14 Sexy Books To Read Since You Finished '50 Shades' Faster Than You'd Like To Admit From More magazine

14 Sexy Books To Read Since You Finished '50 Shades' Faster Than You'd Like To Admit

Books that tug on your heartstrings—and pull on your panties.

By Sierra Burgos

1. Backstage Pass by Olivia Cunning

What happens when one hot, young psychologist goes on tour with five gorgeous guys? Well, you can find out in Olivia Cunning's series, Sinners on Tour. Solely based on the fact that the band's name is "The Sinners", we already know we're in for a wild ride.

2. Gabriel's Inferno by Sylvain Reynard

Young professor Gabriel Emerson believes he's beyond all hope of escaping his dark past, until he meets graduate student Julia Mitchell. Innocent Mitchell enrolls in his class, and the attraction between them is immediate—but their forbidden intrigue could jeopardize his career.

3. On Dublin Street by Samantha Young

Jocelyn Butler leaves her tragic life behind when she moves to Scotland from the United States to start over completely. Forgetting her past goes just as planned, until she meets Scotsman Braden Carmichael. They plunge into a no-strings-attached arrangement, but the physical passion won't hide her past forever.

4. Dark Lover by J.R. Ward

If you loved both Fifty Shades and the Twilight books (it's okay to admit), check out the Black Dagger Brotherhood series. It's basically the sexiness of Fifty combined with the whole vampire thing. Edward Cullen has nothing on Wrath.

5. Thoughtless by SC Stephens

When an unexpected obligation forces Kiera and her boyfriend miles apart, she turns to a friend for support: local rockstar Kellan Kyle. As her loneliness grows, so does her connection to Kellan. If only we all had a sexy, musically inclined "friend" to lean on...

6. The Marriage Bargain by Jennifer Probst

Billionaire Nicholas Ryan is completely against marriage, but he needs a wife in order to inherit his father's business. Bookstore owner Alexa Maria McKenzie fantasizes over her soulmate, but she needs a man with money to save her family home. Each one has something the other needs—but the two couldn't be more different. They arrange to marry with one rule: Keep everything business. They should be able to follow one rule, right?

7. Wallbanger by Alice Clayton

Caroline has just moved into a beautiful new San Francisco apartment. She has a successful design career, a Kitchen Aid mixer, and a great rack—what could be missing? Enter Simon Parker. Thanks to the paper-thin walls in her new apartment, Caroline gets to know Simon pretty intimately before ever seeing him face-to-face. That is, his wall banging keeps her up all night long. When she finally confronts this mystery man, she discovers an entirely new definition of neighborly.

8. Big Rock by Lauren Blakely

This book, told from the male's perspective, will capture you right from the first sentence: "My dick is f*cking awesome." Spencer has a crowd of ladies lined up to sample his *ahem* big rock. But when he must play the role of a family man in order to impress a potential buyer, he's forced to retire his "favorite appendage" and convince people he's engaged to his best friend, Charlotte. It shouldn't be too hard to fake-kiss his fake-fiancee... Right?

9. Playing For Keeps by R.L. Mathewson

Jason is the neighbor from hell. But Haley, the shy school teacher next door, always let his crazy antics slide. That is, until he ruins her flower beds (obviously the breaking point in any relationship). Haley confronts him with a game plan, and she refuses to believe he's capable of being anything but aggravating. But those ocean blue eyes!

10. The Mighty Storm by Samantha Towle

Jake Wethers is the sexy bad-boy lead singer of world-renowned band, The Mighty Storm. Tru Bennett was Jake's childhood best friend, until he and his family moved to America and Jake didn't see Tru for 12 years. Tru, now a music journalist, is sent to interview Jake for her column—and the sparks return immediately. The band offers Tru her dream job of travelling on tour with them, but her boyfriend of two years makes the decision difficult. How long can she ignore her connection with rockstar Jake?

11. Down To You by M. Leighton

And you thought Christian Grey was Fifty shades of f*cked up? Down To You will not disappoint. Olivia meets Cash Davenport, the bad boy who makes her insides melt. And the next day, she meets his twin brother, Nash, who's just as sexy plus incredibly successful—only he's taken. Neither guy is good for Olivia, but she finds herself falling for both of them at once. Which twin will she choose?

