newest in paperback. Well, I enjoyed THE PAID COMPANION–I think it was due to the inclusion of the topic of the lost rivers of London. I’m glad I read this one, and I think I will treat myself to more.


Shifting gears…I started catching up on my Janet
Evanovich, whose Stephanie Plum series I dearly love. I have just finished THREE TO GET DEADLY and FOUR TO SCORE. They were both almost too much fun!

Currently I am reading…two books, actually. One is MERELY MARRIED, a 1998 Regency historical by Patricia Coughlin, and the other is THERE’S ALWAYS PLAN B by Susan Mallery. Both promise to be enjoyable. THERE’S ALWAYS PLAN B is one of the new Harlequin NEXT novels written for the middle aged and older reader. It’s a “starting over” book with a fortyish heroine, her teenage daughter and the heroine’s mother. It seemed a propos for me to read, since I am “starting over” myself, so to speak…

I have just purchased THE PRICE OF INDISCRETION by Cathy Maxwell…will read this one soon.

So…there is my fiction list, albeit limited….
Laurie

Posted in Reading | 5 Replies