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

While feeding Baba o’Riley, I bonded with my DVR over Moonlight. SO many of you have written in to tell me how gawdawful bad this show is. It really was Law & Order: Vampire Unit with bonus extra dark wet cement shots, plus boiler room.

You are all right. It’s so bad, I had to break out the haikus.

In parallel world
without police procedure
comes the show “Moonlight.”

The heroine
walks barefoot through a crime scene
in first ten minutes.

Already I knew:
level of writing? Of the
highest caliber.

And by “caliber,”
somewhere between LKH
and Cassie Edwards.

Gloves? We don’t need them.
Fearless, we break and enter
and touch everything!

The police? Morons.
Dead girl’s computer? Still here.
Blood-soaked jewelry, too.

Let us not forget
bountiful cliché buffet!
So many, I’m dizzy.

And the heroine?
Poor man’s U.S. Kate Winslet.
Only not as good.

The hero? Mullet!
Mullet, mullet, mullet, and
a shitload of angst.

Plus a twelve-inch plate
‘cause he’s the first in line at
the cliché buffet.

(Seriously, y’all.
I am dumbfounded at the
dumbass monologue.

I could have written
a better script while high on
sixteen percocets.)

Jason Dohring can’t
make eye contact - how the hell
is that called “acting?”

In sum, I would say:
what an overwrought angst-fest.
DVR? More please!

Series recording!
I need the laugh therapy.
Yes, it is quite bad.

But the value of
unintentional humor
cannot be measured.

Submitted by Naomi Libicki

Recently, my husband and I bought a giant pile of used children’s books for our one-year-old son – the books we remembered most fondly from our childhoods. One of the books I picked out was In the Night Kitchen.

When our copy arrived, I found the following stamp inside the front cover: Windham Public Library: WITHDRAWN.

“What huh?” I thought. And then, “Oh yeah . . . the penis.”

In the Night Kitchen opens and closes with its protagonist in bed, wearing his pajamas. At part of the transition from this mundane scene to the surreal world where the main action of the book takes place, Mickey falls out of his clothes. He later acquires a sort of flight suit made of cake batter, but for much of the action, he is naked. And rather than using concealing props and postures, Maurice Sendak simply draws him, little-boy penis and all.

The otherworld that Mickey journeys to when he is awoken by bumps in the night is the Night Kitchen, a city with jam jars and coffee canisters for buildings. He is menaced by three fat, good-humored giants in chef’s outfits, who mix him into a cake batter and put him in the oven. However, he escapes, and builds an airplane out of bread dough to harvest milk from the Milky Way. Once this ingredient is obtained, the bakers complete their cake, and Mickey returns to bed.

You know how sometimes you go back and read or watch something you loved as a child, and spend the entire time cringing? And then there are times when you go back, and it’s just . . . perfect.

This is one of those. The city of the Night Kitchen is charming – it’s even got elevated trains made out of bread loaves. The character designs are also spot-on; Mickey is wonderfully expressive, and the jolly, be-mustachio’ed appearance of the bakers – they look a little like the Mario Brothers actually – helps tip the tone of the book from scary to surreal. There are also bits of rhyme that have stayed with you for as long as I can remember. Mickey’s milk harvesting song, for instance : “I’m in the milk and the milk’s in me. God bless milk and God bless me!” Or the chant of the bakers as they mix up the cake batter: “Milk in the batter! Milk in the batter! We bake cake! And nothing’s the matter!”

At this point I should really list some negatives, but I can’t think of any. Well, maybe one. Maurice Sendak is Jewish, and Mickey seems to some extent to share his creator’s cultural background: He calls his parents Mama and Papa, the bakers use kosher salt decades before Alton Brown’s Good Eats, and there’s no lard or other non-kosher ingredients to be found in the Night Kitchen. So why is Mickey uncircumcised?

Submitted by Sarah

When I first bought this book, sometime in middle school, I honestly thought it was about drugs. The back blurb on my particular edition said something like, “Even straight kids will enjoy this love story” – I thought it meant “straight” as in straight-edge.  At the time, I was a studious nerd who hung out in the school library; in this book, I was looking for a little excitement and maybe a chance to moralize over bad behavior.