12. Driven by K. Bromberg

Maybe you loved Fifty Shades, but were annoyed with Ana Steele's character. She's quiet, subordinate, and sometimes a pushover. Driven mirrors Fifty Shades, except the protagonist, Rylee, isn't afraid to speak her mind. She has no intention of letting Colton, the controlling yet sexy racecar driver, get in her pants—but their chemistry is undeniable. Will she give him the green flag?

13. Seducing Cinderella by Gina L. Maxwell

Reid Andrews, a famous MMA fighter, gets a shoulder injury that could end his career for good—only months before his big fight. He goes to Lucie Miller, a physical therapist, who is hopelessly in love with a man who doesn't see her as anything more than a friend. Reid offers up lessons in the art of seduction in exchange for a quick healing. As he's coaching Lucie towards winning the man's affection, he can't help but wish she was chasing after him.

14. Naked by Raine Miller

Brynne Bennett (the very Anastasia Steele-esque protagonist) is an American art student and part-time model living in London. When uber-successful businessman Ethan Blackstone (her Christian Grey-esque counterpart, of course) buys one of Brynne's nude portraits, he becomes enthralled with her and they start to date. If the Fifty Shades books made you feel some type of way, then this series is sure to have you turning pages.

Happy Reading!

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Art of Making Books

I saw this on NPR's website and wanted to share with you.

When Making Books Was As Much Of An Art As Writing Them

Listen·4:

 NOAH ADAMS

When was the last time you picked up a book and really looked at how it was made: the typeface, the feel of the paper, the way the words look on the page? Today, when people can read on their phones, some books never even make it to paper.

Once, bookmaking was an art as refined and distinct as the writing it presents. And in some places, like Larkspur Press in Kentucky, it still is.

For more than 40 years Gray Zeitz has been creating books one at a time in his two-story print shop near the town of Monterey. He works with the some of the state's finest writers, including Wendell Berry and Bobby Ann Mason, and his Larkspur Pressturns out just a few editions a year.

"I have had, and still do have, printers that come in that used to work on presses like this and they are just tickled to death," says Zeitz, 69, showing me his 1915 Chandler & Price printing press. He cuts stacks of paper on another machine that dates from the late 1800s.

Zeitz left the University of Kentucky in the winter of 1974, half a semester away from finishing an English degree. He'd been learning letterpress work – the way individually set type makes an impression on high-quality paper –- and he wanted to make fine books, especially poetry. At that time, the letterpress craft was fading as printers moved to faster offset printing.

But to Zeitz the moment seemed right. He didn't need electricity at first, or indoor plumbing. He'd grow tobacco to sell and they'd raise calves. Kentucky writers would be featured.

Later, to pay the bills, he added in smaller print jobs. "There was a point when my wife, Jean, came up to me and said, 'Gray, you're either going to have to start doing some of these jobs — job printing — or you're going to have to go out and get a job."

He began taking orders for things like business cards and wedding announcements. "That became interesting to me as well."

In those days, Monterey was attracting hippies and musicians and artists and candlemakers. Early on they started a fall festival at Larkspur, and people come from all over the country to see the books Zeitz creates — to touch and feel their hand-sewn bindings and see the perfection Larkspur strives for in the pages.

"This whole concept of texture and lightness, there's a kind of sensual quality just to the book itself," says his friend Jack Campbell, who works in industrial design.

Gabrielle Fox is a professional bookbinder who's done lots of high-end work for Larkspur. Every summer she goes out to Colorado to teach at the American Academy of Bookbinding.

"And the books that they sell to their students to begin learning are Larkspur Press books," she says. "The students come from all over the world to that school."

Zeitz has one full-time employee: Leslie Shane. "I have just sewn 20 of this little book of poetry by Erik Reece," she says. "It's called Animals at Full Moon. Now I'm just cutting them

Larkspur only brings out about four books a year, and they can be two years behind. If Gray Zeitz knew how to use a computer he could open the Larkspur Press home page and see the covers of 100 books he has on his shelves in inventory.

Some of the prices reach $200 for special editions, but the press is best known for the books they can sell for $20 or $25.

In another part of the shop, Gray Zeitz shows me the lead type, which he sets — each letter and space — by hand. "When the ink's ready we'll put this on the press and pull a proof and see what we have."

At day's end Zeitz shuts down his shop and walks up the hill to his house, which is a fading purple.

