#Rebecca Romney

[a-ramblinrose]

"It's Not Hoarding If It's Books" Book Haul!!!

Romance! Poetry! Nonfiction! Fantasy!

I had way to much fun combing the shelves of three different bookstores today! Well, two bookstores and a thrift shop with a lovely collection of very reasonably priced reading material. XP

[judgingbooksbycovers]

Jane Austen's Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend

By Rebecca Romney.

[fated-mates]

The Romance Novel in English is Rebecca Romney's survey of romance rarities from 1769-1999. You can read the free PDF or purchase this beautiful hardcover edition. We thoroughly enjoyed our conversation with her back in season four.

[szeengames123]

(via https://comic.studio/s/9138)

The RED Soldier runs but ran over with Lil Pump says “Gucci Gang” taken off TF2′s Deathrun map, Cocainum

[ninja-muse]

At last, a month where I feel like I read enough! The trick, clearly, was to pick up graphic novels and other very short things. Will this trend continue in November? Almost certainly not.

Followers might have seen my review for The Dollmakers by Lynn Buchanan last week but that's not actually my top read of the month. That honour goes to Jane Austen's Bookshelf by Rebecca Romney, which I got as an ARC from work, told myself I wouldn't read just yet, then promptly picked up after The Dollmakers and all but burned through. It's about the female authors we know Austen read and why they were bestsellers in their day but are barely known now, with all sorts of publishing and book industry history thrown in, along with a dose of memoir. Needless to say, I was the target audience and I've added a good handful of classics to my TBR. (It's out in February, in case you're interested.)

The rest of my top reads are there for just being solidly good. The Disappearing Spoon gave me all the fun science history I wanted. The Angel of Indian Lake gave me a good horror trilogy ending. The Tropic of Serpents gave me more Lady Trent adventures. And so on. I only really had two misses: The Aeronaut's Windlass, which felt very by-the-books epic fantasy without pushing boundaries, and Wordhunter, which I'm actively recommending people don't read. It was utterly average and kind of trying too hard to be edgy, and then it needlessly introduced sexual violence against women and children and handled both badly. How a book that lets a pedophile off with a warning got published in 2024, I will never understand.

In happier news, my book haul! Two books this month: Sorcery and Small Magics, sent by the publisher, and another volume of The Unwritten, meaning I only need to find one and I've got the full run. Hurray! (If you ever spot Vol. 9, folks, lemme know.)

All that reading means that I haven't done much writing. I need to get back to that, but at least I know what was blocking me and am working to rectify the situation. I am, however, starting to get seriously envious of authors who were able to write during the pandemic and are now getting those novels published. I stopped writing entirely for a year and a half, for various reasons, and now I feel like I've fallen behind.

Someday I might return to the Not-Quite-Urban Fantasy but I'm still too raw to handle the edits even now.

Oh, the worlds of might-have-been!

And now I've gone and left this on a down note. There'll be more positivity next month, I promise. In the meantime, here’s my list of everything I read this month, in the rough order of how glad I was to have read them.

Jane Austen’s Bookshelf - Rebecca Romney

A rare book dealer explores the literary histories of Austen’s favourite female authors, and how they didn’t make the English canon the way Austen did. Out in February.

8/10

reading copy

The Disappearing Spoon - Sam Kean

An entertaining history of chemistry, atomic physics, and the elements of the periodic table.

8/10

library ebook

The Tropic of Serpents - Marie Brennan

Isabella Camherst travels south to Bayembe to study savannah dragons, but finds herself caught in politics and sent on a mission to the swamp of Mouleen.

7.5/10

African-coded secondary characters, 🏳️‍🌈 secondary character (asexual)

library book

The Dollmakers - Lynn Buchanan

When Shean of Pearl receives, and refuses, an artisan dollmaker license, she sets off for a remote village to prove she and her dolls have what it takes to be guards against the Shod. If this means luring the monsters in, so be it.

7.5/10

reading copy

The Angel of Indian Lake - Stephen Graham Jones

Jade Daniels, now Proofrock’s history teacher, has put slasher cycles behind her. Except it’s looking like another one’s started anyway.

7.5/10

Blackfoot protagonist, 🏳️‍🌈 protagonist (sapphic), Black secondary characters

warning: blood, gore, death, murder

reading copy

Reluctant Immortals - Gwendolyn Kiste

Lucy Westrena and Bee Rochester are trying to get through the days in 1967 LA when their exes return in San Fransisco.

7/10

🏳️‍🌈 secondary characters (sapphic), Jamaican-British secondary character

warning: abusive relationships

reading copy

Bury Your Gays - Chuck Tingle

After Misha refuses to kill off his queer leads for the season finale, he finds himself stalked by horror villains he created.

