Kelly, this was verra good. (sorry I couldn't help it.)

"Any day now I'm going to drag out my Loreena McKennitt CDs"

Yeah, unfortunately I tried to read it as a very frustrated teenager, when my book selection process was basically: "boning or GTFO."

Ah! You hadn't hit the endless boning sections, gotcha. Yeah, that's annoying about the beginning of the book.

You're in for a ride. Also, when [you know when] happens, we can hold hands and scream at the screen.

I'm actually really enjoying all the shaggy randos.

Who is the guy who was following her around all day? The really hilarious dirty dude with the flowery curses? I want him to have his own show. At one point called someone "a fornicator of women and a shagger of wee beasties when there's no women around" and I damn near fell in love.

Ooo ooo ooo!!! Is the Outlander recap going to be a weekly thing?! Please say yes!

I just mainlined the first book over the last four or five days, since watching the pilot. The sex definitely becomes a LOT more frequent in the second half.

Free advice: If the first novel was too-history, too-little-sexin' for you, do NOT read the other novels. So. Much. History.

There's a huge difference between "I don't like X" and "X is crap," though.

I did eventually finish the book, but I thought it was weird that she then also has to fight him at the end so that he has his will to live? Idk—the book got really weird from the beating scene and on. Between the beating and the butt rape and then having Claire recreate it at the monastery and then having Jamie…

In retrospect, I get it, but I used the term with no harm intended, no desire to minimize her accomplishment, and with a great admiration of romance novels. Even now, I think the greater issue is that we buy into the stereotypes projected onto the genre and concede the (ignorant) point that there is something chintzy…

We're still trying to figure out the best way to do a book club, but don't worry, it's something we've got in mind! And I'm definitely going to keep doing romance stuff as it comes up (and I've got a couple more ideas in the hopper that'll hopefully be fun).

Yeah, she's super, super sensitive about it, and it makes me sad, though I guess I'd be mad if I'd written this big ambitious work of speculative fiction with loads of research about the Jacobite rebellion and then the market was like "naw, here's the label you want." Especially in 1991, which was the damn dark ages…

This is part of the reason I've been writing about romance novels more lately — we're at a point where mystery novels and graphic novels and YA and science fiction and fantasy are all afforded some degree of open-mindedness by critics, and Game of Thrones is hugely popular and treated with a great deal of seriousness…

Oh, God, don't no one call it romance. I once called it romance on an AOL board — yeah, it was a million years ago — and the author jumped out from behind a rock to rip me a new 'un. Which kinda made it difficult to keep reading the books, because the author YELLED at me, er, in written form, because people like me…

Yes! I loved the first episode, and I'm so glad the first book gets 16 episodes instead of a measly 10 or something.

I FORGAVE HIM. *weeps* It's going to kill me when he does that. KILL ME. I'm going to cry, Kelly. Buckets and buckets.

BUCKETS.

SPOILER

Except for the scene where he beats her, of course. (I did eventually forgive him...300 pages later)

ETA: Thank the people on io9 for convincing me to finish the book. I was so so angry after the strapping scene and the rapey scene right after. SO ANGRY. But they all talked me into reading and 300 pages in, I…

I regretfully watched the first (free) episode online, and I'm hooked, but I don't want to pay for Starz. The struggle is real friends.