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.

Do you read more than one book at one time?

Suggested by Janet:

I’ve seen this quotation in several places lately. It’s from Sven Birkerts’ ‘The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age’:

“To read, when one does so of one’s own free will, is to make a volitional statement, to cast a vote; it is to posit an elsewhere and set off toward it. And like any traveling, reading is at once a movement and a comment of sorts about the place one has left. To open a book voluntarily is at some level to remark the insufficiency either of one’s life or one’s orientation toward it.”

To what extent does this describe you?

Well, that’s certainly an impressive quote to start a conversation off with, isn’t it?

I’m almost sad to say this, but this quote fits me quite well if we can combine reading stories and writing them…

Back when I was in the States, I didn’t have a very happy existence. Oh, there were plenty of good times, but the darker demons were still there. I told stories before I knew how to write and wrote many more once I did learn to write. When I wasn’t writing, my nose was stuck in a book.

If you didn’t see me with a book or a notebook, you could know that I had gotten yet another lecture about how my family viewed me as strange/antisocial for always having a book or a notebook with me.

When I moved to Australia, I adopted a new life. A wonderful life. I still had to get past the demons and whatnot, but I finally felt safe, in control of my life and loved unconditionally. I felt love like I’d never felt before, and I felt happy.

Reading books and writing them dropped off considerably.

Whether moving and my reading/writing dropping off are actually related, I don’t know. I just know that it happened to me.

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:

Cat

I Say: The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Suess

You Say…