7/10

🏳️‍🌈 protagonist (gay), 🏳️‍🌈 secondary characters (bi, aroace), 🏳️‍🌈 author

warning: death, murder, torture, homophobia, child abuse

library book

Ms. Marvel, Vol. 7 - G. Willow Wilson with Mirka Andolfo (Illustrator), Takeshi Miyazawa (Illustrator)

Kamala Khan faces two difficult foes: gerrymandering and a sentient computer virus.

6.5/10

Pakistani-American protagonist, Muslim protagonist, Pakistani-American secondary characters, Muslim secondary characters, 🏳️‍🌈 secondary character (sapphic), Black secondary character, secondary character with limb damage and a cane, Muslim author

warning: outing

off my TBR

Paladin’s Grace - T. Kingfisher

Stephen is a paladin whose god has died. Grace is a perfumer trying to keep her past buried. Witnesses to a failed assassination, they now must work together to navigate a world of intrigue, poisoners, and zealots. It’s a good thing they like each other.

6.5/10

off my TBR/ebook

Plain Jane and the Mermaid - Vera Brosgol

When Jane’s potential fiancé is kidnapped by a mermaid, she descends into the depths to rescue him even though she can never hope to compete with true waifish beauty.

7.5/10

warning: body shaming

library book

Sorcery and Small Magics - Maiga Doocy

Leovander Loveage and Sebastian Grimm get along like oil and water—which makes it all the worse when Leo's hit with an illegal curse and they must work together to break it.

6.8/10

🏳️‍🌈 protagonist (achillean), 🏳️‍🌈 secondary character (achillean), 🏳️‍🌈 minor character (ungendered), minor character with dark skin, minor character who uses a cane

gifted by publisher

Dictionary of Fine Distinctions - Eli Bernstein

Illuminating and illustrated definitions of commonly confused words.

7/10

library book

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop - Satoshi Yagisawa

When Takako finds herself adrift in life, she accepts a room in her estranged uncle’s bookshop.

7/10

Japanese cast, Japanese author

library book

Wordhunter - Stella Sands

A spiky forensic linguistics student is tapped by her local PD to help find a kidnapped teen, but that brings up a missing person’s case from her own past. Too close, too soon.

2/10

Black secondary character

warning: drug use, alcohol abuse, rape and an odd attitude towards its aftermath, pedophiles given a pass

library book

Picture books

All the Books - Hayley Rocco

Piper loves books so much she takes her whole collection everywhere, but when her wagons tip over in the rain she discovers … the library!

9/10

DNF

The Aeronaut’s Windlass - Jim Butcher

The cold war between Spires Albion and Aurora is heating up, and something uncanny is showing itself. Caught in it all are Captain Grimm, late of the Predator, a handful of trainee guards, and a prince of cats.

library ebook

Currently reading

The Price of the Stars - Debra Doyle and James D. MacDonald

When Beka’s politician mother is assassinated, her father gives her his warship in exchange for her tracking the assassins down. But when someone has it in for your family, sometimes one must take drastic measures.

off my TBR

The Empress Letters - Linda Rogers

A mother in the 1920s writes her life story in a series of letters to the daughter she’s searching for in China.

🇨🇦, Chinese secondary characters

warning: fetal remains, anti-Chinese racism

off my TBR

Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century - Richard Taruskin A history of early written European music, in its social and political contexts.

The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle Victorian detective stories

disabled POV character (limb injury), occasional Indian secondary characters

warning: racism, colonialism

Monthly total: 14 + 1 Yearly total: 106 Queer books: 3 Authors of colour: 2 Books by women: 9 Authors outside the binary: 0 Canadian authors: 0 Classics: 0 Off the TBR shelves: 3 Books hauled: 2 ARCs acquired: 3 ARCs unhauled: 4 DNFs: 1

January February March April May June July August September

[thekatebridgerton]

I love the idea of a Philoise Rebecca AU SO much! Just so you know. ;)

Oh I think a Rebecca twist for the Philoise season would be both hilarious and show appropriate. I've seen enough 'I hate Phillip' posts from certain people on Tumblr to make me think it would be great if the show took all that hate and ran with it, give the haters a voice and that voice being Eloise herself. Have her go full 'I have my reasons to hate Phillip' and the reason is 'he may have murdered Marina'

First by building up Lady Crane as this larger than life persona, beautiful, charming, pragmatic. Everyone loved Lady Crane. But she died in a tragic lake accident. Or did she? her husband, and pretend father of her children looks awfully suspicious, he's the one that found her in the lake, servants speculate that he was the one who pushed her. He was jealous, he resented her for always being indifferent to him, he never treated her like she deserved, he is obviously a bad guy, so secretive, spending all that time in the greenhouse, or locked in his study. Twirling his evil moustache, distancing himself from the children, almost like he has a guilty conscience for doing something bad to the remarkable Lady Crane.

