Time for that wonderful weekly update! LOL In paper, I finished Vickie Taylor‘s Carved in Stone this weekend and it was quite good. I like that hers is a very different premise for a paranormal romance. Never before reading this would I have thought of a gargoyle as a sexy hero. LOL I’m looking forward to Book 2 in the series. Also in paper, I started Madeline Hunter‘s Lord of Sin this weekend. So far so good. She always writes a good historical and I love how she’s worked her career as an art instructor into this story. Not exactly the type of artwork you’d expect a professor to cover, but it is definitely obvious she’s knowledgeable about her chosen subject. Which made me think, this isn’t the first one of her books she managed to work art in to somehow. In audio, I finished up book 2 in the Left Behind series: Tribulation Force by Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye. It’s getting interesting for this series which I finally decided I had to try out after hearing so much about it over the past few years. I also picked up Book 3 from the library: Nicolae and started that…

You know when you read a book and it doesn’t make you feel good, it just feels like a chore? Or you’re educating yourself or something “worthy” like that? Well, trust me, COURTESAN is such a book. I can see it being read by the women’s book club where everyone pretends literary ambitions. So an exotic locale — Paris at the turn of the 20th century (I’d do it the French way but I haven’t figured out the extra characters yet) — with the mishmash of clashing cultures, in the land where “anything goes,” COURTESAN is the story of a young girl “trained” by her grandmother and mother to carry on the grand tradition of being a courtesan. Now, when I was younger and a college student, this would have been so romantic — women in charge of their financial and social position. Well, not quite social since “bad girls” only last as long as their protectors are in power. And sad too, since the bad girls still wish they knew their fathers and were accepted everywhere. So instead of a romantic read: revenge by the young wife on the murder of her Jewish husband in Persia, turning to the…