Book Recs, Book Cons, Book Reviews, Book Myths

Happy Tuesday! Titles mentioned: 

• Tanith Lee "Night's Master" 1978
• Nan Shepherd "The Living Mountain" 2025
• Georgette Heyer "Veneita" 1958
• Leopold von Sacher-Masoch "Venus in Furs" 1870
• Neil Gaiman "The Sandman" Comic Book

Don't forget to come and see me at LoveLitCon if you're in the area. You can find more information on their website lovelit.com

Transcript

0:00

This is an exquisite book. I've been telling everyone to read it. I do think that you read things at the time. You need to read them. I am a huge Tanith Lee Stan (super-fan) I think I've read everything she's ever written. Good morning everyone. This is Jeffe Kennedy. Also writing is Jennifer K Lambert, author of Epic fantasy Romance. I'm here with my first cup of coffee. Oh. Oh. That's good. Today is. Who knows? It is Tuesday, January 6th, 2026. Bravely forging into the new Year, I believe all of you are back at work this week. Interestingly, people I know who have children or who teach school didn't start till today. I could tell because I don't really take holidays in the same way that a lot of people with actual day jobs do. Yesterday the emails started arriving and it was like, “Oh, everybody’s back” Laughs out loud. Agents, editors, so forth. I had a very productive day yesterday. That was really great. Things are coming together. We have the cover for Love, Lies, and Ley Lines! So exciting. It's really pretty. It's it's great. It's it's what I wanted. I think. Everybody that I show it to says that it makes them want to read the book. So that's great. You want to read this book coming out January 20th! So today I plan to do the final proofing for that and get it uploaded. And we will do the cover reveal. I'm still waiting on the final final cover. I approved it the last proof yesterday. And then, Raven, does the, the little tweaks, the final painting and so forth to make it perfection. For some reason, there are these things that accrete gravitational weight on our to do list. And I know you know what I mean. And they are things that involve, like making a phone call. We don't want to make fighting with somebody, you know, like companies count on us not wanting to call them. And argue about some charge because it's not fun and it's annoying and we don't want to do it. And then they make it difficult for us. And that's all deliberate people. I feel like it is so deliberate to, you know, they can do that extra $5 charge and hope that we won't have the energy to fight it. So, like, one thing I got done yesterday was I got my mom's Xfinity, Comcast, whatever package canceled at the house. So, you know, and they make a call, right? You can't just do it online. You have to call and talk to somebody. And actually the guy was really nice. You know, he asked if I had found a cheaper package, you know, first. Yes. Do I want to cancel internet, cable or phone? And I said, yes, the whole thing. It was all bundled together and expensive. They had them on such an expensive package. It was a pleasure to cancel it, but I still didn't want to have to call and do it. Right? So I've been sliding down my list and sliding down my list. I did several things like that. One of them was, prescription Express Scripts that was still going to her, going to the house. I was able to just cancel that, like via voice mail system. So that was great. I got the dedication, I think knowledge once done for Among the Thorns. I got a trip planned to Tucson. My stepsister, Hope, who is handling much of the house sale is having the carpets replaced. So, Christmas Day, before we left, after we had been drinking wine and opening presents and all the things, I asked Hope, is there anything else that you need me to get done before I leave? And she said, no, and we've talked about this. She's like, well, you know, like, maybe we should have had a lot longer conversation than that. She thought I had done more than I had. I simply ran out of time. And I'm actually expressing zero regrets about this because the whole trying to be kinder to myself thing. But also I did everything I could do that week. AT the same time, I am juggling that my husband, David, who has Parkinson's disease, is going to go on the new vial of pump for medication. But this involves all sorts of acrobatics as well. And so I was waiting to find out when they were going to. They shipped us the first shipment of medication has to be stored in the fridge. All the stuff. So anyway, that's coming Thursday, and after that we have to have an appointment with a nurse who will come to our house and show us how to do everything. And then we have to go down to his movement disorders doctor in Albuquerque to actually turn it on. And so it's like this whole sequence of dates I was waiting on. It turns out the best time for me to go to Tucson is this week. So I'm going to go there Thursday. I'm going to spend a couple of days clearing out my mom's closets and under the beds and so forth, and I will drive her car back to Santa Fe, where I will sell it to the dealer in Tucson. Hope had taken the car to the dealer just to see. Because they had done all the service on this Infiniti, a 2017 Infiniti with 43,000 miles on it. They offered about half of the Kelley Blue Book value of what I could get for it in a private sale here in Santa Fe, so don't sell stuff back to the dealer, is one of our take home messages

