Wanted: Recommendations

[thefourthvine]

Dear, dear people: REC ME SOMETHING, PLEASE. Two things, actually. One for the earthling, one for Best Beloved.

Classical Music

The earthling listens to classical music for about two to four hours each evening; it helps him go through his evening routine and get ready for bed. It has to have certain characteristics:

• It can't be super super slow (because he eats to it, and he tends to suck in time to the music, and evening feedings take long enough without something slowing him way down); kind of slow is fine and even welcome.
  
• It can't be too fast (because see above about eating, plus, this is night-time music).
  
• It can't be too varied (it needs to kind of all go together); no Surprise Symphony or anything.
  
• It needs to have, at minimum, several instruments (like, three or more is fine, but one is not - his attention is just not caught by, say, a piano without any other instruments).

For my sanity, it also needs to have these characteristics:

• It needs to be, overall, pretty long (many individual bits is fine, but they all need to add up to something fairly long).
  
• It needs not to be by Ravel or Rachmaninoff. I’m sorry. It just does.

As examples, here are the three things we listen to:

• Handel's Water Music
  
• Some Schubert
  
• Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons (The earthling really likes the violin in this.)

I have heard these pieces so many times that I find myself walking in time to them when they aren’t even on. I hum them all day long. I wait patiently for the bits I still like, and think increasingly hostile thoughts about Handel and Vivaldi. I realize repetition is good for a baby, but it is making me crazy. And yet I do not know enough about classical music to know what else might interest a baby who likes these three pieces.

So, if you do know about classical music - can you rec me some stuff? Ideally, it will be available via Amazon’s mp3 service, because I can preview it for the earthling there and see his reaction before I buy it.

Romance Novels

I have presented Best Beloved with a challenge: I will pick romance novels based entirely on their titles (usually in themed sets around a certain word or concept - I am nothing if not theme-oriented), and she will read them and review them on GoodReads. This has provided many hours of entertainment in our household. Except. I have apparently done some terrible, terrible things to her with this. I’ve happened upon some good ones (Nalini Singh, for example, or Lisa Kleypas), but I’ve also managed to pick out some things that caused the blood to drain from her face as she stared at them. She’s starting to twitch when the books come in.

So: have you read any good romance novels lately? I just need a few recs, ones I can build a theme around, so that there’s a cookie or two waiting for her in the seas of badness, so her will doesn’t break. (I don’t want them all to be good - the bad ones provide the most entertainment on GoodReads! But, as has been proven, I can find the bad ones without trying at all; it’s the good ones I need help with.)

Unfortunately, I can’t tell you what she likes in a romance novel (although I can link you to her GoodReads account). I can tell you that she does not like:

• Anything with a secret baby. She’s also made geechy by, for example, blackmailing a pregnant woman to get revenge on her dead husband. (The actual plot of one of the ones I found for her. No, really. I was not at all kidding when I said I had no trouble finding bad ones.)
  
• Anything that comes in trade paperack only. Apparently these are...special. One of the early ones she read featured a protagonist with two cocks. It scarred her. She now makes very sad noises when I buy her trade paperbacks, especially if they have warnings on the cover, or those covers that feature Sims-looking people. If you can recommend a good trade paperback one, I’ll get it for her, but I’ll need some help motivating her to read it.
  
• Anything that is really really short and has a title like The Basque Renegade’s Blackmailed Love Child’s Farmer Bride’s Cousin Georgina. I get wounded looks when I get these for her. I don’t know why.
  
• Anything where there’s lots of talk of God and devotion and someone dies at the end.
  
• Anything featuring rape or domination (like, the hero is the master of the heroine, kind of thing) - what she would term “old school” romance.

If you read romance, your input would be greatly appreciated.