Wanted: Recommendations

[thefourthvine]

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.

Comments

[sinsense.livejournal.com]

Susan Elizabeth Phillips -- hurt/comforty stuff, a little bit of mean-man, but nothing like rape.
Jennifer Crusie -- highly recommended (other people's recs are solid), screwball comedy type stories (think 50s romantic comedy). My favorite is Bet Me, but I think it depends on the person. I also really enjoyed Anyone But You, Getting Even With Bradley, and What the Lady Wants. Do not get her mystery-romances that she co-authored with some dude, they are terrible.
Mary Balogh -- particularly the "Slightly" series.
Karen Robards -- not particularly good, but I have one or two on my "to keep" pile. Scandalous is enjoyable.
Kristan Higgins -- sweet, funny, first person but not too jarring. I loved Catch of the Day.
Elizabeth Hoyt -- her "Prince" series is quite good, as hetrez mentioned.

I don't particularly like Vicki Lewis Thompson -- she has a tendency to excuse the sexuality of her main couple by having the heroine endangered by a sexually menacing man or woman (like, it's okay that they're having sex, because there's this creepy sex-obsessed pervert who's doing it wrong, see) -- but I liked Nerd In Shining Armor and still have it.

Susan Wiggs is uneven for me, but there's a Lakeside Cottage book that I enjoyed.

I know there's someone with a last name of Bourne (IIRC) who does a "Spymaster" series that I liked. It has a blindness trope (blind heroine who magically sees again), but is otherwise fun. [See hetrez's recommendation.]

That's all I can think of offhand. Hope that helps!

[hypertwink.livejournal.com]

I recced Sussan Elizabeth Phillips before i saw your comment. I loved reading her. Just finished Ain't She Sweet? Awesome. My faves are Kiss An Angel, Fancy Pants and Dream a Little Dream.

[sinsense.livejournal.com]

I haven't read Fancy Pants yet, actually, but I've been looking for it. I really enjoyed Kiss an Angel and Dream a Little Dream, though, definitely.

[hypertwink.livejournal.com]

Fancy Pants is like the mack daddy of SEP romances. Hope you can find a copy...I found mine in a used bookstore.

[omnia-mutantur.livejournal.com]

I found The Nerd Who Loved Me awesome, particularly for the supporting cast.

[sinsense.livejournal.com]

That one wasn't bad, actually -- I'd forgotten about that one! The other ones I read I didn't particularly enjoy, though.

[rozasharn.livejournal.com]

Seconding Nerd in Shining Armor.

[sinsense.livejournal.com]

I read another two of hers, and they didn't approach the funky fun of that one. I really did enjoy that one, though, I should say.

[brownbetty]

Do not get her mystery-romances that she co-authored with some dude, they are terrible.

They're not bad if you skip the chapters the dude writes? You know when you hit them though, cuz ugh.

[sinsense.livejournal.com]

Oh man, agreed. I -- and fearlesstemp, I found out later -- made the mistake of buying one of those in hardcover, because we were separately so overjoyed to see a new Crusie. Fatal mistake! Grump grump growl.