Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

Total number of books I own:

Sarah:
This number has greatly dropped since I’m moving next week, and in a fit of cleaning fury I dumped more than half my romance paperbacks, and more than half my other books as well. I’d have to estimate that I started with well over 400 and have dropped to the 150 range. Of course, this just means - I can buy more books once I am confronted with those sad and empty shelves.

Candy:
Ummm. Loads. 2,385. OK, that was a number I just pulled out of my ass. Seriously, I have no idea, but I have two shelves stacked double-deep with nothing but paperbacks, plus a two mini shelves full of an assortment of children’s books and paperbacks, plus two BIG shelves full of hardcovers and trade paperbacks. And I have a couple hundred other books in storage back in Malaysia, most of which I inherited from my siblings.

Last book I bought:

Sarah:
The Fearless Pregnancy by Victoria Clayton - sorry, not a romance. This book, should you be pregnant like me, will get you through the first trimester with a lot less anxiety.

Candy:
I needed to get my oil changed and forgot to bring along the book I was reading, so I ran into Borders real quick and bought Fool For Love by Eloisa James because it was there and I was mildly curious about what happened to Esme and Sebastian.

And yes, I’m the kind of person who will buy a paperback just because she has to wait 20 minutes in the Jiffy Lube waiting room, and the thought of being book-less terrifies her. THIS, ladies and gentlemen, is how a person’s TBR pile can start to spiral out of control.

Last book(s) I read:

Sarah:
The Fearless Pregnancy - Victoria Clayton

Mr. Impossible - Loretta Chase

Beyond Seduction - Emma Holly

The Pregnancy Bible - Keith Eddelman, Joanne Stone

Candy
The last book I finished was White Tigress by Jade Lee. I’m currently switching between Vera Nazarian’s Lords of the Rainbow and Fool For Love by Eloisa James. Poor Fabric of the Cosmos is getting short shrift.

Five books that mean a lot to me:

Sarah:
The Fearless Pregnancy: I’ve referred back to it constantly the past few months and it has done a lot to adjust my attitude about being pregnant.

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant: Acknowledges the male-centric telling of most bible stories, casts the story of Dinah, Jacob, Rachel and Leah in an entirely different light, and forced me to think more about the matriarchs of the old testament, and whether I should accept their stories as told.

Lamb: the Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore: I love Christopher Moore’s books. He’s so clever, absurd, and hysterical - The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove had tears running down my face I laughed so hard. But Lamb was not only funny, it completely changed the way I thought of and understood Christ, which is a tricky issue for me, as I converted to Judaism six years ago. Biff, Christ’s childhood pal, is resurrected by the angels to fill in the missing years of the gospel’s telling of Jesus’ life, specifically, puberty and adolescence, and in doing so reveals a human teenager and young adult who has to deal with damn huge responsibilties. It was amazing, and even though I knew what was going to happen, I cried at the end, then tied my husband down and made him read it.

Bitten by Kelley Armstrong: didn’t change the way I think about God, redemption, or the role of women in history, but reminded me that a good solid romance will make me cry and laugh - and reminded me that there are some out there. This book revitalized my interest and love of romance, after too many stumbles into poorly written novels. This book also ended up being half of the inspiration for my conversation with Candy that ended up as SBTB - there is a lot of good romance out there, and a lot of people who read it - discuss!

I have to think of a fifth? Without looking at my bookshelves? No way. I’ll have to add one later.

Candy:
Hmmm. OK, the first five that come to mind:

Something Wonderful by Judith McNaught: The first romance novel I learned to like. No, “like” is too lukewarm a word. I loved it. I devoured it. I read it in one big gulp, then I turned to page one and started re-reading it, then I re-read the good bits over and over.

Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh: Started my love affair with reading books written in dialect.

A Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth: It’s a parable about slavery. It’s a crazy seafaring adventure. It’s a revenge tale. It’s about the importance of appearances and social class in 18th-century England. It’s about the idea that wealth is a blessing from God, which to some people means that becoming wealthy by any means necessary is a Godly activity. It’s about an attempt to create a utopian multi-racial society. In short, it has it all, and I tend to talk about this book a lot.

