Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

1. Grab your current read.
2. Open to a random page.
3. Share two (or three or four, if you’re me) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page.
4. BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
5. Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Mr. L. Prosser was, as they say, only human. In other words he was a carbon-based bipedal life form descended from an ape.

I know things have been very quiet around here lately. I apologize for that. Life for me lately has been a little hard. But! We’ve had some great news.

The husband and I are finally moving! By a bunch of random ‘coincidences’, friends of ours had a place coming up for rent, and the husband and I got in just in time! The current tenant (a royalties officer with a publishing company!) is officially ending her lease on April 5th, so we’re in a bit of a rush to pack everything and sell what we don’t want to move with.

(If you’re in the Melbourne area, we have a hardwood table up for sale, a portable air conditioner, duffel bags, a computer bag, etc.)

Not only that, I have been making plans to take DownUnderViews.com and DownUnderViews.com/blog and put them together under the single .com. When I started this place, I thought having the separate blog was a good idea, but I’m now regretting my decision. So please bookmark the .com because I’ll be making the transition as soon as my weblovely mistress is able to build my new site!

To celebrate the transition, I’ll be adding books to the giveaway shelf and probably running some sort of giveaway as well.

A lot of good things coming up!

How do you feel about illustrations in your books? Graphs? Photos? Sketches?

Most of the books I read these days are traditional adult books – aka books with no illustrations. But I like illustrations – especially when I don’t expect them in the books I’m reading.

I’m just as reliant on my imagination as the next person, so I don’t feel a lack when I’m reading something with no pictures, but I do consider it a sort of extension into the author’s brain when there are illustrations. It’s almost like valuing someone else’s opinions on an art piece you like while also having your own opinion; I don’t let the pictures change what’s in my head if I prefer not to.

Welcome to this week’s By Any Other Name book game!

We didn’t quite get to the goal number of titles last week, so the goal stays the same…

If you’re new to the challenge, this is a game from my dear friend Calliope that gets us to play with book titles.

The game works like this:

1. Each week I will choose and a book title that features that word.
2. Then it’s your turn to come up with book titles containing the same word, without duplication (yes, that includes my titles). The author would be nice, too, in case I want to check it out.
3. If you make it to the challenge number of titles (make sure you read the challenge section each week because it can change), then I will draw one name from all the participants and that person wins their choice of one book from my giveaway shelf!

It’s really not complicated. I pick a word and you list titles with that word. Easy peasy.

The current challenge:

Titles to Reach: Nineteen
Titles Per Person: Two

What can you win? The winner receives any one of the books on this page along with a bookmark (or two!).

I’ve decided this is a much better way of doing things rather than offering the SAME book over and over. Plus, I will be adding to the giveaway shelf as much as I can, so keep checking in to see what’s on offer.

So if you’d like a chance to win, join in!

If you don’t reach the goal, we’ll try again next week. If you reach the goal, I’ll have a brand new challenge for you next Wednesday where you’ll get another chance to win a book – regardless if you have won a book previously!

The word this week is:

Day

I Say: All In A Day by Cynthia Rylant and Nikki McClure

You Say…

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

1. Grab your current read.
2. Open to a random page.
3. Share two (or three or four, if you’re me) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page.
4. BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
5. Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson

“Now we come to the real reason I want to hire you. I want you to find out who in the family murdered Harriet, and who since then has spent almost forty years trying to drive me insane.”

…otherwise known as 9997 Novels I Haven’t Read.

I saw this post on Mad Bibliophile a little while ago and became curious. I usually don’t pay attention to those ‘must read’ lists because I haven’t read many classics and, frankly, I don’t intend to. Great Expectations may be a great literary work, but I’m not seeking it out.

Big whoop, right? Who cares what I choose to read?

Well, I saw that post and thought that, out of 1000 book, I had to have read some.

Wrong. Make that a few.

Out of that big ol’ list, I have read a total of three books:

Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone
Wuthering Heights
Flowers for Algernon

Yeah, I know. It’s not the most thrilling list, is it. However, I would like to point out that there are a couple I didn’t add in because they put ‘the x series‘ whereas I had only read one. And, though tempting, I didn’t include all of the ones where I had seen the movie and not read the book.

To be honest, I still don’t care about those ‘must read’ lists; this one just gave me a bigger laugh than they usually do because of all the books I haven’t read.

If you have or do go through this list and post about it, let me know! Or let me know how you feel about these sort of lists in general.

About the Book

The combination of food and sex is by far not a unique or new concept in the world of sexual bliss. The book Erotica Café, however, is.

A distinctive collection of fun, sexual recipes and interesting sexual facts regarding the link between food and sex.