Instead, I got Liza Winthrop, student body president and classic over-achiever.  Her dreams are to save her private school from closing down, and to study architecture at MIT.  However, when she meets Annie Kenyon ( while Annie was singing to the knights at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), she realizes that there’s more to life than following in her parent’s footsteps.  It’s a typical “Girl meets Girl, Girls fall in love, Girls get caught doin’ it” love story.  In the end, Liza and Annie’s relationship is an outward expression of their struggles to establish an identity within their family frameworks, while also dealing with a growing awareness of their sexualities.

As a shy girl with few friends, the idea that every person has a soul mate, the way Liza and Annie were soul mates, was deeply moving to me.  Not one other character in the novel understood them, especially after they were forcibly outed.  Although I am not gay, I could empathize with their feelings of alienation, and I drew strength from the fact that each girl ultimately followed her dream, despite the forces keeping them home and keeping them apart.

Since I identified so strongly with both Liza and Annie, it’s hard for me to understand why anyone would feel this book was inappropriate for students; although it does contain some adult themes, it almost perfectly captures the teenage struggle for self-identity and self-expression.  There are no explicit scenes, but I suppose some parents object to the fact that it’s generally accepting of homosexuality.

Submitted by Carrie Lofty

Respected Canadian poet and novelist Margaret Atwood departed from the style and tone of her previous works to present a fable of the near future. In the Republic of Gilead, formerly the United States, far-right extremists have instituted a monotheocratic government, a feminist’s nightmare. Women are strictly controlled, prevented from holding jobs, and are assigned to classes: the housekeeping Marthas, the reproductive Handmaids, and the morally fit Wives. The tale is narrated by Offred, a Handmaid who recalls the past and tells us how society came to be.

Authors who survey the future landscape and find distopias--Orwell, Huxley, and even Jack London in The Iron Heel--are harshly judged by readers who have the scorecard of history available to them, ready to make comparisons and award points for accuracy.

So here I go: While we do not live in a society as extreme as Gilead, it is looking more familiar all the time. If I had been asked to read this novel in high school during Clinton’s first term, it would have seemed terribly out of date and pessimistic, merely seven years after its initial printing. Predictions of a severe feminist backlash, an exaggeration of the AIDS crises, the rise of a fundamentalist Christian right--none of these strains had risen to the forefront of everyday thinking in 1993. Fast forward fourteen years and these are pressing, immediate issues. I find this a very startling example of how a novel’s relevance can be so very altered by the context in which it is read.

What I found most compelling was Offred’s continuous mental battle. She kept reminding herself that, only three years before, she wore bathing suits in public. She had a job. She had a daughter. So thorough were the architects of this new society that even a college-educated woman with myriad freedoms and pleasures to lose found herself being seduced by her new reality. After a time, everything becomes ordinary. She had to fight the lassitude of her position, the waiting, the monotony, the degradation, the moments of gripping fear that kept everyone in check, the urge for something more, something past--all of this without going numb or insane.

But she is not a hero. She is not the Huxley protagonists who make their escape, nor is she left a brain-dead proponent of Big Brother. She knows there is an Underground, and the ambiguous ending suggests she may have even benefited from its protection, but she cannot compromise her safety or the little piece of happiness she has found in her objectionable life in order to help its progress. She is, frankly, a very real assessment of a normal person, held fast by fear and apathy, yet propelled forward by hope and the sheer momentum of living. This is Atwood’s most significant achievement, even as the present influences any assessment of the accuracy of her futuristic vision.

Submitted by Katie Dickson

Jean Auel’s first novel in the series, Clan of the Cave Bear, was recommended to me by my uncle when I was just starting high school. He gave it to me with a warning. “Um,” he said, “I started to read the rest of the books, but they got kind of romance-novel-ish.” He was clearly embarrassed. “The sequels are kind of smutty.”

Telling a young lady that the book she is about to read is not only good but contains plenty of sex is like handing a young man a Playboy. I immediately checked out each Earth’s Children novel from my local library.

Earth’s Children should be divided into two categories: Cave Bear and everything else. Cave Bear is a marvelous experiment, richly detailed and researched and endlessly fascinating. The main character, blonde Homo sapien Ayla, is adopted by a pack of Neanderthals (called Flat-Heads by humans) and must learn to survive first among the group and then on her own. Talk about female empowerment! Ayla follows the classic romance novel heroine pattern: she’s buxom, blonde, had a tough childhood, is great with animals, a natural healer, and is in possession of a Magical Vajayjay. She also has a pet lion.