It's a quiet house; Jean passed away four summers ago. His two dogs come over from playing in the creek.

"Well, I don't intend to retire," he says. "If I did retire then I'd just print books, so I might as well stay in business."

Happy Reading!

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I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend.

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Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore review

Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore  by Matthew Sullivan

Genre:  Mystery

Publisher: Scribner

Source: Public Library

Book Description:

When a bookshop patron commits suicide, his favorite store clerk must unravel the puzzle he left behind in this fiendishly clever debut novel from an award-winning short story writer.

Lydia Smith lives her life hiding in plain sight. A clerk at the Bright Ideas bookstore, she keeps a meticulously crafted existence among her beloved books, eccentric colleagues, and the BookFrogs—the lost and lonely regulars who spend every day marauding the store’s overwhelmed shelves.

But when Joey Molina, a young, beguiling BookFrog, kills himself in the bookstore’s upper room, Lydia’s life comes unglued. Always Joey’s favorite bookseller, Lydia has been bequeathed his meager worldly possessions. Trinkets and books; the detritus of a lonely, uncared for man. But when Lydia flips through his books she finds them defaced in ways both disturbing and inexplicable. They reveal the psyche of a young man on the verge of an emotional reckoning. And they seem to contain a hidden message. What did Joey know? And what does it have to do with Lydia?

As Lydia untangles the mystery of Joey’s suicide, she unearths a long buried memory from her own violent childhood. Details from that one bloody night begin to circle back. Her distant father returns to the fold, along with an obsessive local cop, and the Hammerman, a murderer who came into Lydia’s life long ago and, as she soon discovers, never completely left. Bedazzling, addictive, and wildly clever, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore is a heart-pounding mystery that perfectly captures the intellect and eccentricity of the bookstore milieu and will keep you guessing until the very last page.​

Review:

This was a great read. I love the twists and turns and the seamless transition between the present and the past. Lydia has a secret and when Joey hangs himself in the store it sends her on a trip to her past.

As she's piecing together Joey's story, she discovers a connection to her father and ultimately to the secret of the Hammerman. When her childhood friend, Raj, shows up together they work to discover who Joey was and his connection to them both.

This story will keep you in suspense and you will discover the Hammerman's identity at the end. I highly recommend this book.

Happy Reading!

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My Domino Review

My Domino  by Roy Cross

Genre:  Mystery novella

Publisher: Publishing Push

Source: Sent for review

Book Description:

Domino is the story of Miss Patricia Lewin, a spinster lady who, having saved the life of a dying cat, finds that to some extent they can communicate with each other and this leads to a nail biting mystery which is hard to put down.

Review:

This is a nine chapter story that I enjoyed. I would love to see it as a longer, more developed book. Roy has told an interesting story and I was into the characters and the story, but would have enjoyed it more, if it were longer. I liked the connection between Domino and Pattie and the detective that she meets.

The characters were well developed, but you only get a glimpse of them and the relationship to the cat needs to be explained in depth. Overall, It's a good start for the author and I hope he writes longer books in the future.

Thanks to Charles for sending this book to me for an honest review.

Happy Reading!

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Bookish quotes

1. "A book is a dream that you hold in your hand."

— Neil Gaiman

2. "What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though."

― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

3. "Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul."

— Joyce Carol Oates

4. "To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark."

— Victor Hugo

5. "What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die."

— Anne Lamott

6. "When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young."

— Maya Angelou

7. "A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe."

— Madeleine L’Engle

8. "We read to know that we are not alone."

— C.S. Lewis

9. "Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss."

— Nora Ephron

10. "What is reading but silent conversation?"

— Walter Savage Landor

11. "You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive."

— James Baldwin

12. "Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing."

― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

13. "I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library."

― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

14. "Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live."

― Gustave Flaubert

15. "Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you."

― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

16. "I read a book one day and my whole life was changed."

― Orhan Pamuk, The New Life

17. "Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere."

— Mary Schmich

18. "Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it."

― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

19. "It's a great blessing if one can lose all sense of time, all worries, if only for a short time, in a book."

― Nella Last

20. "Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book."

― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

21. "The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend."

— Oliver Goldsmith

22. "You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend."

— Paul Sweeney

23. "Books may well be the only true magic."

― Alice Hoffman

24. "Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly—they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced."

―Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

25. "Reading takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere."

— Hazel Rochman

26. "Wherever I am, if I've got a book with me, I have a place I can go and be happy."

— J.K. Rowling

27. "Once you learn to read, you will be forever free."

— Frederick Douglass

 Happy Reading!

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Antonia Fraser

Came across this in The Guardian and wanted to share with you.

Antonia Fraser: ‘I was forced to learn typing as a punishment for being uppish’

The award-winning author on morning rituals, the importance of a pleasant break at lunchtime and why she has not worked after dinner since 1968

 ‘Swimming is the best sport I know for reflecting on history’ … Antonia Fraser.

Saturday 11 November 2017 05.01 EST

Aclose encounter with cats begins my writing day. Ferdy and Bella were originally Mayhew Animal Home rescue kittens; nowadays they have a way with technology that means that printing out overnight emails becomes a sophisticated version of cat-and-mouse. I eject them from my eyrie, as my writing room is known: they lie outside the door, hoping for another technological treat.

The room is on the fourth floor of the house, views both ways towards Southall and our beautiful garden square (my desk faces Southall) and was originally the nursery; so I changed the name firmly from nursery to eyrie to promote the notion of solitude.

Now the day will progress with total calm, won’t it, since the telephone bell is turned off, while the mobile is banished during the morning. I’ve also invested in a special computer for work, so that while I’m upstairs I do not receive those delightful distracting emails for which my baser self is secretly longing. I’ve always written on some form of typewriter, now a computer, since I was forced to learn typing on Saturdays at my convent school as a punishment for being uppish. In consequence I’m a touch typist – actually the most useful skill I ever acquired; so much for uppishness.

At this point in my day, I work with aforesaid total calm from about 9.30 until lunchtime. Ideally I then go out to a local Italian restaurant, preferably with someone who talks brilliantly about themselves, not totally impossible to achieve in London W11. I can then covertly mull over the morning’s work. I never work in the afternoon, preferring to go swimming in a local health club, for more mulling as I slowly and happily traverse the pool for 20 minutes. Swimming is the best sport I know for reflecting seriously on history. In the early evening I go back upstairs, but it will be for reading over the day’s pages, and correcting them, rather than something more creative.

I have never worked after dinner since 1968 when I was writing Mary Queen of Scots and my then husband [Hugh Fraser] was away in his constituency. I took the opportunity to work until 4am. When I read it through in the morning, it was total rubbish. This taught me a sharp lesson. Harold [Pinter] was the exact opposite: he regularly worked all night or half the night or most of the night, depending on where the inspiration took him. In that respect we were, like many happy married couples, the embodiment of Jack Sprat and his wife.

Refer­ence books are avail­able online, but for serious work I still prefer cuddling up to a heavy tome

The reason that this pattern of work-in-the-morning-only is something so deeply ingrained in me, is that I began trying to write history seriously when I had six children born in 10 years. I have actually written all my life, but history was It. So I devised a way of working like a bat out of hell, or anyway a bat out of the nursery, the moment I could cram the children into cradles, kindergartens, schools ... with the wild hope they would stay there. (There are wicked stories of notices on my door saying “Only come in if you have broken something”, which I utterly deny.) Under the circumstances, I never ever suffered from writer’s block.

Today the discipline remains. I still feel odd if I don’t work in the morning, and if I am not alone in the eyrie (with Ferdy and Bella outside). The computer is quite companion enough: “Dear Google, what year did Robert Peel die?” So much easier than combing the four biographies of Peel I possess, looking at me reproachfully from the bookshelves that wallpaper the room. Although over the years I have collected reference books to which I am profoundly grateful, such as The Historyof Parliament in seven volumes (available online, but for serious work I still prefer cuddling up to a heavy tome), which was invaluable for my last two books.

I will end on the ideal break, since every routine needs the occasional interruption. For me, this would be attending a literary festival crowded with amiable well wishers, who have only one ambition, which is to buy my book at the end of the talk. For their sake, I will put up with the first question I am now most frequently asked: “Lady Antonia, are you still writing?” The answer is: “Yes. What else to do with my day?”

In brief

Hours: three ferocious, two milder
Words: 3,000 maximum, three minimum
Refreshment: a glass of pinot grigio at lunch to celebrate if things have gone well, and console if they haven’t

Happy Reading!

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