We have included a fun “Kiss” scale from one to ten, rating each recipe. The rating formula was based on fun, passion and pleasure.

The Long Story

Recently I decided that I should spice up my reading list a little bit by adding something fun. Described as a sensual recipe book with humor and fun facts as well, Erotica Café, appeared to be the perfect book for me to read next.

Lo and behold, I was wrong.

I probably should have figured out by the first page with the weirdly alternating fonts and lack of chapters or other organization, but I kept on.

While many of the recipes sounded tasty and easy to make, I didn’t get to read them all. I kept getting distracted because along with no chapters, there are also often no page breaks. This book’s arrangement is like someone’s scrapbook – all kinds of interesting pieces with no organization. Let me amend that – I have seen plenty of scrapbooks more reader/viewer friendly and organized than this book.

Erotica Café, appears to be a book that its creators didn’t take seriously enough to set up in a reader-friendly manner, so I don’t think it’s any surprise that I don’t take it seriously either. I would have been immensely better if the creators had just taken some time to format it properly.

But that is a far off dream, as the publisher – Rain Publishing – no longer exists.

The Short Story

I don’t recommend this book for anything other than a brief browse through. If you’re looking for seductive recipes and/or erotic lore, there are plenty of better books out there that will do the job quite nicely.

***
Rating: 0 stars

[What do the ratings mean?]
***
Erotica Café
Tilly Rivers
http://www.authorsden.com/visit/author.asp?id=51701
ISBN: 978-0978125776
Length: 189 Pages

In honor of National Grammar Day … it IS “March Fourth” after all … do you have any grammar books? Punctuation? Writing guidelines? Style books?

More importantly, have you read them?

How do you feel about grammar in general? Important? Vital? Unnecessary? Fussy?

If you know me (know I’m a writer), then you won’t be surprised to hear that I have the Strunk and White Elements of Style. I have heaps of other books on writing, etc, but Elements of Style is my only one that focuses specifically on the technical side of writing.

I haven’t read Elements of Style through like a regular book, no. I have used it more like a reference book, picking and choosing when I need.

And this is where I get into a rant…

Especially in this day and age, I feel that grammar (spelling, etc) is very important! I am absolutely disgusted by some of the articles and books that are out today and touted as actual good writing.

Bull! That’s what I say.

I’m not perfect by any means, but it’s not like there is some shortage of editors out there. Heck, these days they can customize down to whether they edit your grammar and punctuation, overall story critique, so on and so forth. I’m a freelance editor with few credits; hire me if you are on a budget!

I have seen words misspelled on restaurant menus, heard radio announcers say things so wrong that they have sent me into fits of giggles, articles that have no point I can decipher in their confusing run-on sentences and self-published books that had so many errors (not to mention plot holes) that my husband had to stop me from sending it back to the author full of red marks.

I don’t know if it is because we just take so little pride in our work these days or if the ‘instant gratification’ society we live in that is causing all this, but I find it amusing – more often annoying.

Welcome to this week’s By Any Other Name book game!

We didn’t quite get to the goal number of titles last week, so the goal stays the same…

If you’re new to the challenge, this is a game from my dear friend Calliope that gets us to play with book titles.

The game works like this:

1. Each week I will choose and a book title that features that word.
2. Then it’s your turn to come up with book titles containing the same word, without duplication (yes, that includes my titles). The author would be nice, too, in case I want to check it out.
3. If you make it to the challenge number of titles (make sure you read the challenge section each week because it can change), then I will draw one name from all the participants and that person wins their choice of one book from my giveaway shelf!

It’s really not complicated. I pick a word and you list titles with that word. Easy peasy.

The current challenge:

Titles to Reach: Nineteen
Titles Per Person: Two

What can you win? The winner receives any one of the books on this page along with a bookmark (or two!).

I’ve decided this is a much better way of doing things rather than offering the SAME book over and over. Plus, I will be adding to the giveaway shelf as much as I can, so keep checking in to see what’s on offer.

So if you’d like a chance to win, join in!

If you don’t reach the goal, we’ll try again next week. If you reach the goal, I’ll have a brand new challenge for you next Wednesday where you’ll get another chance to win a book – regardless if you have won a book previously!

The word this week is:

Spring

I Say: It’s Spring by Linda Glaser

You Say…

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

1. Grab your current read.
2. Open to a random page.
3. Share two (or three or four, if you’re me) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page.
4. BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
5. Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Gringa in a Strange Land by Linda Dahl

Sitting on the floor of the thatched hut of the Mayan village deep in the state of Yucatan, and understanding imperfectly the translation into Spanish that Alonso is whispering into her ear, Erica Mason thinks: I’m the only American woman in the entire world doing this right now.