I've been on a crappy romance kick lately, courtesy of Kindle Unlimited and a lot of free time watching my youngest's swim practices.
22/100 - Beauty and the Beast by Vivienne Savage
23/100 - Red and the Wolf
Retellings of classic fairy tale stories as adult romance novels. I really enjoyed the first one, but the second was only okay. Part of that might be because Beauty & the Beast is one of my all-time favorite stories, in its many adaptations. But part of it was also that the world just didn't draw me in, and I didn't enjoy the characters as well in Red.
24/100 - Wanted by the Devil by Joanna Blake
25/100 - Ride with the Devil
26/100 - Trust the Devil
I have mixed feelings about this trilogy. Trashy romances in the internet era just aren't what they were when I was picking of Harlequins at garage sales, I guess... The first story was sort of sweet but a little odd because the heroine is so young, and there are some elements that were sort of disturbing to me relating to that. The second was better, but still very much the young, inexperienced girl with the big, bad biker. The third was the only one that had a real adult as the central female character, and while the characters and stories were entertaining enough I was left feeling like I kind of don't get where the romance genre is going. They almost felt written by/for men rather than women, echoing soft porn more than romance with the youth/innocence aspect of the heroines, the boasting all of the men do about their pre-heroine sexual exploits, and the exaggerated masculinity of the heroes.
26/100 - Sweet as Sin by J.T. Geissinger
27/100 - Make Me Sin
28/100 - Sin With Me
Another trilogy of romance stories I picked up to take with me to the pool. Each is the love story of a member of a superstar rock band, and they get pretty dark. Each of the heroes has a secret in his past that shapes his interactions with the heroines, who happen to be best friends, and keeps the story moving along. I enjoyed these more than the Devil trilogy, though I have noticed a trend of poor copy editing in all of these Kindle romances that kind of grates on me as I read.
29/100 - Ruined by the Biker by Evelyn Glass
By far the worst Kindle title I've picked up thus far. Just a head-hopping, sprawling mess of a story, full of typos and usage errors, and only half the book was actually this story - the rest was teaser chapters for the author's other work. I barely made it a third of the way in before I abandoned this one, which is something I almost never do. It was so bad that it convinced me to return to my to-read pile of print books for my next book.
30/100 - Better than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie by Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter S. Thompson is a bit of a personal hero of mine and somewhere along the line my daughter and I got into a conversation about "gonzo" journalism. I picked this one up for her as an introduction to his work. Some of it is compiled from the work he did for Rolling Stone, covering the Clinton campaign, mixed in with personal musings and recollections to exemplify Thompson's trademark style. Darkly funny, deeply cynical, and sharply insightful into political trends and attitudes that persist to this day, I think this ranks among his best work (although Hell's Angels will probably always be my personal favorite).