Patti O'Shea's Blog

My latest audio book was Bad Astronomy by Philip Plait. I’d seen retweets from a Twitter account called Bad Astronomer, but I’d figured it was a parody account like Bronx Zoo Cobra or Fake AP Stylebook, but whenever I clicked on the links, the articles were to legitimate astronomy sites/articles. When I spotted this book on Audible, the pieces fell into place.

The book is written by an astronomer and he debunks common misconceptions about his profession, the stars, planets, meteors, etc. He covers a fairly wide range of topics including Hollywood and what moviemakers get wrong. Like small meteorites (they only go from meteor to meteorite if they hit the ground) almost never start fires when they hit Earth. They’re too cold. Big ones, however, are another story and he cites an impact that happened in Russia in the 1800s. I’d seen pictures of that in the past and knew exactly what he was talking about.

We also learn that there is no dark side of the moon. There’s the far side of the moon. We don’t see it because of orbits and rotation, but all sides of the moon are exposed to sunlight, we just never see it when it happens on the far side.

There’s an entire chapter on the Hubble telescope which gave me a lot of new information. Like the telescope doesn’t have a lens, it has mirrors. The telescope has a restricted zone where it won’t be utilized because sunlight is too bright for a lot of the instruments on board. Every year, astronomers put in proposals for time on the telescope. Six times more applications are received than slots available.

Many of the common misconceptions he covered were things I hadn’t heard of before. For example, apparently many people believe you can see stars in the middle of the day if you stand in the bottom of a well. It’s not really true, although the answer is a bit more complicated than that. This was the first time I’d heard of it, though.

Sometimes I knew the right answer already. Like Earth has seasons because of it’s tilt and how that changes as we orbit. Apparently many people think it’s related to our distance from the sun, but that doesn’t account for the southern hemisphere whose seasons are opposite of the northern hemisphere.

I learned a lot from the book and this is despite having an astronomy class in college and an interest in the topic. The author gives the information in an interesting manner and the voice actor read well. He did a kind of Superman voiceover kind of thing for the Hollywood chapter that was kind of amusing.

If you have even the slightest interest in astronomy or curiosity about what you think you know that’s wrong on this topic, I recommend this book. I found it entertaining and worthwhile.

Nonzero by Robert Wright is a nonfiction book that looks at how human society has evolved from small hunter/gatherer bands to large nations and beyond to alliances among nations. The title comes from gaming. In a non-zero sum game, people work together because they’re in the same boat. A zero sum game is when someone has to lose for someone else to win.

The theory that the book proposes is that because of human nature and the advantages to non-zero sum behavior that our societies and cultures were destined to head from small bands to multi-state nations. He further proposes that cultural evolution and physical evolution drive each other forward until a certain point and that we’ve passed this time. That now cultural evolution is the driving force and that we are controlling the evolution of other creatures by tinkering with their genes. For example, crops are being genetically engineered.

We are geared toward complexity. That while our massive and complicated nations weren’t inevitable, they were so probable that it’s incredible. He also speculates on what further cultural evolution portends for our future.

I listened to this book on my iPod, which is a different experience than actually reading. At first, I had some trouble getting used to the narrator, but once we got going, he was fine. Sometimes, though, the way he chose to emphasize a word or sentence conveyed a kind of attitude. It’s difficult for me to guess whether the author meant some of this to be taken the way the narrator spoke the information.

I can tell you from personal experience that the reader for my Through a Crimson Veil story didn’t check with me about anything. Consequently, my heroine’s name is pronounced incorrectly through the entire audio. Yes, the narrator is saying it the way it’s normally pronounced. Mika doesn’t pronounce it that way. You would have guessed I’d at least be asked how to pronounce the various branches of demons since those were made up. I wasn’t. Given this, I always assume the reader is doing his or her own thing and try not to ascribe attitude to the author.

That said, I found Nonzero to be largely fascinating. I will confess there was a section that was less than riveting, but it picked up again after a couple of chapters. It was particularly interesting to hear his arguments about history and how/why things played out the way they did. We cover everything from Polynesian "big men" to Medieval lords. Seeing history from this angle was interesting and I found the arguments to be compelling.

