( An in-chat review of Laura London's _Windflower_, or this is what happened last summer when someone handed me a romance novel right before a transcontinental flight. )

Channelling our collective hatred of both bigotry and faulty logic, Sarah of Smart Bitches is organizing a good old-fashioned Amazon Google-Bombing. Snarktastically brilliant details here, but the short version is this ( Read more... )

Amazon.com is censoring books featuring GLBTQ characters or homosexual relationships by stripping them of their sales rankings, which makes it less likely that they will appear in searches. When contacted regarding one of the books, an author was told, "In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some ( Read more... )

As some of you already know, my friend Candy Tan is one of the two fiery, feisty, unrestrained geniuses behind Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books, the site for women who love a) romance novels and genre fiction, b) meaningful criticism and praise thereof, and c) foul language. Those of you who don't already follow this site for being made of deep- ( Read more... )

( This Omnivore's Dilemma, or 'Mea Culpa, I've been sold on the marketing of virtuousness-through-eating' )

This selection comes from a discussion of the transition from the kind of exchange of commodities that existed under feudalism to the market as we currently know it:

The Market [sic] as the basic organizing principle of society had its historical origin in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. It is what today's economists blandly refer to ( Read more... )

Other highlights of the morning that I forgot to mention included waking up from some seriously disturbing dreams, and discovering right before I left for work that one of the cats Does Not Approve of the new litter and had thus crapped on the kitchen floor (and kindly flipped the rug over to "bury" it ( Read more... )

So, Self-Made Man by Norah Vincent was ... ( both worthwhile and slightly disappointing. )