thefourthvine | Wanted: Recommendations

Dear, dear people: REC ME SOMETHING, PLEASE. Two things, actually. One for the earthling, one for Best Beloved.

Classical Music

The earthling listens to classical music for about two to four hours each evening; it helps him go through his evening routine and get ready for bed. It has to have certain characteristics:

It can't be super super slow (because he eats to it, and he tends to suck in time to the music, and evening feedings take long enough without something slowing him way down); kind of slow is fine and even welcome.
It can't be too fast (because see above about eating, plus, this is night-time music).
It can't be too varied (it needs to kind of all go together); no Surprise Symphony or anything.
It needs to have, at minimum, several instruments (like, three or more is fine, but one is not - his attention is just not caught by, say, a piano without any other instruments).

For my sanity, it also needs to have these characteristics:

It needs to be, overall, pretty long (many individual bits is fine, but they all need to add up to something fairly long).
It needs not to be by Ravel or Rachmaninoff. I’m sorry. It just does.

As examples, here are the three things we listen to:

Handel's Water Music
Some Schubert
Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons (The earthling really likes the violin in this.)

I have heard these pieces so many times that I find myself walking in time to them when they aren’t even on. I hum them all day long. I wait patiently for the bits I still like, and think increasingly hostile thoughts about Handel and Vivaldi. I realize repetition is good for a baby, but it is making me crazy. And yet I do not know enough about classical music to know what else might interest a baby who likes these three pieces.

So, if you do know about classical music - can you rec me some stuff? Ideally, it will be available via Amazon’s mp3 service, because I can preview it for the earthling there and see his reaction before I buy it.

Romance Novels

I have presented Best Beloved with a challenge: I will pick romance novels based entirely on their titles (usually in themed sets around a certain word or concept - I am nothing if not theme-oriented), and she will read them and review them on GoodReads. This has provided many hours of entertainment in our household. Except. I have apparently done some terrible, terrible things to her with this. I’ve happened upon some good ones (Nalini Singh, for example, or Lisa Kleypas), but I’ve also managed to pick out some things that caused the blood to drain from her face as she stared at them. She’s starting to twitch when the books come in.

So: have you read any good romance novels lately? I just need a few recs, ones I can build a theme around, so that there’s a cookie or two waiting for her in the seas of badness, so her will doesn’t break. (I don’t want them all to be good - the bad ones provide the most entertainment on GoodReads! But, as has been proven, I can find the bad ones without trying at all; it’s the good ones I need help with.)

Unfortunately, I can’t tell you what she likes in a romance novel (although I can link you to her GoodReads account). I can tell you that she does not like:

Anything with a secret baby. She’s also made geechy by, for example, blackmailing a pregnant woman to get revenge on her dead husband. (The actual plot of one of the ones I found for her. No, really. I was not at all kidding when I said I had no trouble finding bad ones.)
Anything that comes in trade paperack only. Apparently these are...special. One of the early ones she read featured a protagonist with two cocks. It scarred her. She now makes very sad noises when I buy her trade paperbacks, especially if they have warnings on the cover, or those covers that feature Sims-looking people. If you can recommend a good trade paperback one, I’ll get it for her, but I’ll need some help motivating her to read it.
Anything that is really really short and has a title like The Basque Renegade’s Blackmailed Love Child’s Farmer Bride’s Cousin Georgina. I get wounded looks when I get these for her. I don’t know why.
Anything where there’s lots of talk of God and devotion and someone dies at the end.
Anything featuring rape or domination (like, the hero is the master of the heroine, kind of thing) - what she would term “old school” romance.

If you read romance, your input would be greatly appreciated.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I really like choral masses by Vivaldi and Mozart, but those vary a lot, in terms of tempo, so probably not so good.

ROMANCE NOVELS, though. I read a DISGUSTING amount of those, mostly the trade paperbacks. Not the creepy ones, though. I usually stick to Avon's Historical Romances, since they're reasonably long (not like those teensy little Harlequins) and tend to have lots of social drama along with ridiculous sex scenes. Anything by Teresa Medeiros is pretty good. I also really liked Kinley MacGregor's pirate series. All the women tend to be fairly spunky, in her books, too. She also writes under the name Sherrilyn Kenyon.

For modern stuff, Suzanne Brockmann has a LONG series about Navy SEALS and terrorism and the women who fall in love with Navy SEALS, or something. And a gay FBI agent. Those are all pretty good, although the first few books drag a litte. Her earlier work is also fun, but much shorter -- less terrorism, more romance.

I also really liked Sophia Nash's A Dangerous Beauty, which is another Avon's historicals.

And I totally agree with everyone who recced Georgette Heyer, even though there are no sex scenes in hers. These Old Shades is BRILLIANT.

I read one of Brockmann's SEAL romances, and was really thrown by the gay FBI agent at the end of it discovering his romantic interest was evil in a kind of skeevy way. It seemed kind of moralizing to have the good gay guy not end up with someone at the end. (I can't remember the title, unfortunately, and gave the book away.) Are any of her other stories less negative than that? I love the SEAL plotline, is the thing, and would be happy if the FBI agent eventually finds love.

I haven't actually read the series in ages, so I don't remember! I thought that Jules gets a happy ending with a nice guy, but I might be remembering that wrong. I was actually REALLY invested in the whole Max-and-Gina thing, at that point. I know I really liked both Breaking Point and Hot Target, though.

Thank you! I was reconsidering Brockmann recently -- I think I read the novel of hers at a bad time, when I had no other good options at the airport or something -- and wished that I could ask someone. I'm going to check those titles out. If there's even a vague chance that Jules will end up happily paired off, I'll still enjoy the series as a whole, if that makes any sense. I thought that it was a one-shot in a series, as it were, and so that that was the end of it.

Jules gets a happy ending with Robin, the so-far-back-in-the-closet-his-grandmother-couldn't-find-him-looking-for-her-shoes actor brother of Cosmo's love interest, Jane. Robin and Jules got a novella of their own last winter.

Oooooh. Intriguing! Thank you!

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