The predictions of the future were also interesting. Some of it didn’t exactly leave me feeling all warm and fuzzy, but unfortunately all too believable. One of his predictions was for more terrorism because of more "unhappy campers" at least in the short term as we transition from where we are now to what he sees as the next level.

Overall, I found the book to be well worth the time it took to listen to it. Not all of it held my attention, but that could easily be because of my personal interests. I’d recommend it to anyone interested in cultural anthropology or who finds the author’s premise interesting enough to learn more.

The Wallflower by Jan Freed is another of my favorite books. The heroine is a twentysomething professional woman and witnesses a murder. She’s put under protection until she can testify, but someone betrays her. Not knowing who to trust, she decides to hide on her own–by pretending to be a high school senior. The hero is her English teacher.

This is one of the few old books that I loved that’s actually available for the Kindle! I’m not getting rid of my paper copy, but it’s appealing to me to have the books I really loved in multiple formats so I can read it wherever and whenever and however I want. (Since it’s a July 2011 reissue from Harlequin, I’m assuming that it’s available for all the different ereaders. No links for them, sorry. I have a Kindle, so I was on that page.)

The book is just plain good and a lot of fun. One of the things that appealed to me was the idea of going back to high school and being cool. The heroine, Sarah, gets to do this and she helps the other geeks live up to their potentials.

Okay, well, I just stopped to reread the book. Some of the references are a bit dated since the book was published in 1998, but I still enjoyed it. The heroine’s growth arc was something I’d forgotten. She starts the book as an ambitious career woman just looking for feathers in her cap, but not really thrilled with her job, to someone who uses her professional skills to do something that matters to her.

The relationship she had with the kids was one of my favorite parts of the story. This is a book rich with secondary characters. The heroine’s best friend and their relationship was strong. The relationship among the secondary characters. It wasn’t as if they all revolved around the hero or heroine; they felt as if they had lives of their own. If that makes sense. Some books make the secondary characters feel as if they don’t exist out of context of the h/h, but Jan Freed does an tremendous job making everyone feel 3D and real.

The book isn’t a true romantic suspense. (It was originally published in the SuperRomance line.) The suspense aspect is really just there to set the story in motion. There’s a bit of wrap up of that at the end, but by and large, it’s a contemporary (circa 1998 contemporary) romance. It’s also a relationship book. Not only the relationship between the h/h, but their relationships with other people as well.

Highly recommended.

Flashback by Terri Herrington is a time travel romance originally released by Silhouette Shadows. I really loved the Shadows line, and except for a few titles that I still need to hunt down, I have (nearly) the complete line. To my great disappointment, Silhouette ended it after a few years.

In Flashback the heroine is a photographer who has some old man come up to her at a shoot and say some weird stuff. It freaks her out and then he rushes off, gets hit by a car, and dies. This shakes her up and she feels responsible.

She picks up an old camera and she decides to do some shooting with it in her home. It ends up transporting her to the 1950s, but it takes a toll on her health. In the 50s, the hero lives in the house that’s now hers. He’s a doctor, but he’s not practicing thanks to some traumatic stuff from the Korean War. They fall in love, but the heroine’s sister keeps calling her back to the present. Every time the heroine travels either to the 50s or back to the present, her health is impacted more. Finally the hero tells her she can’t come anymore, that he couldn’t live with her dying.

The old man that said something weird to the heroine? That, of course, was the hero.

I loved that this was a time travel to an unusual era. Normally, with time travel romance to the past, it’s almost always somewhere in the 1800s. I’ve enjoyed many of those books, too, but it was nice to see something different. The 50s are definitely different.

There’s angst in this story. The hero is beating himself up over Korea and the heroine is torn between the hero and her love for her twin sister. Since her sister can call her back to the present at any time, the heroine can’t have any contact with her if she wants to stay with the hero. She’ll be forced to choose–if she can find a way to stay in the past at all.

Now I feel like rereading this story, but I’ve wanted to do that with almost every book I’ve reviewed here.

One of the books on my keeper/reread shelf is Dreamer’s Heart by Lynn Turner. This came out in the mid-90s and has a story I really enjoyed.

The heroine dreams about a bomber blowing up things. The dreams come true, and when she has another, she knows she has no choice except go to the police. She knows they won’t believe her, but her conscience won’t let her ignore it.

