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

I was reading CrankyReader’s entry on her latest Ken Follett glom, and a comment she made caught my eye. She noted that people who love soggy romantic fiction a la Nicholas Sparks and Robert James Waller also love to make fun of people who read romance novels, and yeah, I’ve noticed that too. It really, really peeves me.

Those books are every bit as formulaic as romance novels, and aside from a lack of explicit sex and the lack of an HEA guarantee, they bear more than a passing resemblance to our beloved rippers de corsage. Many of these books are also every bit as badly-written as the worst romance novels. I couldn’t finish the one Nicholas Sparks novel I picked up (Message In a Bottle) because the I could feel the beginnings of a diabetic coma approaching, and the other book from that genre that I read, The Lighthouse Keeper, was… oh God, it was so bad. If I didn’t have to review it for AAR at the time, I never would’ve finished that, either. And if I’d been writing for Smart Bitches at the time, I might’ve finished it, but the review would’ve been so filled with profanity, I would’ve had to change the website’s background from pink to blue.

Just to give you an idea of how that book was: The Lighthouse Keeper ties with Desire’s Blossom for the worst book I’ve ever read in my life. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.

I haven’t tried anything else from that genre since. This may sound really odd coming from a person who relishes reading romance novels, but: my threshold is really low when it comes to sentimentality. You’re looking at (or reading the words of, at any rate) the coldhearted bitch who made gagging sounds during the scene in the beginning of Finding Nemo when Daddy Fish was all “You’re all I have left my pwecious widdle son and I’ll always take care of you.”

But this coldheartedness is not remotely consistent, of course. No, that’d make it too easy. Like that scene right at the end of The Dream Hunter—OK, this is a spoiler, so please highlight the text to find out what I’m talking about if you’ve read TDH already or if, like me, you don’t give a shit about spoilers—so that scene at the end in which Arden gives Zenia the paper with the spell written on it to assure her of his love, and it turns out to be “I Love You” written backwards or whatever? SWOOOOOOON. That one scene single-handedly lifted that book from C territory into B. (OK, that scene and Arden in general, who’s one of my all-time favorite heroes.)

Uh, what’s my point again? Hmmm. OK, hang on, here it is: Bad writing can be found in any genre. I’m sure there are good examples of this sort of soggy masculine romantic fiction, books that are a credit to the genre as opposed to horrifying embodiments of every awful Movie-Of-The-Week cliche in existence. (As a side note: anyone know what this genre is called? Or does it not deserve to be labelled because the writers are predominantly male, instead of female? I vote for Squish-Lit, to indicate the state of your heart and hanky after you finish one of these.) I will read and enjoy just about any kind of story as long as it’s well-written, but I’ll also readily admit that given my distaste for a certain kind of mawkishness, and given the ease with which these sorts of books can fall into the Crevasse of Neverending Sappiness, I’m a harder sell than most.

God, now that I’m looking over what I wrote, this whole rant has basically been a long-winded way of saying: people in glass houses should turn off the light before putting on trousers.

Or something.

Sigh.

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