Love Lit Book Convention Annoucement: 5:50

I’m starting to plan for conventions. I'm going to be at Love Lit Con in San Diego in February, so there's still tickets left for that. It's a new con, so a little bit of an unknown, but I really hope that you all will come because it will be great! It's going to be at a great hotel and it's in San Diego, which is fabulous. And the organizers have been wonderful. (end of message) So I listen to the audiobook of Venecia.-I do want to talk about books I've been reading- by Georgette Heyer I had never read it. I had gotten the Richard Armitage narrated version, which, you know, he's got a beautiful voice and I thought that would be great and only discovered afterwards that it's actually the abridged version. It's like two thirds shorter. I don't know, I mean, I felt like a lot of things happened very quickly, but also, I feel like I've experienced Venetia now and I don't need to go back. Isn't Vinicius mother awful? And everyone at the end was just like, oh, okay. So maybe that's why it felt like it was just okay at the end because, so much have been cut out. I'm sorry. Spoiler. When Venetia meets her mother, who she believes is dead, can a novel this old be spoiled? I'm also thinking about reading Moby Dick. Speaking of spoiling the ending, her mother, who she thought was dead. She meets her and she meets her mother's new husband or lover. It's not quite clear, but she refers to him as her father in law and that she is his daughter in law. And it's like, well, that changed because I would say, you. Shouldn't that be stepdaughter? It was a mistake. But then there was a repetition and I realized it's a change in the vernacular. Right. All right. I'm reading this book called Venus in Furs by Richard von Leopold von Sacher-Masoch from which the word masochism comes up. There are a lot of references to Jews in the book, and it's an old book, and it's rather shocking. The, you know, like, “greasy Jew and dirty Jew”“I bought this from a Jews” and just this casual anti-Semitism. He is the great-great uncle of this woman artist Marianne Faithfull. I was listening to Marianne Faithfull, and it's interesting how like one artist leads into another. And I love that. And this is all part of my refilling the well. So anyway, yeah, her great great uncle wrote this book, Venus in Furs, and it's, Do I recommend it? I don't know, but it's about, a male submissive, a woman who makes him into her slave. And it's it's interesting and not a book. I was previously familiar with. Right. We all know about, like, the murky, the sad and Justine and the story of. Oh, and those kinds of things. But, at least I did not know about Venus in Furs. I reread Tanith Lee's “Night's Master” and one of the things I'm trying to do, I think I talked about this previously. I want to make sure that I am reading full stop, and not disliking a book or board was a book so that I pick up my phone and scroll right. Because threads is always so interesting. I can just do threads forever and I know it's set up algorithmically to do that. But I want to read. I want to get more read. I listened to Nan Shepherds The Living Mountain, which is one of the most exquisite books that I have read in my entire life. I did not know why I had this audiobook. I was bored on the drive back from Christmas. Then I went back and listened to pieces of it because it's so beautiful. It's this lyrical celebration of nature. And she is a Scots woman who spent most of her life traipsing through the Cairngorm mountains, and it's, just about the poetry of nature. And I listen to there's a couple of great and the foreword and an afterword, and they talked about how there's a lot of Taoist principles, which in retrospect, now I see why it appealed to me. This is an exquisite book. I've been telling everyone to read it, and I was trying to figure out why it was in my audible library. Oh, and it's narrated by Tilda Swinton, who has a gorgeous voice, and she does an amazing job. And it's not abridged, and I recommended it to Kelly Robson. And she's like, I've read this book and I love it. And we actually traced back my getting it for my audible library to a lunch we had back in 2020. And you know, this is what happens. I, I'm in conversation with people, I buy things, I put it, you know, in my library and then forget it's there and discover it later, which