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

Growly Cub writes:

When I lived in Scotland in 93/94 I read a Mills and Boon (historical) category from a local library about the one of the Duke of Sutherland's daughters, or maybe a woman who married into the family.

I can't remember much about it, just that the female was very young. I want to say it took place in the late 1700s, early 1800s, but I'm not sure I trust my memory; and that the story was inspired by somebody who lived at Dunrobin Castle as some point in her life.

The unreliable mind also spits out a memory of a pinkish cover, no author or title though.

Would love to find this title again! Although I'm all aware that it's nowhere near as interesting as the Regency time travel!

Until I picked up this book, I’d never read a Betty Neels book, and I was not disappointed in the least. And in list format, here are are 6 Important Facts I learned about this novel:

1. Hot Dutch doctors, especially the wealthy ones, are incredibly generous and once in the hot throes of lovin’ say things like, “Oh, my darling, my darling!” And I have a hard time imagining Dutch doctors going into raptures of romantic expression by saying, “Oh, my darling! My darling!” However, I can imagine them saying, “But sit and fart in the duck!” Wait, no. I can’t.

2. If you get in a wreck in Holland, and are a British nurse, you and your bus full o’ spastic children (nice vintage terminology!) will end up at a hospital, one which will happily arrange to pay you as if you were one of their staff while you tirelessly and selflessly care for the children. Yeah. But what about retirement?!

3. The heroine is so relentlessly selfless it’s astonishing that she can stand upright. She’s got a backbone of the same durability as an old, damp dishrag. Her uncle and aunt treat her as one step up from hired help, and her cousin takes merciless advantage of her, even going to far as to slander her to The Hot Dutch Doctor Oh My Darling. But really, they fed and clothed her so she can’t complain. And according to what I’ve read online, many a Neels novel features plain but noble British nurse falling head over heels with Hot Dutch Doctor Oh My Darling. Did the Hot Dutch Doctors die out? Will angsty emo vampires suffer the same fate? Perhaps we need to spearhead the fund raising for the endangered romance novel hero species. Do not let the oversexed Regency Earl With Not a Hint of Venereal Disease go the way of the Hot Dutch Doctor Oh My Darling! Call now!

4. The heroine never complains, even when The Hot Dutch Doctor Oh My Darling has listened to Evil Cousin instead of Plain Noble British Nurse, and accuses her of being a thoughtless wench. Plain Noble Brit Nurse needed to administer an enema of justice to her shitass Evil Cousin.

5. Fortunately, the happy ending elevates the Plain Noble British Nurse, and rewards her for her selfless behavior. She wins an incredibly happy, optimistic future with the Hot Dutch Doctor Oh My Darling - in Holland, far far away from her family of craptastic crap.

6. Unfortunately, the happy ending elevates the Plain Noble British Nurse and rewards her for her selfless, and altogether spineless behavior. She never has to stand up for herself where it counts, really, and the selfish family never gets a hard paddle to the assal region like they deserve.

If Neels is part of the foundation of romance, and indeed I think she is, reading this book (complete with red page dye that came off on my hands) was both a quaint and educational experience. Quaint because romance, ma’am, you have come a LONG WAY. Imagine the heroine of The Magic of Living meeting up with a nurse heroine from a Blaze novel fresh after sex in the linen closet with Dr. McSchlong. Poor Plain Noble British Nurse would pass out cold. Her idea of scandalous was her cousin dating a married doctor - which is plenty sleazy but somewhat less of a shock when compared to what Blazing McSex can occur in Doctor/Nurse romances today.

However, reading The Magic of Living was educational because the elements at work in the story were effective on me, jaded reader that I am. The heroine was faultlessly noble, which got old but even still, she was amply rewarded and there’s no doubt I was rooting for her, especially because Neels took deliberate steps to make her sympathetic to the point of, “Oh, Honey,” but never quite so pathetic that I wanted to smack her around. The hero, however, was something of a stock background figure: enigmatic in his affections until the very end and even then, his mercurial announcements of love and of sweeping her off into the sunset were so abrupt it was creepy. Creepitude notwithstanding, the sudsy fantasy of vintage nurse/doctor category romance worked for me, much to my surprise, even though I could identify when Neels was working to make Plain Noble British Nurse even more Noble and Sympathetic. I more than enjoyed this trip in the wayback machine - but I wouldn’t want this to be the only type of romance I read. I like applesauce, but I also like hot sauce, and I wouldn’t want to eschew the latter for an exclusive diet of the former. 

After an article in Newsweek, a weekend of coverage on NPR, and a lot of email requesting pictures with his shirt off, preferably holding a ferret, journalist Paul Tolmé agreed to an interview with Smart Bitches. I’d sent a request for questions to our readers using our top-secret email list of Bitchery members, and using those questions, Paul and I chatted for nearly an hour about plagiarism, ferrets, the environment, romance and writing. 
Any reader-submitted questions are notated with the author’s name in parenthesis; otherwise the question is one that either multiple people asked, or I made up. He also answered my request for a picture - one we haven’t seen before. He obliged with the one on the left, wherein he sports long hair. Try to keep from fainting, ladies.

