Erin O'Riordan writes smart, whimsical erotica. Her erotic romance novel trilogy, Pagan Spirits, is now available. With her husband, she also writes crime novels. Visit her home page at ko-fi.com.
While your humble blogger here is in between day jobs, I've signed up to try my hand as an Amazon affiliate. As you know, I'm a big reader and a big podcast listener, so it seems like a natural fit for me to recommend some audiobooks. These books are on sale through July 1, 2023 at midnight. These are affiliate links, so if you click through and purchase something, I may earn a small commission on your purchase. Hopefully you have some Audible credits!
First up is Confident Women: Swindlers, Grifters, and Shapeshifters of the Feminine Persuasion, nonfiction/true crime by Tori Telfer. I haven't read this one, but I read Telfer's previous book Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History, and that was fascinating.
Next is a classic: The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. This classic science fiction novel is 53% off during the sale period.
H.G. Wells by Alvin Langdon Coburn, November 2, 1905, photogravure, from the National Portrait Gallery which has explicitly released this digital image under the CC0 license. (https://npg.si.edu/object/npg_S_NPG.87.288.F)
If you're into science fiction, you may also be interested to know that Robert Heinlein'sHave Space Suit, Will Travel is also on sale.
This paranormal romance title, Crouching Tiger, Forbidden Vampire, is a book I've read, in print form, and I really enjoyed it. You can read my review here on the blog.
Scott Lewis's Mythology: Mega Collection is only available from Audible. This omnibus edition contains volumes 1-8 of Lewis's Classical Mythology Series. It includes stories from Celtic, Chinese, Egyptian, Greek, Hindu, Japanese, Mesopotamian, and Norse mythology.
Finally, if you like mythology and folklore and you also like classics, you may be interested in The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm for 41% off.
Crouching Tiger, Forbidden Vampire is the 16th book in the Love at Stake series by Kerrelyn Sparks. I'm not a regular reader of the series. In fact, I've read only one other Love at Stake novel: #5, All I Want for Christmas Is a Vampire:
All I Want for Christmas is a Vampire by Kerrelyn Sparks
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Good story, though it's part of a series and evidently I've skipped a few. Said vampire is a good-hearted, kilt-wearing, 600-year-old Scot who only drinks synthetic bottled blood (well, with one exception near the end). Santa, I will gladly take a vampire for Christmas, especially if he looks like James McAvoy.
So then I skipped ahead eleven volumes when I got the opportunity to order this free of charge through the Amazon Vine program, in exchange for a review. I liked the cute title, and I'm almost always willing to give a paranormal romance a chance, even though I couldn't remember all the specifics of the background characters.
As one might conclude from the title, this one is about a weretiger. She also happens to be a member of royal weretiger society. A Chinese native, she's about to become engaged to the weretiger prince of South Korea. But first, Jia is determined to exact revenge on the vampire who killed her parents and brother. He goes by the name of Master Han.
Jia isn't Han's only would-be assassin, though. He's also hunted by Russell, a secretive vampire who lives alone in a bat cave. Russell has to rescue Jia - an inexperienced assassin - and take her back to his cave. Slowly they begin to find themselves attracted to one another, although relationships between weretigers and vampires have never been heard of before. Chafed by her constrained life in weretiger society, Jia finds freedom with Russell.
Master Han is a dangerous enemy, but making him even more dangerous is his association with the demon Darafer. Darafer drags Jia off to hell, and then Russell needs the help of the angels to get her back.
In short, it's everything I want in a paranormal romance. The protagonists are likable people, they're both a little wounded by their tragic histories, and they fall in love in a natural, gradual way, not a love-at-first-sight fantasy way.
This is an affiliate link:
The First Bite Is the Deepest by Elisa Catrina. $2.99 from Smashwords.com
“Funny and clever and emotionally hard-hitting” "A perfectly creepy read." Elisa Catrina's debut novel begins as a quirky send-up of vampire romance, but quickly turns sinister. High schooler Stella Ortiz starts dating the mysterious new guy, but her friends are convinced he's bad news: Sebastian misses tons of school, he day-drinks something that smells like pennies, and oh yeah, he's a vampire.
Now that I've finished Gone Girl, my current reads are:
I'm about 70 pages into Great by Sara Benincasa. It's a contemporary YA retelling of The Great Gatsby with some of the characters' genders reversed; Nick and Jay are now Naomi and Jacinta. The writing style isn't super-literary, and in spots it borders on the ridiculous, but I'm still interested in how the tale proceeds. I started reading this at my cousin's birthday party for her kids the other night, when my husband and the other men were engaged in watching an incredibly stupid MTV show in the bar. (The party took place at a bowling alley my cousin had rented for the occasion.)
