My laboratory-proven book ranking process & 2008 faves

I was working on a post on how I didn’t expect Dark Desires After Dusk to be one of my top five favorite books released in or around 2008, and then I realized I never listed my top five here on my blog, and then I realized I never say how I even judge a book.

Needless to say, Cade will be waiting another day for his post.

So, my top 5, alphabetical, not faves order:

• Dark Desires after Dusk by Kresley Cole
• Death of a Pirate King by Josh Lanyon
• Demon Moon by Meljean Brook
• The Spymaster’s Lady by Joanna Bourne
• Sugar Daddy by Lisa Kleypas

**Little CJ and I discussed most of these at Book Smugglers last week, so I won't do it here.

How did I determine these? Pure readerly experience.
By my system, a poorly written book can fare better than a well written one, just if I take a fancy to it. And if a book has something I personally hate, it can be the best book in the world and it will nevertheless get multiple vicious stab wounds which, as anybody who watches real crime TV knows, is not at all random, but a sign of strong feelings. I don't often assign the "ranks" below as grades when I discuss a book, but it's how I arrange them in my mind.

Book experience ranking levels:

Love affair: I crave it, it takes hold of my mind, it has me in its thrall. Very rare. The Spymaster’s Lady is the only one above that was a full Love Affair, even though it didn’t have the character interplay that makes a book perfect for me, described below in my last post. I didn't care. I loved it.

Passionate crave read: Almost a love affair, but not quite. A passionate crave read is full of excitement and magic, and when I’m not reading it I wish I was. Paradoxically, though, I often try to read slow to make the goodness last. I totally did this with Dark Desires.

Damn fine read: This is a rollicking good read that I look forward to. This might be a B+ for me. Most books I talk about here fall into the damn fine read range.

Serviceable: The book generally works, nothing special. Good enough to finish. Some serviceable books take me forever to finish, others are page turners but still, merely serviceable.

Hostage situation: I want to leave but it won’t let me go because I have to find out what happens goddammit! Extreme measures during a hostage situation may include skipping chunks, reading only dialogue or the first sentence of every paragraph.

ROI situation: (return on investment) This is where I force myself to finish a book because I invested a lot of time in the reading of it before I realized I wish I wasn’t reading it. Typically, a serviceable book will convert to an ROI situation when I'm pretty far along.

The cautionary tale: A DNF (did not finish) I still read a bunch of and get a lot out of, because it’s like a warning or lesson for me as a writer: don’t let this happen to your hero. Pay attention to the build up or you'll have this problem. This sex scene leaves me cold because of that problem. I read such a book with the sort of attention I give to scenes of car crashes or fires. A primal instinct forces me to look for a while, and then it’s like, enough.

The mercy kill DNF: This is a DNF due to boredom. Set gently on floor with a sigh.

The multiple vicious stab wound DNF: This is a DNF due to an intense negative reaction. If it’s a book I actually own, it usually involves some physical abuse, like hurling it across the room.

Speaking of top books of 2008, I still have my running list going here. Let me know if you have a list for me to post. I just added an interesting one last night: the best selling fantasy, which includes a lot of urban fantasy, from Best Fantasy Stories.

The two lower images from Wikipedia commons.

The many pleasures of My Lord and Spymaster

Joanna Bourne wrote one of my top two favorite novels this year: The Spymaster’s Lady. So it was enormously exciting to get an ARC of My Lord and Spymaster from a certain ravishing redhead. Thank you Katie(babs)!

Dipping into this, I felt like I was laying into something rich and exquisite, and I wanted to gobble it up, but also take my time and enjoy it. I’d say, in a nutshell, that I loved this almost as much as I loved The Spymaster’s Lady.

A bit from the back:

Raised as a poor but cunning pickpocket, Jess Whitby may have grown into a wealthy young woman, but now she must once again rely on her guile. Her father’s been wrongly accused of selling secrets to Napoleon, and he’s going to hang—unless Jess finds the real traitor…

Jess focuses on one Captain Sebastian Kennett. He’s the target of her investigation, she’s the target of his infatuation. Is he the French spy, Cinq? It’s an excellent ‘In the arms of the maybe-enemy' tale. The conflict here is the hero and heroine’s reluctance to fully trust each other without proof vs. their attraction to one another.