First, and obvious question: when you found out, were you pissed off? What has the attention meant for you?

Paul: No, I wasn’t pissed off. I was miffed, but I also found it absurd, and I think that the media picked up on that absurdity. Media attention is always a good thing for a writer, and that means new projects. I’d love to do another story about the ferrets, and have a magazine send me back to South Dakota, to see how they’re doing. It hasn’t happened yet.

How did you get your start as an environmental journalist? (Radish)

Paul: I started off as a daily journalist. When I graduated from the University of New Hampshire, I got a job with the AP and I covered everything. I wrote about politics and news stories, I went to the state house in New Hampshire and Providence… but really, I wanted to be outside. I helped start an environmental and outdoors beat in the New Hampshire bureau – and this was back in the 90’s when the environment wasn’t a hot topic – because I wanted to be out of the office. I liked writing about politics, but it kept me in government buildings. I always wanted to get out. I love to follow researchers, and go snoop around in the woods. My writing career has been one long earth sciences course – all the stuff I should have learned in high school and college, but didn’t.

According to my web research, the 30th anniversary gift is traditionally pearls or diamonds. But here at Smart Bitch headquarters, the traditional gift to mark the passing of the big 3-0 is something very very different.

The 30th birthday at Smart Bitches: the year of the Mantitty Mullet. And here to pay tribute to Candy on her 30th birthday are some of the finest mantitty mullet men ever to walk the earth - and remember, I grew up in Pittsburgh during the years of Jaromir Jagr and Mario Lemieux, so I know whereof I mullet. Only the finest mulleted mantitty shall express their luuuuurve™ for Candy’s 30th. Read on. 

My friend Peter sent me a rather interesting link a few days ago: Books That Make You Dumb. The methodology is rather simple: Go to Facebook, download the top ten most popular books by college, look up the average SAT/ACT score for the various colleges, and plot the data on a chart. (The creator of the chart acknowledges that correlation != causation.)

Some of the trends are rather interesting.

1. The Holy Bible scores about 150 points lower than regular-flavor Bible, and 180 points lower than the Book of Mormon. I have ideas on why colleges in which the top-ranked books include The Holy Bible would indicate a lower average SAT score than colleges that list The Bible, but The Book of Mormon? I have no theories on that. I’m just intrigued.

2. A Time to Kill scores about 60 points lower than John Grisham in general, which is very amusing.

3. Books classified as Science Fiction and Classics dominate as the average SAT score goes up. This didn’t surprise me--white nerds, who are more likely to apply to top-tier colleges, are more likely to be exposed to and to love SF/F and Old White Dude fiction. I’m not entirely sure why The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho is classified as SF, though--I would’ve classified it as Terrible New Age Pap myself. (No, I’m not terribly fond of Coelho’s work--too squishy for my tastes.) However, many other classifications in this chart puzzle me--Life of Pi is Philosophy instead of Contemporary Fiction?

4. The presence of Dystopian Fiction as its own classification in this chart is fascinating to me.

5. “I Don’t Read” outranks some amazing and amazingly literary books (The Color Purple, Fahrenheit 451, Their Eyes Were Watching God), street lit and erotica. Overwhelmingly, the bottom 12 spots are occupied by books written by and for African Americans. This says something interesting about the state of institutional prejudice, I think.

6. Zane has the honor of occupying three of the bottom 10 spots--in fact, the only three erotica classifications on this list are due to Zane.

And Zane brings me to something I’ve been pondering for the past few days. Peter, while discussing the results with me, couldn’t believe that people actually listed erotica (especially what was, in his opinion, very poorly-written erotica) among their favorite books with no shame whatsoever. An argument about whether or not we should feel embarrassed about the books we love took a left turn, and we found ourselves talking about the different ways we read, and that was when I clarified for myself, for the first time ever, the process of reading pornographically.

I’m not talking about the way I read porn--or at least, not exclusively. See, I don’t have “favorite porn writers” so much as I do “favorite scenarios.” The relatively few times I seek out written porn, very little is bad enough to shock me out of its intended purpose. I’m reading for an orgasm, not literary quality. And then I realized that I don’t just utilize this method for reading porn; I do this for certain types of genre fiction, too, though for somewhat different types of pay-off.

And then last weekend, when I listened to the Seattle Symphony play video game music themes, I came to realize several different things that helped flesh out this basic premise.

A lot of the music we listened to was mediocre. Most of it blurred together, in fact, partly because the majority of the program drew from RPGs for 32-bit systems released in the last 7 years or so. (Look! another stirring theme involving harps, airy synths and pan flutes!) Some of the music, however, perked my interest--the bits of music from Sonic, for example made me grin, and I felt 14 years old all over again. By far the most popular pieces were the themes for Super Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda; people actually hooted and whistled for those.

