Sunday Post: February 27, 2022

Hello, my lovelies.

Today was a game day here en casa, with our friend Lowell coming over for Spaghetti and Clank!. I made the sauce, Lowell made bread and dessert, and the three of us each won one game, which was pretty satisfying.

I decided this morning that, in honor of the very lovely homemade loaf of bread that Lowell had promised, that I should learn to make butter. My friend over at Blogferatu might have made a little fun of me, asking if I needed to be called Goody Piper. But it was easy, and tasty, and the feeling of holding a giant ball of butter and squeezing a cup of buttermilk out of it was strangely satisfying. I will definitely be making butter again, and maybe compounding it next time.

I think that March will be the month where I read all the ARCs that I have been approved for. Most of them don’t release till the summer (or Fall, even) so I had thought that I would wait and read them closer to their release, but I have so many now that it’s messing with my percentages, so I talked with a couple other bloggers, and I think that my best course is to read them, get the reviews in on NetGalley, and then hold off publishing them here till closer to the release. That way, I can keep my stats healthier, and I can write the reviews while the book is still fresh.

On the ARC topic, is there a better feeling than getting approved for an ARC by your absolute favorite author? If there is, I can’t quite figure out what it might be. Which book? That would be this one—

I read six books this week, which brings me to 35 books this year, which Goodreads tells me is 8 books ahead of schedule.

Those first four are books 2-5 of the Bootleg Springs series by Lucy Score and Claire Kingsley. Each of them took three books in the series, and while each book follows one member of the Bodine/Tucker family as they find their mate, the entire series is tied together with an over-arching mystery, which is pretty well done. It makes the books feel more cohesive than these sorts of series sometimes do.

Meet Me In The Margins is a pretty standard rom-com where a book editor hides a copy of her own book in her office, only to retrieve it with copious editing notes from an anonymous reader. Over the course of several weeks, they co-edit the book in secret, finding that their feelings grow as the book nears completion. But who is the secret editor? Charming, but no new ground is really broken here.

And then there was Gerritsen’s Rizzoli and Isles #12. One of my ARCs is #13, so I needed this one…and it was good. Not my favorite R&I, a little slow to start, but solid work and I am now looking forward to the next one.

OK, that’s all from the 52 Creamery, where we are frantically looking for things to do with fresh buttermilk.

Till next week, stay safe, cook something intimidating, wear a mask and hug a book.