The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton: You know, I didn’t really like to read when I was a kid. I mean, I liked it OK, but the TV still ruled supreme. Then I picked this up when I was 7 or 8 years old. Holy crap. Gnomes. Fairies. Elves. The Saucepan Man. A new magical land at the top of the tree every few days, and you had no idea if the land was going to be something awesome or something kind of creepy. I was hooked on reading from then on. By the time I was 10 or so I grew very disillusioned with Blyton because of her simplistic morality and the overt jingoism in her books (British is Best!) and switched to “edgier” kid’s authors like Roald Dahl and Joan Aiken, but I credit this book for starting me on the slippery slope to bibliophilia.

Warrior Scarlet by Rosemary Sutcliff: Another children’s book. This one’s set in ancient Britain. The hero, Drem, is a boy with a withered arm and it chronicles his struggles to kill his first wolf to prove his worthiness to his clan. It also features a very neat love story. Probably responsible for sparking my ongoing fascination with historical fiction of all kinds.

I have so many more I want to add… The Jungle Book, and my first Dragonlance book (SHUT UP, I was 13 at the time and it started my love affair with fantasy which in turn bloomed into a love affair with science fiction), The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (taught me that narrators are not necessarily trustworthy, a truly mind-boggling concept for an 11-year-old), Misery by Stephen King, Huckleberry Finn, The Twits by Roald Dahl....

Tag 5 people to do this:

Buh. Who hasn’t been tagged yet? Errr.

1. HelenKay
2. Monica
3. Angie (see? I didn’t call you Brianna this time!)
4. Giselle
5. Beth K., Slayer of Foley

Because Romances are written so tightly to genre, and the predictability factor is so important to their buyers, they can’t overhaul their image that much. The explicitness of the sex scenes is the only wiggle room they have.

Whuh? Has this woman checked out the romance section in her local bookstore lately? Horny vampires (color vision optional). Chaste Christians. Werewolves. Spies. Assassins. Navy SEALs. High-in-the-instep aristocrats. Fairies. Witches. Mermaids. Rock stars. Poets. Actors. Nurses. Doctors. Threesomes. BDSM. Murders. Betrayal. Adultery. Secret babies. Cowboys. Sheikhs.

So, uh, sex is the ONLY wiggle room romance authors have? Bull. Fucking. Shit. The only requirements for romance novels to be considered as such, near as I can tell are:

1. It must be a love story and focus on the budding romantic relationship (usually between a man and a woman, but erotic romances are fast changing that).

2. There must be some kind of commitment and happily-ever-after ending.

Draconian constraints, indeed.

When a woman buys a traditional Romance, it’s like a hardcore porn fan buying a XXX video. She wants her money shot. She does not want distractions. She wants familiarity, to connect with “the childhood masturbatory feeling,” as my friend and offbeat Romanticist Pam Rosenthal so perfectly described to me.

You can say very much the same thing about ANY book in ANY genre. Do mystery fans buy a book just so they can read about how the mystery is unsolved, the investigator is dead halfway through the book and the murderer/other variety of Very Nasty Person still running loose? Do erotica authors buy a book so they can be lectured on the evils of sex? Hell no. People buy books because they EXPECT something. If I pick up a literary novel about a Jewish family’s internment in a concentration camp during WWII, then by golly by God I expect a story about just that; I certainly don’t want blue fairies with tentacles to show up out of nowhere and turn it into a Merry Gentry novel.

The point is: Closure matters. Expectations matter. There’s no difference whether the book is literary fiction like A Sacred Hunger (can’t recommend that book highly enough, by the way--GO GO GO READ READ READ) or an SF novel like Hyperion or a romance like Bet Me. If enjoying fiction and the closure it brings = shooting my wad into my own hand, then consider me a chronic masturbator--and proud of it.

The tension between Erotica vs. Romance isn’t sex, it’s writing style.