And then of course there is Cinq. We get one chilling glimpse into his head, and he’s nasty! And we know he’s in the thick of things…possibly their social circle, business circle, neighborhood…but who is he? Will they unmask him in time?

As is my way, this will not be a proper review. However, my esteemed colleagues Katie(babs) at Ramblings on Romance and Ana at Booksmugglers have done excellent ones. And for a thoughtful dissenting opinion, see Jennie’s from Dear Author.

Onto the many pleasures
Pleasure #1: Jess Whitby: another kickass Bourne heroine. I want to second (third?) the excellent points that Katie(babs) at Ramblings on Romance and Ana at Booksmugglers made about this being a heroine’s book rather than a hero’s book. Jess is colorful, brave and delightful, and I enjoyed her shady history, and the way it resonates with Sebastian’s past. I know people complain about the power imbalance here between Jess and the men. I do indeed see why that charge is leveled, but it doesn’t bother me for a number of reasons having to do with the reality of the times and frankly, Bourne makes it sexy in places.

Somewhere in an interview on TSL…oh, let me find it—here at Romancebandits, Joanna Bourne discussed different kinds of power, and how Grey had brute power, but it’s not “ultimately useful—none of it will get him what he desperately needs.” That’s also the case here, in my mind. While Sebastian and Adrian help her get out of scrapes and so forth, Jess is using her street contacts combined with her bookkeeping and recordkeeping savvy to crack a case all these spies just couldn’t crack.

Random fun facts: On her blog, Bourne says she pictures Jess as looking like Robin Wright (pictured). And FYI, Annique from TSL looks like Natassja Kinski. Also, her goal as a writer is a sane 1000 words a day. No wonder her quality is so high.

Pleasure #2: Being in the head of a Bourne character—so satisfying! It always feels so intimate, like when you go to somebody’s home and find yourself surrounded by their favorite furniture and little treasures and signs of everyday life, and you get them on a visceral level.

I sometimes muse about what it is about the way she writes that creates this intimacy—I think it’s a mixture of the music of the language, the closeness of the thought process, the personality that shines through in the specific things her different characters dwell on—and the specific things that don’t occur to them. Just so satisfying to me as a reader. I especially relished this effect in the first few chapters.

Pleasure #3: Kedger the ferret! I have to say, I get very nervous about pets in books—I always worry some harm will come to them. Luckily, Kedger is just as streetsmart as Jess, with an equally shady past, being that he was her accomplice back in the day. And little Kedger helps out at the thrilling conclusion—in a totally believable way. On her blog, Joanna Bourne reveals that she’s into ferrets—before they were cool. I enjoyed learning all what a ferret can do. (She also has some nice writing tips on there.)

Pleasure #4: Adrian Hawke. Ah, Adrian, the young, brilliant and talented spy trying to do the right thing, but caught in the bureaucracy. Smidge of a dark side. Adrian is just such a pleasure to read about. A number of reviewers talk about Grey from TSL and Sebastian from this book as being unexciting and even two-dimensional. I had a bit of this sense, though not as strongly as others. But Adrian just sings on the page. I can’t wait for his book.

Pleasure #5: Lazarus. Lazarus is this crazy underworld crime boss with a labyrinthine organization of renegade children and hardened criminals. He reminded me a bit of Brando in Apocalypse Now, except he’s not insane. The thing that got me most was when one Lazarus dies, another guy takes his place. Is there a historical basis for this character?

Anyway, as a youth, Jess was The Hand, Lazarus’ ultimate inner circle helper. Jess goes to Lazarus for help at one point, quite a perilous thing to do, because with Lazarus, you’re not supposed to be able to leave.

Pleasure #6: The shipping backdrop. Both Jess and Sebastian are immersed in the business of shipping, and I enjoyed learning about it. The details were interesting in and of themselves, and deeply intrinsic to the novel. There were times where their opinions on the various import-export issues sort of characterized them.

