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

John Lennon once wrote a love letter to his first wife, Cynthia, in which he said, “I love you.... I love you like guitars.”

*sigh*

Gets me every time.

Elizabeth has a similarly musical love scene in her quest to find a lost book, and hopes you can help:

I was hoping the Bitchery could help me identify one of the first romance novels I ever read.  It involves a woman who is kidnapped by a pirate who mistakenly believes her to be wealthy.  When she first meets him, she nearly faints from hunger because he has a loaf of warm bread in his pocket and she’s overcome by the scent of it.  After she’s been kidnapped, one of the crewmen is injured or ill, and she sends another man to collect crewman A’s ration of grog.  Crewman B is about to be whipped (?) for trying to take more than his allotment.  She confesses her responsibility, and this (of course) gets the crew on her side.  There’s a subplot involving the first mate, who falls in love with a Scandinavian woman.  This Scandinavian woman looks down on the heroine because she’s the captain’s mistress by this point, and the crew all insist that the captain has to marry her so she can keep her head up.

The heroine’s meditations on sex are probably the most distinctive thing about the book (the plot is generic and the characterizations are thin).  Basically, she imagines a different instrument playing in her head every time - sometimes the sex makes her think of trumpets, sometimes drums, sometimes flutes...you get the idea.  I’m not sure if she winds up with the whole orchestra by the end of the book, or if it never gets better than a string quartet.

If anyone knows what book this is, I’d be incredibly grateful for the help.

Anyone got an idea which book this is? And really, is there a more lovely expression than, “I love you, I love you like guitars?” I’m all warm and fuzzy from the memorable dialogue discussion, and that just keeps the soft-focus glow going and going. 

I have a stack of book covers to get through, each one more awesome than the next - and by “awesome” I mean “so searingly neon in color and utterly bizarre in artistic construct that I can only gape and wish with a naughty part of myself that there were more covers on the market now that looked like these, if only for the sake of hilarity.” Or something like that.

Thanks to Joanne, the allure of the pirate, it falters in the face of these costumes. It’s one week until Halloween, and time for a little game I like to call, ¿Quién es más faygele?

This Guy.

That Guy.

That Other Guy.

Dude.

Yarr! Take your pick!

¿Quién es más faygele?

This guy.

That guy.

That other guy.

Dude.