“. . . and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.” ~ James Joyce, Ulysses
Joyce set Ulysses on June 16, 1904, and Bloomsday is a day-long celebration of the author and his work. Ah, to be in Dublin on Bloomsday!
And the winners of Janet Elizabeth Henderson’s Lingerie Wars are Lori, Kaye, and Kirsten! Woohoo! Congratulations, you three. Janet will send you your Smashwords coupons soon!
Englishman Lake Benson loaned his life savings to his dippy sister so that she could buy a shop. It was a big mistake. His sister has been steadily flushing his money down the drain – and now he wants it back. Years in the special forces taught Lake that if you want a job done, do it yourself. So he steps in to make the shop profitable, sell it and get his money back. The only problem is, the business is an underwear shop. And all Lake knows about underwear can be summed up in how fast he can unsnap a bra. To make matters worse, the tiny highland town already has a lingerie shop. A successful one, run by an ex-lingerie model. A very gorgeous ex-lingerie model, who’s distracting him from his mission more than he’d like to admit. If Lake wants to get his savings back, and get out of Scotland, he only has one option – wipe out the competition.
Kirsty Campbell has spent years rebuilding her life after she woke up in hospital in Spain to find her body scarred, and her ex-fiancé had run off with all her money. The last thing she needs is a cocky, English soldier-boy trying to ruin all she has left. Her home town is only too happy to help her fight the latest English invasion, although Lake is beginning to sway them with his sex appeal and cut price knickers. With the help of her mother, and the retired ladies of Knit or Die, Kirsty sets about making sure that her shop is the last one standing in Invertary.
It’s Scotland versus England as you’ve never seen it before. It’s lingerie war.
Bess here. If you’re like me and you think Scotland is the most perfect place on the planet, and kilts and Scottish accents should be mandatory, you already want this book. If, however, you are not as enlightened (or Scots mad) as I am, let me give you a few more reasons why you should buy this book: 1) It’s funny (Janet Elizabeth Henderson does funny very, very well); 2) It’s romantic and sexy (and no, the characters don’t hop into bed on the first page- for me, that’s a win); 3) Lake and Kirsty are people you wouldn’t mind being friends with; 4) This book has two romances for the price of one (and that’s just good economic sense, isn’t it?).
Lingerie Wars will be available in all e-book formats, and paperback, on the 14th June 2013. To download a sample of the book, visit https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/319503
Janet is currently running a competition to win one of 5 paperback copies of Lingerie Wars on Goodreads. Click on the link to enter: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17729315-lingerie-wars
She is also bribing people to sign up for her newsletter. She’s offering a chance to win an autographed copy of the book, plus a handmade handbag by Scottish designer Irene Wadsworth – who designed the clothes on the cover of Lingerie Wars. Go to Janet’s website to enter: http://www.janetelizabethhenderson.com
Janet’s also giving away a few copies of her book right here on GroggSpot! Comment for your chance to win and don’t forget to leave your email address and specify which e-book format you prefer.
Here it is, Bess’s June review (part of the Austenprose Pride & Prejudice Bicentenary Challenge):
Mr. Darcy’s Obsession -Abigail Reynolds
If you’re not already in love with Mr. Darcy, you will be by the time you finish this book.* Darcy’s still proud and uncommunicative, but Reynolds does a great job of showing us what’s in Darcy’s heart and how strongly Lizzie affects him.
I won’t spoil the fun, but here are a few things I enjoyed about this book:
Verdict: Awesome! I’ll be reading more books by this author very soon.
*If you’re not in love with Mr. Darcy, there is probably something very seriously wrong with you. I’m not a doctor, but if I were I would recommend reading this book or watching P&P 1995 (with Colin Firth). Do it now. You’ll feel better, I promise.
Remember complimentary matchbooks? And matchbook collections? Any restaurant you went to gave away books of matches with covers advertising the restaurant. People would collect them as useful mementos of dinners, travels, dates, anniversaries…whatever memorable occasion involved a restaurant.
I never collected matchbooks. For me, places were marked by the bookstores I visited, and what I collected was bookmarks. Clerks in the bookstores would stick them in the books you bought, and the bookmarks ran the gamut from fancy to funny to quotable, all while including the name of the store and other information. They functioned as an enlarged business card for the bookstore, and a tool for readers to boot.
Bookmarks are a technology that has yet to be improved upon. Easy to use, recyclable, no batteries, no breakdowns, and no upgrades necessary. Used and battered though they may become, they still perform, yet they are so simple you can make them yourself.
At some point, restaurants stopped giving away matchbooks. Free bookmarks seem to be disappearing as well. Even Amazon stopped sending them out with book orders. I know ebooks are hastening the demise of the humble bookmark, so I thought I would share some of the cool ones I’ve collected over the years.
A lot of libraries still give out bookmarks. But I’ve never found one I like better than my multilingual “I love my library” marker!
Years on the west coast left me with many bookish mementos.
Some bookmarks are really loooong, and some are wiiiide!
My favorite bookmarks were made by my nieces when I turned them loose on my rubber stamp collection. It’s refrigerator art you can use.
Humble, yes, but bookmarks are an art unto themselves. Long may they live.
Here it is, Bess’s May review (part of the Austenprose Pride & Prejudice Bicentenary Challenge):
Pride & Prejudice -(BBC/PBS 1980)
Warning: This review is not based on the entire mini-series. I only made it through one and a third episodes. That should tell you something.