This is a book I got free from Amazon Vine. Another Vine pick I'm about a third of the way through:
So it's a silly PNR about a weretiger princess who finds herself attracted to a warrior vampire. So what? It's fun, and I love big cat shapeshifter stories. In my mind I'm picturing Russell, the vampire, as Christian Bale. Russell is supposed to be an American - well, Christian Bale is now a naturalized American. I think they kicked him out of the U.K. because he was born without a British Charm Unit.
In the car on my hour-long commute to the Corporate Marketing Day Job, I'm 11 of 15 discs through Dan Brown'sDeception Point. I borrowed it from the library. I've begun mentally casting the movie:
Michael Tolland - George Clooney
Corky Marlinson - Jeffrey Wright (my beloved Beetee from the Hunger Games film series)
Wailee Ming - Ken Leung
I don't have strong feelings about who should play Rachel Sexton. Any Generic White Girl will do. I can't stop thinking of Gabrielle as Halle Berry because it's written right into the text that she resembles the actress.
The book I sometimes read on my lunch hour at work is Cover Him With Darkness by Janine Ashbless. I got the paperback from Cleis Press in exchange for an honest review.
It encompasses one of my current obsessions - angel sex, although of the hetero variety in this case - and one of my deep-seated, ongoing obsessions - That Yugoslavia! Thing. It takes place in Montenegro, partially. Also, the writing is fantastically good.
You may remember Yugoslavia! from previous installments of Erin's Dream Diary:
Because my uterus refuses to play nice, like my other bodily organs do, I awoke to pain and blood. Despite, or perhaps because of, the hormonal flux going on beneath my skin, I vividly remember what I'd been dreaming before my internal Nagini decided to shed her skin:
My dad's dad was still alive. He and my Irish Granny owned a restaurant, where my parents and I both worked. I was 19 years old. My project of the morning was making a pot of soup, the base of which included the concentrated juice of pomegranates.
This lovely photo, which I found on Tumblr during an idle moment yesterday, may have been responsible for my dreaming of pomegranates.
Here I must mention that in my dream, the Earth was under the control of the Empire - the Darth Vader empire from the Star Wars series. We all know that the events of Star Wars happened a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. But maybe I was dreaming about Star Wars because I am a nerd drove through fog the other day, and when I drive through fog, I like to pretend I'm in Cloud City. Yeah, I grew up in the '80s.
The time of year is late April/early May - the time of Beltane - in my dream. I kept thinking I wanted to ride my bike into the woods to make my prayers and sacrifices to the God and Goddess. But I had to wait to go to the temple of the woods, because a storm trooper came into the restaurant.
Eve Rinaldi via Wikimedia Commons
FYI, the reference to Beltane might have come about because I've reblogged a few Howl's Moving Castle posts on Tumblr in the past few days. I love Howl and Sophie as a couple, and as you may recall, they met on Beltane/May Day. It's their anniversary. Yesterday was my maternal grandparents' wedding anniversary, although both are deceased, and they had gotten married on the same day as my grandfather's parents.
My mother's father's parents on their wedding day, circa 1915. That day was a January 24th.
But I digress. The storm trooper came in, and I felt very threatened and intimidated by his presence. I considered the fact that he might kill me and my family. But he took off his helmet, and he was a regular guy. He looked just like Ben Affleck.
I told you I would get attached to Nick Dunne.
So the storm trooper, whose name I must have known in the dream but cannot now remember - we'll just call him Ben - flirted with me. I let him come upstairs to my bedroom, to the family living quarters above the restaurant. Somehow I managed to sneak him past my parents and grandparents, even though all four of them were there.
We kissed. I took my clothes off. He took off his uniform. We had sex. For me, it was the first time.
Currently obsessed with the song "First Time" by Ghost Beach, an indie rock band named after a Goosebumps book
Several weeks later, when I realized my period was late, I knew I was pregnant. I surreptitiously bought a pregnancy test and sneaked off to the woods, to the very place where I would have made my obeisance to the God and Goddess on Beltane, to take the test. My family found out shortly after that. I don't know how - I didn't volunteer that information. Soon I found myself hauled in to the Empire's nearest outpost. The Empire had some kind of interest in children who had been conceived on Beltane, and they considered my offspring to be their property. I would be held as a prisoner until I gave birth to my daughter, then released back to my family. I was never to expect to see my daughter again. It was bad, but not as bad as it could have been. Ben was allowed to visit me and bring me things. On his home planet, he was also a witch. He showed me a book of the Craft from his home world that told him which roots to dig up and give me for morning sickness. Fortunately, they also grew on Earth, but he could only dig them up by the light of the full moon, and he had to chew them up for me. (This is oddly sweet - the father having to chew up the roots that will benefit his child in utero.) In actuality, the time I had to live without seeing my daughter was only a few months, because the Empire was defeated and the troops got to go home. I know I got my child back, but I don't know whether Ben stayed on Earth, if I decided to take the baby to his home planet, or if we parted ways. That is how my hormone-addled subconscious mind works.
The First Bite Is the Deepest
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