Unfortunately for the plot (great for Ayla, bad for readers), in book two (Valley of Horses) she discovers cunnilingus in the form of Jondalar, a Brad Pitt wannabe with a huge schlong. Jondalar lives to hunt, eat out, and stick his penis into things. From then on, the Earth’s Children series reads like a summation of past events sprinkled with technical sexual how-tos. It’s not too much of a stretch to say Valley of Horses was the first erotica I ever read.

Props go to Auel for the way the build-up is handled. Readers get parallel points of view, with every other chapter from either Ayla’s or Jondalar’s perspective. As cookie-cutter as both the characters seem to be, there is a little depth to be found in these pages, as Jondalar roams across the known world in search of a wife. In the process, he goes down on lots and lots of women, and Ayla tames animals and learns to be self-sufficient. She also basically invents modern hunting. Not too shabby!

Auel is guilty of breaking the Golden Rule of sex scenes: use them to move the story forward or develop the characters, or don’t use them at all. A few of the sex scenes are helpful, necessary, even, in understanding her characters; most are simply fluff. “Smut,” as my uncle said. But what fantastic smut!

I must have read Valley of Horses a dozen times. Even now, the book falls open precisely to the chapters full of the purplest prose. Taken as a whole, Valley of Horses—and its subsequent sequels—is a fairly boring read, tedious and full of irritating adjectives. But if you read it for the good stuff, you won’t be disappointed. And at the age of fourteen or so, I couldn’t get enough.

Submitted by Aileen

I found this book when I was working as a bookseller and a customer requested it. I immediately bought a copy for myself and for any future children in my life.

Mommy Laid an Egg is a picture book designed to explain sex to children. When the parents in the book decide to tell their kids where babies come from, they spout off many of the myths we tell children. The kids in the book find these stories hysterical, and sit their parents down for a conversation about how things really work. The book stays honest and fairly simple, and explains sex within what I consider an appropriate range for younger kids (obviously, many people do not agree.) The illustrations are wonderfully whimsical, especially as Cole draws the kids drawing diagrams for their parents. The page that sticks with me most is the one that has something to do with multiple positions Mommy and Daddy can use when making a baby.

While the book doesn’t use the correct anatomical language, it is a simple explanation of how babies are made that is appropriate for the 4 to 8 year-old set. It fills a niche in the market. Should I have children, this book will be a must in their library.

Bitchery reader plainjane sent me this fascinating link to “good girl” comic art, where the impossibly arched feet and giant perfectly circular breasts make them all look like “Katy Keene fights crime” - how DO they walk in those overly-arched feet, anyway?

Even more fun is the Gangster & Gun Moll comic - nice shooter(s)!

Either way, it’s nice to know that absurdly-proportioned women are as always not exclusive to the romance genre cover art.

Submitted by Stephanie Gayle

I read Ordinary People as part of my “I’m only reading novels from the 1970s” research kick. This book, thank god, did not represent a literary low in that decade. I found myself so embroiled in the family’s drama that I’d find myself muttering, “This mother is a monster!” and look up for confirmation. That’s something in short supply when you’re reading in your room alone. Ahem. 

The book is about the Jarret family (mother: Beth, father: Cal, son: Conrad) and their struggle to survive the aftermath of Conrad’s recent suicide attempt. We learn surprisingly late in the book that there was another brother, Buck, who died in a boating accident. Conrad was also in the accident and has survivor’s guilt. It’s interesting how little space is devoted to the accident or the dead brother.  We get it all as flashback and aftereffects.  I thought the author relied too much on the reader too supply the back story. But had she shoved it down my throat, I’d also complain. Picky, picky!

The mother and father enjoy a social prominence and easy lifestyle that would be easy to make two-dimensional, but the author, by and large, avoids this.  Cal is obsessed with his wife and she comes across a bit as a showpiece until we see her in action. Man, has this lady got issues.  She discourages any talk of her son’s suicide attempt and resents the attention her husband lavishes on him. The husband drinks quite a bit and is constantly checking on Conrad, anxious to keep his son intact.  The affection balance in the house is seriously off kilter.  Conrad spends a lot of time thinking: about his time in the hospital, about his friends, about pressure from his swim coach.  His thoughts seemed to me quite real.  Throughout the book he begins healing with the help of his psychiatrist Dr. Berger (who is a master shrink in the manner of Good Will Hunting’s head doctor).