Enter Eloise, who started corresponding with him previously and 100% believes Phillip is a wife murderer. Pretending she's in Romney Hall to help with his children, when really she's investigating Marina's death to bring her killer (Phillip) to justice. Except, oops he's actually got logical reasons for being in his greenhouse all the time, and he's always locked up in his study because he's got an estate to manage, and he roams around darkened hallways at night because he's got insomnia. Is Eloise falling inlove with a wife murderer or is Phillip really innocent? if he is then what is he hiding? who murdered the beautiful and sparkling Marina?. Knowing show Eloise, she'd probably consider Phillip way sexier as a possible criminal than as an awkward botanist.

(Cue a fight where Eloise confronts Phillip accusing him of murdering his wife and Phillip admits that all this time Marina was mentally ill and he's been protecting her reputation, to the point of covering up her suicide for the sake of the people who knew her, this is why he feels so much guilt! he can never tell anyone the truth, it would tarnish George's memory AND Marina's)

Somewhere in between there, El's brothers find out where she is, they jump to conclusions, ranging from Phillip kidnapping Eloise to Eloise being a busybody that can't leave well enough alone. They beat up Phillip, then they apologize when Eloise explains and Phillip proposes. Gets rejected, El goes back home, gets the Violet TM 'marry your best friend' pep talk and comes to her senses and realizes that now that she knows Phillip won't murder her like she thought he murdered Marina, then it's okay if she loves him. So she goes back and proposes to him, like the feminist she is and makes it her business to defend Phillip's reputation from those wife murderer rumors.

I want all the gothic romance tropes, I want Phillip to look as low key suspicious as Rob Cameron with a dash of villain Rience, I want Eloise at the height of her detective era coming up with all the wrong conclusions, I want the main misunderstanding to be made worse when the Bridgertons get involved. I think it would be awesome.

And that's the tea.

[haggishlyhagging]

Life for both sexes—and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement—is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority—it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney—for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination—over other people. Hence the enormous importance to a patriarch who has to conquer, who has to rule, of feeling that great numbers of people, half the human race indeed, are by nature inferior to himself. It must indeed be one of the chief sources of his power. But let me turn the light of this observation on to real life, I thought. Does it help to explain some of those psychological puzzles that one notes in the margin of daily life? Does it explain my astonishment the other day when Z, most humane, most modest of men, taking up some book by Rebecca West and reading a passage in it, exclaimed, "The arrant feminist! She says that men are snobs!" The exclamation, to me so surprising—for why was Miss West an arrant feminist for making a possibly true if uncomplimentary statement about the other sex?—was not merely the cry of wounded vanity; it was a protest against some infringement of his power to believe in himself. Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle. The glories of all our wars would be unknown. We should still be scratching the outlines of deer on the remains of mutton bones and bartering flints for sheep skins or whatever simple ornament took our unsophisticated taste. Supermen and Fingers of Destiny would never have existed. The Czar and the Kaiser would never have worn crowns or lost them. Whatever may be their use in civilised societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgement, civilising natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?

-Virginia Woolf, ‘A Room of One’s Own’ in Alice S. Rossi, The Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir

[antebellumite]

Antebellum Miscellaneous Casting 2/?

Before i continue i feel like it needs to be said that i actually dont know what any of these peoples acting styles are like, so this is 90% vibes 7% faceclaim and 3% concentration of will, so:

Matthew Daddario as Alexander Hamilton Jr.

Rebecca Hall as Sarah Polk

Emily Blunt as Lucretia Clay

Evan Rachel Wood as Margaret Eaton

Natalie Dormer as Floride Calhoun

Ben Barnes as Galusha Grow

Adam Driver as Roger B. Taney

Tom Cruise as John J. Crittenden

Luke Evans as Lawrence Keitts

Benedict Cumberbatch as Jefferson Davis

Sophie Nelisse as Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Jennifer Lawrence as Varina Davis

Chris Pratt as Horace Greeley

Jared Padalecki as Anson Burlingame

and

Mitt Romney as Franklin Pierce

[aduckmentalistin]

Love this book dedication!

A Bear for the FBI by Melvin Van Peebles, 1968.

(Source: Rebecca Romney)

[luizcarlos412012]

Pawn Stars - A TRÁGICA HISTÓRIA de Rebecca Romney no "Pawn Stars

[a-ramblinrose]

A Weekly Reading Journal 3.31.24

Accidentally skipped a week but it was also all One Piece because March was all about the ridiculous pirate manga so nobody missed anything at all.