What I loved:
• The textiles. Yes, really. I’m not a big clotheshorse (unless you count all the jeans that I might be able to wear again some day hanging in my closet), but the first episode had me pretty much mesmerized with the detail on the dresses. Maybe it’s the way this was filmed (pretty sure the technical name is not “like a British TV show from the 80’s”), but the fabrics and fashions really stand out here. I had a hard time concentrating on the actors because I was constantly gawking at their clothes.
• It felt very intimate (again, probably because of the way it was filmed).
• The ladies were sewing constantly. I hate shopping for clothes, but not as much as I would hate making my own. Hats off to those who do.
• The assembly had fewer people, so you could see the dancing much better than in other versions.
• The sight of Mr. Collins darting about the Lucas’s garden just before he proposes to Charlotte. I laughed myself sick.
What I didn’t love: pretty much everything else. Sorry to get ugly, but it’s true.
• I couldn’t tell the sisters apart, and I wasn’t the only one who had trouble. One of my boys actually said, “I can’t tell who’s who, except for Mary, and that’s because she looks like a creeper.” Worse, Mr. Bingley and Mr. Collins had the same round face and the same godawful hair (honestly, I may never recover).
• Darcy: Proud, no. Robotic, yes.
• The relationship between Jane and Lizzie was pretty much non-existent.
• The complete lack of humor. The great lines are still there, but they’re in the wrong people’s mouths, and there are no raised eyebrows, no animation, no emotion whatsoever in any of the actors. There is no IRONY. How the hell is that even possible?
Verdict: Worth watching for the Mr. Collins scene mentioned above or if you’re really into the dresses. Just make sure you get it from the library.
Have you seen it? Do you agree? Disagree? Should I go back and watch the whole thing?
Buddha with Peach Iris
“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind in the present moment.” ~Buddha
“Don’t worry about the crap you wrote yesterday, don’t daydream about the best-seller you’ll write tomorrow, concentrate on what you’re writing today.” ~GroggSpot
There are writers whose work I read and reread, and Wallace Stegner is one of them. He died 20 years ago this month, so I’ve been rereading my favorites. I love the scene at the end of The Big Rock Candy Mountain, when the main character ponders the meaning of his father’s rather tawdry life.
“Perhaps that was what it meant, all of it. It was good to have been along and to have shared it. There were things he had learned that could not be taken away from him. Perhaps it took several generations to make a man, perhaps it took several combinations and re-creations of his mother’s gentleness and resilience, his father’s enormous energy and appetite for the new, a subtle blending of masculine and feminine, selfish and selfless, stubborn and yielding, before a proper man could be fashioned.” ~ Wallace Stegner, The Big Rock Candy Mountain
Living, like writing, is a process. Enjoy the ride!
No southern street cred here—in fact, it seems it’s up to the damn Yankee to defend Scarlett O’Hara. Gone With the Wind, both book and movie, have long been a guilty pleasure of mine. But thinking it through to respond to Bess’s post has made me realize there’s nothing to feel guilty about. Scarlett is a heroine before her time, and I wish more heroines were like her.
Yes, Scarlett is spoiled, vain, and selfish. But she’s 16 at the beginning of the novel, and most teens are pretty absorbed in themselves and oblivious to the needs and feelings of others. And yes, she is flawed, which means she makes some terrible mistakes. But without Scarlett’s flaws and mistakes, the story would suck.
As for ruining peoples’ lives, I have to say that it takes two. After all, Charles Hamilton let himself be stolen away from India Wilkes, and India herself decided to stay bitter about it. If she’d had half the guts Scarlett had, she would have said to hell with having to marry a cousin and found someone else. She’s a total loser.
Scarlett’s sister Suellen is a whiner who, when their fortunes change, cries and complains while Scarlett acts. Frank Kennedy chooses to dump Suellen and marry Scarlett, and he chooses to defend Scarlett’s honor. All Scarlett did was flirt with him. Can we blame her for men being easily manipulated? One thing you can say for Ashley is that he never fell for that shit. If the “human equivalent of soggy cornflakes” could resist Scarlett, why couldn’t the other guys?
And now we come to Melanie. If Scarlett had wanted Melanie dead, all she had to do is leave her in Atlanta for General Sherman to burn. But no. Scarlett has great courage—she stays with Melanie while Atlanta is under siege, delivers the baby, convinces Rhett to get her a horse and cart, and gets them the hell out of the city while Union troops are invading and burning it to the ground. And what is she at that point, 18? 19?
When Rhett abandons her in enemy territory (what a guy), Scarlett is alone, burdened with a helpless woman and a baby. Does she cry about it? No. Scarlett drags that damn horse and cart back to Tara, works her ass off feeding everyone, shoots a Union soldier dead to protect them, buries both her parents, and pretty much prostitutes herself by marrying Frank so she can save Tara and ensure her kin don’t starve.
Scarlett saved Melanie’s life, and her baby’s life, and Melanie never forgot that.
Yes, Scarlett pines for Ashley, but she has the courage to tell him she won’t bother him anymore when he finally tells her nothing will ever happen between them. Even in rags, Scarlett has pride and self-respect. She faces down carpetbaggers who want to buy Tara out from under her by throwing that handful of dirt at them and telling them that “this is as much of Tara as you’ll ever get!”
As Ashley tells her, what Scarlett loves most is Tara. Not Ashley, not Rhett, not any person. The land itself. And I love that about her. She has a single-minded purpose and goal, and it’s not just to be in love or get married or have children–even though she does all those things. It’s to save Tara. And she pursues that goal with ferocity, regardless of what society thinks of her and the price to herself.
My kind of heroine. (Cue the Tara theme from GWTW.)