Why banned?  Because it deals with the topic of teenage suicide. WTF? Oh, these folks must subscribe to the “if kids can’t read about a subject than they can’t imagine it or reenact it” school of thought.  If that were true I’d gladly give up reading accounts of atrocities like genocide, rape, and worldwide food shortages. But that isn’t how it works and if I remember anything about my teenage years (besides the tragic spiral perm) it’s that teenagers think and talk about suicide, rather a lot.  Giving them a book that portrays the subject with some sensitivity and insight isn’t the world’s worst idea. (Again, that would be my spiral perm).

Submitted by Jessica

There are a handful of truly beautiful books from my young adulthood, and THE GOATS by Brock Cole is one of them. I was very surprised to find this YA novel on the banned books list. I can still read this book today and feel all of the pleasure and loveliness of a wonderful book, having lost nothing in the 13 years since I first read it. It is still as sweet and solemn and kindhearted and hopeful as it was when I first opened the book and discovered a writer and a pair of protagonists who spoke so strongly to me.

The loveliness of this little novel lies in the spare, fluid writing and in the two main characters, Laura Golden and Howie Mitchell, whose friendship in the book is perfect. Laura and Howie are both miserable inmates at a summer camp while their parents have better things to do, leaving them to suffer the cruel tricks of the other campers. Laura is considered “a real dog” by the boys in the camp, and Howie is considered a wimpy geeky nerd. They both sit at the bottom of the preteen hierarchy, and they both know it.

When the two of them are stranded naked on a small island in the camp lake as a practical joke by the other campers, Laura and Howie decide that they won’t stay to be humiliated when the other kids come back to bring them home. Instead, they escape from the island, steal clothes from some sunbathers on a beach, and decide to disappear completely.

The friendship that grows and blooms between these two very likable and sympathetic characters is just wonderful. They’re basically strangers to one another when they’re put on the island, and as they escape and go off on an adventure together, their friendship slowly and steadily forms and unfolds into something rare. These two social outcasts are so dedicated to one another, so kind to one another, helping each other survive the horrors of pre-adolescence with dignity and understanding. Laura’s mother is a frazzled divorcee; Howie’s parents are extremely busy archaeologists who don’t know what to do with him. They’re both only children, lonely and forgotten—until they meet each other.

Really, it’s a platonic romance novel. Laura and Howie are soulmates. I wish more adult novels could portray the beautiful friendship in this unprepossessing Young Adult novel. I think so many people long for connection, for understanding and true friendship, the constant kind. It’s always a delight to find a book which portrays just this sort of connection and friendship, and the joy of finding someone who makes you believe that you’ll be okay, that you’re not alone. It is so invaluable.

Really, THE GOATS is such a wonderful story. I’m shocked that it’s on the banned books list. This book was so strong and special to me as a kid. I’m sorry to think someone else might miss out on it, because an adult somewhere thought parts of it were naughty or wrong. How sad. 

We talk a good bit every now and again about how our cultural perception of romance has changed, especially as pertains to rape scenes, secret babies, or even the careers of the heroes - are cowboys on the way out?

Similarly, thanks to the fabulous V., here’s a link: David Brooks from the NY Times (Motto: “We won’t print the title of your Bitchy website, but we’ll publish pictures of corpses whenever we want. Because we are a ‘family newspaper.’") compares the perceptions of Kerouac’s On the Road now that the book is 50 years old. Now, instead of a book about wild celebration and savoring the enjoyment of life, it’s a book about “loss,” “death” and the melancholy of life.

Brooks’ column is largely a WTF? directed at the aging Boomers who he blames for “the great geriatric pall settled over the world, before it became illegal to be cheerful.” Seems On the Road no longer sucks the marrow out of life, to mix literature quotes, but instead wants life pureed and boiled into mush because the readership no longer has the teeth to chew it.

Brooks predicts that the over-safety-belted culture in which we now live will produce another revolutionary piece of literature: “Someday some hypermanic kid will produce a moronically maxed-out adventure odyssey that will spark the overdue rebellion among all the over-pressured SAT grinds, and us grumpy midlife critics will get to witness a new Kerouac, and the greatest pent-up young-life crisis in the history of the world.”

(Dude. I so hope it’s a romance.)

Aside from predictions of what rebellious literature will emerge next, I am fascinated by how time and aging of the audience changes perceptions of literature, and the condemnation of that which was celebrated and the celebration of that which was condemned come circling around each other time and again. The Flame and the Flower was reissued shortly after Claiming the Courtesan - and both ask readers to reexamine rape and the sexual power plays that occur in every romance novel (though not always through rape). The passage of 30 years of readership between those two books, for example, creates an entirely new attitude toward the balance of sexual power, but no shortage of controversy. 