Currently Reading:

Fiction:

Guardian Vol.2 by Priest

Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories by GennaRose Nethercott

Poetry:

The Book of Songs translated by Arthur Waley

The Collected Poems of Sara Teasdale

Rilke: Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke

Nonfiction:

Unlikeable Female Characters by Anna Bogutskaya

Eros The Bittersweet by Anne Carson

Graphic Novels:

Weirdos from Another Planet! by Bill Watterson

Just Finished:

One Piece Vol. 77-90 by Eiichiro Oda ★★★★

One Piece: Ace’s Story—The Manga Vol. 1 by Sho Hinata ★★★ One Piece: Shokugeki no Sanji by Yūto Tsukuda ★★★★

DNFs/Try Again Later:

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (my reread was going nowhere so I stopped.)

Hauled:

One Piece: Ace’s Story—The Manga Vol. 1 by Sho Hinata

One Piece: Shokugeki no Sanji by Yūto Tsukuda

Mad & Bad by Bea Koch

Band Sinister by KJ Charles

A Little Light Mischief by Cat Sebastian

Printer's Error by Rebecca Romney

Deep Wizardry by Diane Duane

Hand In Hand With Love by Simon Avery

Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart: And Other Stories by GennaRose Nethercott

Sailor Moon Vol. 7 by Naoko Takeuchi

Sunbringer by Hanna Kaner

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

3 Streets by Yoko Tawada

Guardian Vol.2 by Priest

General Reading Thoughts:

March was a bit of a slump for anything not pirate manga. And book obtaining. I'm reminding myself that some of that massive haul from the last 2 weeks was little free library finds, thrifted and long ago preorders. My wallet still is crying. 😢

Happy Reading!!!

Current Reading Tag || General Original Content || 2024 Reading Page

[wickedlittlecritta]

Still, the question remains: Why books? Booksellers can be a pessimistic lot, often expressing a view that the last word on their business may soon be written. “As a rare book dealer myself,” laments Rebecca Romney, whom TV viewers know from the History channel program Pawn Stars, “I’m aware of the unfortunate truth that rare books, while of immense cultural value, are much more difficult to sell than laptops.” Ed Maggs, the London bookseller, agrees. “This,” he tells me, “was the smartest and the dumbest robbery ever. Smart because of all the Mission: Impossible business with ropes, and dumb because there are few objects of value that are less fungible than rare books.”

[didanagy]

1. Elizabeth Ramus (George Romney).

2. Lady Altamont, George Romney, 1788

3. Jane Maxwell, Duchess of Gordon, with Her Son George Duncan, George Romney, 1778

4. Portrait of Jane Hoskyns, George Romney , c. 1778-1780, Cleveland Museum of Art: European Painting and Sculpture

5. Mrs Crouch, 1787, George Romney

6. The Honourable Rebecca Clive (1760–1795), Mrs John Robinson, George Romney

7. Mrs Robert Trotter of Bush, George Romney, 1788, Tate

8. 1777 Young Woman in Powder Blue, by George Romney

9. Mary Bootle, George Romney, 1781

10. 1788 George Romney - Catherine Clements

[thekatebridgerton]

But seriously seeing as Chris Fulton keeps getting these cool antagonist roles, all this time I've been thinking that Philoise deserves a twist ' the sound of music' style when I should have been thinking bigger. And hoping for a Rebecca twist.

Philoise Rebecca au

Give me a Phillip who is more like Mr DeWinter. Give me an Eloise who is in Romney Hall pretending to get to know him but is actually investigating Marina's mysterious death. Give me a Phillip who looks like he killed his wife, acts like he killed his wife, had all reasons to kill his wife, and in the end it's discovered he DIDN'T kill his wife. Give me Eloise who pretends to be nice to him while wondering if she's falling in love with a wife murder who may or may not be plotting to murder her too if she gets too close to the truth. Give me the gothic romance tropes! The children being afraid of their possible wife murdering dad who doesn't talk to them. Only for it to be revealed that Phillip has been hiding the truth of Marina's mental problems and her eventual suicidal mania. Give me Eloise accusing Phillip of a crime the way she accused Penelope of betrayal via Whistledown only to discover that Phillip was protecting the dead Marina all along by hiding the truth of her suicide from the servants and the children.

I want the whole gothic crime period romance drama! Come on Bridgerton! Give me some delicious intrigue and sexually charged encounters in darkened hallways! Give me candlelight jump scares turned romantic rendezvous! Do it!! I want the good stuff.