has a certain lovely serendipity to it. Right. You? I do think that you read things at the time you need to read them, which is another good reason to put a book down. If you're not loving it, you can always come back to it. I totally believe that listening to an audiobook counts as reading the book, but I do think that it is a slightly different experience. And I want to have that with the Living Mountain. I highly recommend that book. I went back and reread Tanith Lee's Nights Master, which is kind of a collection of interlinked fantasy stories, and this book was published in 1978, and I have had it probably since, maybe not 1978. I would have been 12, but I was reading a lot at the age of 12, so I could have gotten it down. But yeah, I have my original copy of my Da paperback with its yellowed pages. Now I am a huge Tanith Lee stan as some of you may or may not know, I think I've read everything she's ever written, but I had not read Night's Master in a really, really long time. I wanted to read it again, in part because I'm finding that it is refilling my creative well to go back and read some of the fantasies that informed me. And growing up, it does really illuminate what I'm trying to write now. Also, because of the whole Neil Gaiman thing, Neil Gaiman Sandman heavily influenced Never the Roses. There was a whole lot of stuff about dream. The power of the dream that influenced what I wrote was an era as an old Neuromancer, a sorceress who can affect sleeping and dreaming. And in part it was the Netflix series of Sandman. I mean, I've read the graphic novels. I don't really like the radio show. I can't tell you why, but the Netflix show, I think so many of the visuals were so incredible and gorgeous that it really did, filter into my creative mind. All of the stuff came out about Neil being, a predator and so forth, which was heartbreaking to all of us. Right? Because there were so many things that I have admired about him as a creator and a person, and I find the, evidence compelling. And I talked about this, that it's a very difficult place to be when you love a creation and have, I don't even want to say mixed feelings about the creator. I mean, I think he did terrible things to these women, and I'm very disappointed in that. Anyway, people had said to me, oh, well, you should read Kenneth Lee's Knight's Master because Neil Gaiman stole Sandman from her. And I kind of did the the head tilt because I remember reading the book. I remembered not necessarily loving it. I think it was a little adult for me at the time. It's possible I read it when I was 12. I really don't see why people would say that he stole Sam from her, to from Knight's master. I don't I don't think that's the case. There are times when I think you can really tell somebody derived an idea. And, you know, we will go through all the things on, you know, like how much is copying and how much is on Mars and how much it's conversation and how much is like blatantly ripping off an idea, but I could see some sort of thematic influences. But, you know, Knight's Master is about a demon. It's it's not about dreams or dreaming or sleeping or any of those things. So I'm not sure why people thought that. And it bothers me quite a bit, because I think that there are many very legitimate accusations we can lay at Neil Gaiman's feet and things that he, you know, needs to examine in himself and probably apologies and reparations he needs to make. And that's that's really not here nor there, but to say that he ripped off another author's book entirely is is not fair. And so I really wanted to, to come out and say that, I think that there is a tendency in us to want to, once we discover that someone has done terrible things, to paint them entirely with the brush as a bad person. And I think that's because nuance is difficult for us. But I think that Neil Gaiman is a very original and creative person and not a plagiarist. I think he's a monster in other ways and a predator, and he caused damage, but I don't think he ripped off his ideas. So on that note, I am going to get to work proofing Love Lies on ley lines. I'm excited to get that out there. And if you are back at the grindstone this week, I hope, I hope you're revitalized and it's going well for you. And I may or may not talk to you on Friday. We'll see how that goes. You all take care. Bye bye.