This book will be released on July 1.

Nada Review

I think I love you, SPYMASTER’S LADY. I think you are my new favorite book of the year now! Or maybe you are tied with Demon Night. I don’t know yet. I am too fresh from bed with you.

Sometimes when I love a thing, I want to talk and talk about it, and other times when I love a thing, I sort of don’t want to talk about it. I just want to sit quietly and enjoy it. That seems to be the case here. I don’t want to tell what the plot is or say what I liked it.

So apparently, not only am I a crap blogger this week, but no kind of reviewer either.

I will say this: you know how you sometimes catch of scent of something, and you don’t know what it reminds you of right away, you only know it was something wonderful? Like it fills you with a good feeling. And eventually you remember—oh, that day at the bakery, that summer at the lake. I sort of had that a lot with this book, not with scents, but more conceptually. Little things would evoke a pleasant feeling, and then I’d think, oh this scene or that scene. Sigh.

Also, I shamelessly pimped this to not only my mom, who tends to go for more literary fare, (though she loved The Outlander years before I did), but also to my pal Lauren, AND even to Mark! I hope that wasn’t a mistake. Mark is always looking for exciting books to read on planes. I pimped Janet Evanovich’s One for the Money to him as plane reading recently and he hated it. Isn’t that weird? He found the whole “bad girl voice” as he called it annoying. Anyway, he might read it for an upcoming plane trip based on my oh-so-strong recommendation, but he imagined he might get his own copy and rip off the cover and the inside color picture. And then he was like, what if the plane goes down and everybody finds out I was reading a book called The Spymaster’s Lady? Like it’s clutched in his dead hands. However, if the plane started going down, he could pitch it across the cabin.

Enough about Mark! Back to my non-review. The Spymaster’s Lady by Joanna Bourne. Oh, what a pleasure this book was!

Spymaster update and More about Lust Bites

The Update
THE SPYMASTER'S LADY is so enchanting and exciting, I can no longer read it before bed, because as soon as I turn the light out I just think about it excitedly, replaying all the delicious scenes in my head when I should be sleeping. Marveling, replaying, churning.

I am losing serious sleep, Ms. Joanna Bourne, and it is ALL YOUR FAULT! You have made your book too enthralling.

I am quite new to historicals. Is it possible they are all this good? This is such a good life to have one excellent book to read after another. I feel so lucky.

More about Lust Bites
I never considered myself an anthology reader, but I have certainly gotten a ton of pleasure out of this one. Maybe I have been transformed into an anthology reader now. We’ll see! Maybe I’ll wake up soon with glowing red eyes, craving another anthology, running madly through the streets to Barnes and Noble, frightening the clerks with my strangely elongated reading glasses.

I finished it a bit ago, but I never got to talk about the Kristina Lloyd story. Tumperkin, who generously gave me this book as a prize, enjoyed the exquisite writing in this story, and I’d have to agree. Both this and the Portia Da Costa story are startlingly well written.

Ah, a bloggerly pleasure
Tumperkin excerpted one of her favorite passages, and it was really fun coming back across that passage in context. That happened with a passage that lisabea excerpted from Demon Night, too. It is a unique pleasure to revisit passages that my online friends have pointed out.

Anyway...
What I found remarkable in this story was the collision of worlds, or more, of thought processes. You have Arctic trekker Esther, who is an intelligent, likeable and highly reasonable heroine trekking along with her wholesome, sophisticated, outdoorsy Arctic group.

Esther’s scenes alternate with scenes featuring these debauched and sex-crazed vampires, two men and a woman, and their equally crazed vampire cat, cavorting in their freaky arctic outpost, making weird decisions about things. Their mad ways are exactly what you’d expect from isolated vampires in the arctic tundra. Wonderfully written. Delightfully dirty!

And you have the hero, vampire Billy, their leader sort of, struggling to raise up out of his chaotic mad ways and do the right thing for once, regarding Esther, who he was in love with centuries ago. It’s absolutely wonderful. This story is crazy and wonderful.

The Spymaster's Lady: Two views