Brooks’ opinions on our over-professionalized society I’m going to have to think about some more, though. It’s also feeding time, so Baba says “Get off the computer already, woman.”

Here’s a bit of random trivia for you - answer readily available via Google, but really, it’s much more fun if you don’t cheat.

What author’s first published work was a short story called “I slept with my uncle on my wedding night”?

And when is Harlequin’s new “Our Editors are on Crack” department going to release that? It’d totally be a secret baby book, right? Right. Totally.

A few days late and possibly a dollar short, but hey, I am more than a little short on sleep and think that every day since Saturday has been one loooooong ass day. Woo!

But enough about me - it’s coronation time round these parts. And our Smart Bitch Title™ is bestowed upon Shannon for correctly guessing the Lonely Heart: Rhia from Eyes of Crow by Jeri Smith-Ready. Kneel Shannon, and arise a member of the Peerage.

Reviewed by Erastes

“O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beautious mankind is!
O brave new world
That has such people in’t!”

Miranda.  The Tempest Act V, Scene I:

I first read this book at least 35 years ago and at the time it was very much “science fiction” but Huxley was well ahead of his time; He took the hints of his own world (this was written in 1932) such as recreational drugs, sexual freedoms and mass manufacturing and did what good spec-fic writers do - pushed them into the future and imagined what the consequences of them would be.

Huxley’s Brave New World is a faux-Utopia (The World State) where the populace is controlled. They are grown in vitro, raised in specialist nurseries and they are both “natured and nurtured” to fit into their place in society and the work they do. Humans are graded from Alpha to Epsilon, and everyone’s happy to be the grade they are, due to successful brain washing.

I’m so glad I’m a Beta.....Alpha children wear grey They work much harder than we do, because they’re so frightfully clever. I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They’re too stupid to be able …”

Happiness is given out in the form of Soma, a recreational drug. Sex is freely available. No-one marries, no-one gives birth.

But there IS an outside to this world, reservations where people live “natural” lives, giving birth and living off the land and are treated like a tourist attraction. While on a date there, Mustapha Mond, (who is an Alpha, but seems to be imperfect - doesn’t really fit in) - discovers Linda - an “insider” who was left outside 20 years ago and now she has a son.  In a King Kong manner the boy, John “Savage” is brought into the perfect world that he’s heard so much about from his mother.  As you can imagine this does not go well, as he’s as about as well equipped for living in such a world as Kong was for living in captivity.  John’s reactions to the World State are gradually more and more violent as he attempts to get the people there what shallow empty lives they lead.

An amazing book, terrifying and, in these days of recreational drugs, mass manufacturing, and dependence on large cities, it still remains a great and unsettling mirror of society.  It makes you truly wonder what Miranda would have made of the real world, once she had stepped off Prospero’s Island.  Huxley obviously didn’t think she would last long. 

Janet Mullany sent me a fascinating link to the the Shenis, and I have to ask: why is it 12” long, and WHY is it GOLD? A goldmember purely to assist women with peeing? I could do without the uber-permed ladies demonstrating the Shenis’ powers of pee projection, but the unit does have its uses.

On vacation with Hubby a few years ago, we drove from San Francisco to LA & Palm Springs, and of course we stopped at the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo. We weren’t there to eat, sleep, shop, party or visit - we were there to pee.

Imagine my disappointment when the ladies’ room was boring boring boring, while Hubby got to pee in a freaking waterfall. NO FAIR. NO FAIR.

The worst was that we’d visited the Good Vibrations store in San Francisco a few days prior, and I’d seriously thought about buying a soft pack. I don’t have any predilection for gender switching personally, but it looked from the sample that I could potentially pee through the soft pack. I couldn’t verify that possibility, but hey, we were on a road trip, and being able to pee on the side of the road without worrying about the anatomical difficulties of having to do so as a girl was quite a temptation. But alas, I didn’t buy it. And if I HAD, I could have peed in a waterfall.

But now that I think about it, we might need to do the road trip again, and stop at the Madonna Inn again, because a giant 12” gold pee-wand would totally fit in with the uber-kitsch of the Inn’s decor, don’t you think? Or was this whole entry WAY too much TMI for you this morning? What can I say - I’m profoundly sleep deprived. I’m lucky I’m still typing in English. 

Graceful curtsy to Lorelie for sending me the link that will keep my sleep-deprived self amused for days: LOLBabies. I can has breastmilk?