Nope. I’d say three things separate erotica from romance:

1. Romance focuses more on romantic relationship, erotica more the sexual relationship.

2. HEA is de rigueur for romance, but not for erotica.

3. Erotica HAS to include sex. How’s that for conforming to formula? Romances can skip the sex entirely and still work. How’s that for busting a genre convention?

Let me examine one of these desires as an example: Inter-racial relationships. Even though they are an exploding statistic in American life, they are still frowned upon- to say the least. (...) However, in “Romance World,” everyone is likely to be in bed with someone of a different “color” than themselves. White women with black men, and black women with white men, is a hot ticket.

I know I’m not up on the hippest, happening-est romance trends. Fergawdsake, I discovered MaryJanice Davidson and Emma Holly just a couple of months ago. But inter-racial relationships are common in romance novels? What. The. Fuck. I have read hundreds--actually, come to think of it, I’ve read well over a thousand romance novels in my lifetime. Romances featuring inter-racial couples that I’ve read are as follows:

The China Bride by Mary Jo Putney
Harvard’s Education by Suzanne Brockmann
White Tigress by Jade Lee

In each book, the inter-racial aspect was NOT glossed over (though I read the Brockmann book so long ago that I can’t remember much about it); the concerns about two different races marrying were very, very real and are central issues in the book.

Now, if she’d addressed how class issues are handled in European historical romances, THAT would’ve been more on the money.

Another Romance fetish is overt bondage, and domination/submission. Rape/forced sex is de rigeur.

Oh yes. That infamous preponderance of rape in modern romances. I’ll just repeat what I said in my drive-by bitching, with minor modifications: “Do you wish that Susie Bright has read romance novels that were published in the last 10, 15 years instead of being stuck in Woodiwisslandia, circa 1975? Yeah, me too.”

You know how women’s bodes are the ones that always have to be perfect in porn, even if the men are kinda droopy or overweight?  It’s the same with romance, in reverse. The men’s bodies are all PUMPED— the women can be whatever. Her imperfections are irrelevant or sympathetic; the hero has to be an oiled stud muffin. Fabio is Jenna is Fabio.

OK, she has a point here. But not all romance readers find grotesquely muscular men attractive, and not all romance readers find Fabio to be the beau ideal. I certainly don’t. I love me a nice, skinny nerd hero like Jack Langdon in The Devil’s Delilah. Oh, wait, it doesn’t feature rape, which according to Bright is de rigueur for a romance. Maybe it’s not a romance novel after all. *wrinkles forehead in deep thought*

The biggest difference between my Best American Erotica and one of the “Sexxxy” Romances isn’t the sex… it’s the style of the writing (genre vs. literary fiction). Every romance has a ‘happy, monogamous ending” while BAE stories are more diverse, without that guarantee.

She’s clearly talking about two different things here but conflating them into one. One is writing style, and the other is genre constraints. Erotica has a genre constraint, and it’s every bit as inflexible as the HEA ending demanded of all romance novels: it has to have sex. Loads of it. In fact, it has to BE mostly about sex. What constitutes a literary writing style is certainly up for debate, and I’ve encountered romance novels that feature beautiful, literary prose. Laura Kinsale, for example, does quite well in that regard.

In the same way that sci-fi and mystery novels historically became more psychological and complicated, the same thing is happening to romance, which has been the infantile genre the longest. The women still love their romances-- like loving their Barbie Doll-- but they’re buying other things now too.

Yowwwch. Not only am I a mental masturbator, I’m now a child for reading romances. And apparently my reading tastes are not diverse. I guess reading everything from SF/F to veterinary textbooks to literary fiction to children’s books to old adventure stories to romance novels to scientific non-fiction (I need to spend more quality time with Fabric of the Cosmos, dammit) doesn’t qualify. Maybe I need to read more erotica?

Romance readers are not remaining “monogamous;” their reading interests are diversifying.

Heh. From what I’ve heard and read, romance readers are some of the most voracious, diverse readers there are in the market.

If they break formula, they’ll be a better writer.

Sweet. I want to become the first erotica author to write an erotic novel all about the salubrious effects of abstinence, with nary a sex scene in it. How’s THAT for breaking formula?