That was when I realized that the key to the enjoyment of this symphony was largely associative. All things being equal, the extent to which I enjoyed any particular piece of music from that concert was directly proportional to how much I’d played the game myself, and since the vast majority of the program involved games I’d never played (when it comes to video games, I mostly want to play games in which I get to beat people up under the guise of a sumo wrestler whose superpower is Slapping the Shit Out Of You Really Really Fast--I’m of the Mashing Buttons Randomly While Spewing Profanities school of video game playing), I was able to focus on the music, and found most of it kind of schmaltzy. The pieces I enjoyed, however, had the weight of positive associations going for them--all the fun hours I spent bouncing an Italian plumber’s head against boxes with question marks on them, or rolling a tiny blue hedgehog at insanely fast speeds to collect gold coins. Essentially, I was bringing as much, if not more, into the music as it was providing to me.

And I realized that the same applied to reading pornographically. I’ve heard some authors talking about how, when it comes down to it, most people, when they read for entertainment, read for plot and not for writing style. However, I’d argue that much of the time, we’re not even reading for plot--lots of wildly popular books feature inconsistent, silly or downright confusing plots. We’re reading for scenarios. We’re reading for the pay-off, the money shot (the boy gets the girl, or the boy solves the mystery, or the boy saves the world, or the boy gets an orgasm); we need only the barest outline from the author, and we supply much of the rest. Which is essentially a restatement of sorts of reader response criticism, but we’ll pretend that I’m being all clever and (kind of) original here, eh?

(Incidentally, this is part of the reason why written pornography works much more effectively for me--almost embarrassingly so, really--compared to movies or pictures. Written porn has to be pretty damn vile or poorly-written to shake me out of my fantasy, because my brain is supplying most of the necessary details, and I can selectively ignore the vast majority of any unappealing elements. I can’t ignore the details in a movie or a photo, however, because they’re right there--the unattractive actors, the atrocious acting, the non-existent production values.)

Interestingly enough, the genres in which I do most of this sort of reading are fantasy, romance and, well, porn. Pirate romances? Romances with cross-dressing protagonists? Fantasy novels featuring dragons? Books about a scrappy group of rag-tag misfits saving the world? HELL. FUCKING. YES. I almost never read pornographically when it comes to literary fiction, science fiction, mysteries or horror. I’m not sure what that says about me--or about the genre of fiction.

Candy, it is often mentioned here, usually by Candy herself, is a big Dara Joy fan. I personally have never read Joy’s books, but Candy, she’ll wank on for hours about them. They are among her guilty pleasures.

So imagine the, well, joy when, just in time for Candy’s birthday, Dara Joy announces she has a new ebook for sale on her newly designed website. Pity I already sent Candy her gift, because I’d be hard-pressed to beat a present entitled Death by Ploot Ploot.

In honor of our third birthday, Sarah looked up what the typical third anniversary gift is...and it turns out it’s *drumroll* LEATHER.

And you know what that means for our cover snark.

Oh yes. BDSM romance covers. Cover your eyes and head for the hills. Or, y’know, don’t, because you’re a masochistic fool and have a strong hankering for 3-D man-titty.

I’m categorizing all my category (har!) reviews under the heading “1001 Ways to Eat Crow” because I’m reading a monster truck shitload of category romance right now, averaging about 75% of a book per day. I read fast. And I’m enjoying them. For the most part. This is an exception. But either way, I’m reading quickly enough that my usual monster session of navel-gazing in a review will have to be trimmed by a good bit for the category binge I’m on now. Avast - here begin ye shorte reviews!

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In a word, this book was Yawntastic. It has such a great setup, but the plot and the characterization were so limply executed. A horror writer’s sister is murdered, and a vampire hero has to save her, protect her from potentially risen sister, and eradicate the bad guy vampire dude what’s doing the killing. The heroine writes books that scare even the hero, yet in the course of the story she’s firmly a wuss on the border of TSTL. I was repeatedly told she authored some scary, chilling books but saw no evidence of creativity or crafty thinking in any portion of her scenes in the book. Perhaps she has a ghost writer- literally.

And you know all those warnings to “show not tell?” This here is a 251-page example of tell tell tell with little to show for it. Honestly, it reminds me of Moonlight where terrific actors suffer through some of the most wooden, uninspiring dialog ever in the history of the televised world. If this book were a radio play, the voice actors would probably be shrugging and rolling their eyes as they read it aloud. Check this out:

“...Don’t forget the oath we all took. We can’t reveal the Mission or its purpose to anyone. if the citizens out there found out what we’re dealing with, there would be mass hysteria. Civilization as we know it could crumble, and we would have no way to prevent it. You can’t tell her, Nick. You can’t tell anyone....”

What if he couldn’t protect Erin? What if he lost her to the darkness, too? He’d already lost his soul. How could he survive knowing that she had lost hers, too?

Behold: among my least favorite romance stereotypical heroes? The whiny-ass navel-gazing angsty emo Vampire. More emo than Peter Petrelli from Heroes and that is some emorific emoism to the 100th power of emo, my friend.

And among the top twenty list of my stereotype dislikes in romance? The Doomful Warning of Mass Hysteria from the character who wants to preserve the ignorance of the mortals. Give it up already, dude.

In the end, well, I didn’t get to the end. After the heroine went into yet another trance and the hero busted down the door to save her, I skimmed to the end. There was a happy ending. I wasn’t happy for either of the characters. I couldn’t have cared less. 

I got this from the mystery writer group blog First Offenders:

Having worked in tech support, I can so, so relate.