The hero is a police detective, and because he’s the most patient one on the task force, he gets assigned the job of taking statements from the public about the bombings. Rhys calls these people who come in the screwball brigade. The heroine picks up this phrase (she’s psychic), and fires it back at the hero as she leaves.

Then the bombing happens, exactly the way she told him it would, and Rhys turns up on her doorstep the next morning. When the feds show up and take over, the heroine is the only way for him to catch the bomber.

I really loved this story! The h/h have great banter back and forth throughout the book and Rhys was hot. The heroine is no one’s pushover.

A reviewer on Amazon compared this book to Linda Howard’s Dream Man. There are some similarities, but I didn’t think the books were that close. Yes, both heroines are psychic, see crimes, and help the police, but those are macro things. At the micro level they’re different stories.

The fun for me was the interaction between the h/h more than the suspense. They’re just so good together and I was pulling for them to become a couple early in the book. Rhys is alpha, but he’s not a jerk and he doesn’t use the heroine or betray her. They’re a team all the way through and I love it when a story is setup that way. Not that there isn’t some friction between the characters–they’re attracted and don’t want to be–but they both have the goal of catching the bomber and they both need each other to reach this end.

I am a huge Julie Garwood fan. Not only is she an awesome writer, she’s a really nice woman and very gracious as I gushed all over her at an RWA conference. Or two. I always say I don’t read historicals, but she’s the exception. I love Garwood’s historical romances. They’re awesome! One of my all-time favorites is Ransom.

The heroine rescues a small boy who’s been kidnapped by the villain and she returns him to Scotland to reunite him with his family. She meets the hero when she claims to be his betrothed and orders him (through an intermediary) to come to her. The hero is the little boy’s uncle/close friend of the family. The hero shows up with his men, and when he sees the boy, he escorts them both to the boy’s home.

Um, lots of stuff ensues along the way, of course, and the heroine is determined to return home. She has a mission. I’m never sure how much to say, but it’s a romance, so you know the h/h fall in love.

One of my favorite things about Julie Garwood’s stories is her humor. OMG, I laugh when I read her books. Her characters are awesome, too, and I care about them and am rooting for them throughout the story.

I found her kind of by accident. I was looking for new authors to read and I decided that if someone had a lot of books at the bookstore, that must mean they’re really good. Julie Garwood had a lot of books. I grabbed one of them, The Gift and loved it enough to go back for more. As much as I loved my first Garwood, though, Ransom remains my absolute favorite.

Highly recommended.

One of my all-time favorite books is The Morning Side of Dawn by Justine Davis. This was a Silhouette Intimate Moments from 1995.

The heroine, Cassandra, is a super model who’s taking time away to reassess her life. She’s also being stalked, so it’s a good time to get away. The hero, Dar, designs and builds wheelchairs for racing. He’s a double amputee who competes in these races. He also has a huge attitude problem. But when the stalker follows Cassandra out west and she needs help, it’s Dar that steps in to provide it Reluctantly.

This is a book that I’ve read and reread over and over. One of the themes I liked about the book is how people judge others based on appearance and often don’t bother to look deeper. This book shows two different sides of the same coin. Cassandra is only seen for her beauty, but no one seems to see beneath the facade to the person she is below the surface. On the other hand, people look at Dar and see a man in a wheelchair. They don’t see him as a person or notice how gorgeous he is. They’re too caught up on his physical challenge. It’s the fact that they are the flip side of the same coin that allows Dar to finally see that he’s judging Cassandra the same way others have judged him.

Justine Davis is one of my favorite authors. I loved a lot of her books for Silhouette (especially the Intimate Moments line) and her futuristic romance, The Skypirate, is still my favorite in this subgenre. She has a way of really making me care about her characters and she excels at torturing them. You know how I feel about that.

The Morning Side of Dawn is no exception on the torture front. The h/h are immediately attracted to each other, but Dar doesn’t want to get close. His attitude problem, BTW, came before the accident that took his legs. Most people don’t look beyond that either and make assumptions, but Cassandra doesn’t and that’s part of what gets under Dar’s skin, that the heroine really does care enough to get to know who he is at his heart.

I’m not doing justice to this book at all, but trust me, it’s awesome and I highly recommend it.