reading reading and reading

Not much writing around here this week. Tuesday, I got a big box o' books from B&N AND two other books from Amazon, which were a delayed birthday present. Oh boy.

So keep in mind that I actually have to faint from joy and/or drool all over a book to give it a perfect score. I am against grade inflation in colleges, too, can you tell?

And I'm not putting them in the order I read them, because I want you all to know about Rose Lerner.

Rose Lerner, In for a Penny. 8/10 stars - Wow. just wow. This is her first book (unless she formerly published under another pseudonym or something). It's the story of an early 19th-century wild-boy nobleman whose wild-boy father dies and leaves him in such deep debt that he marries a brewery heiress and gives up all his fun (drinking and gambling with his friends and going out with his scandalous mistress) and moves out to his estate, where everything's falling apart - not the house itself, but the lands and the people are all hungry and the other landowners and renters are right b*st*rds and so on.

She really gets deep into the class issues and the fear that the H&H both have of offending each other and of losing each other and of how they have a hard time communicating. She repeats herself a bit and goes a bit far on the melodrama, but what a good book.

I'm not sure where I heard of it, since I read about 20 different romance book blogs, but more people need to read this book. Awesome! (EDIT TO ADD: I must have seen it on the B&N book blog, where Eloisa James writes a column. EDIT AGAIN: or else it was when she did a top ten favorite romance list for dear Author? Anyway, she's being noticed...)

And if you have a Nook or the patience to read on your computer screen, they have it for $2.56 as an ebook. I have a hard copy, because though I have an eReader, I am actually a Luddite and if it's a book I would like to keep, then I want a real book, darnit.

Julia Quinn, Ten things I love about you. 8/10 stars - cute and funny, but not as funny as the one before it, plus I felt there were subplots that were set up that never got resolved.

Sherry Thomas, His at Night. 8/10 stars - angsty, but not as heartrending as her first two books (Private Arrangements and, um, the one about the chef? Delicious?). Her writing is so, so good that even though the plot felt a bit contrived at times, I loved it. Does she publish her grocery lists? I'd buy them.

Joanna Bourne, Forbidden Rose. 9/10 stars - spies and French Revolution and ... I was about to give some huge spoilers, but I won't. And her writing is every bit as good as ever, though I didn't get as strong a feel as I did in her first book of the cadence of French in the dialogue. Ditto on the grocery lists.

Lisa Kleypas, Married by Morning. 7/10 stars - A fairly typical Kleypas, by which I mean quite good, but no drooling.

And then there was a an anthology with stories from Catherine Anderson, Loretta Chase, and Samantha James.... Whose description I should have read more carefully because these were old novellas, reprinted. I had read the Anderson and Chase ones and hadn't even liked the Anderson one, so skipped it this time. And the James one was a bit meh. So that was a waste of six or seven bucks, ya know?

Next up, Indigo Blue, which is a Catherine Anderson re-issue, then, um, what else do I have? A couple of Guhrke from the library because she writes late-19th century London which is what I am trying to do, and, uh, well, I have 20+ books out of the library to be honest.