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

Last week Candy burst forth with songs of Luuurve ™ about covers she actually liked. This week, it’s my turn.

This is one of my favorite covers ever, which is good because I like the book a helluva lot, too. It’s both ethereal and creepy, attractive and horrifying - a diaphanous woman on the ground in an unnatural position, yet still arranged in a way that is alluring enough to make you take a second look. Amazing design, especially the physical position of the model - at first glance, she’s just reclining but then you see the bent arm and think, “Wait a minute....”

P.C. Cast shall henceforth be known as Seriously Lucky Bitch, because she won the cover lottery somehow. I’ll get to the “Goddess of” series in a minute, but check this out. It’s a centaur woman. She’s half a horse. And she’s still attractive and interesting and how the hell did they do that? She is HALF HORSE and yet she’s strong and feminine. Wow.

Proof #2 that PC Cast has the luck that dare not speak its name. Candy already talked about Goddess of Spring so I’m going to take a gander at this one - and there’s something very specific I like about it, too. Aside from being artistically gorgeous and visually exquisite, I love this cover for a particular reason. The woman in question, she has a BELLY. At least, it looks like she does. And wow, does that every make my pregnant self feel even more goddess-like.

I love Dot Frank’s Lowcountry tales, and Sullivan’s Island is one of my favorites, and, like Bitten, I love it when a cover is attractive enough to match my enjoyment of the contents. It has enough color to avoid being one of those washed-out beach watercolors, and it looks like a still snapshot of a romance and a good story - which it is.

I love this cover for the same reasons as the Dot Frank cover. I personally love the beach, so it’s not hard for me to like any cover that’s ocean-related. But the classic attire, almost Greek or Roman-like, coupled with the gesture that the woman depicted is about to toss off her gown and go swimming is both a romantic and conquering image.

I have tried to read this book a bunch of times, and each time I didn’t enjoy it as much as I enjoyed the cover - so I suppose this is my “Kitchen Witch,” the book I keep coming back to even though I’ve tried to read it before. It’s a lush, evocative cover, and I wish my hair would do that thing that it’s doing on her head on that there cover. The smooth bun without the flying pieces every which way? I might have to try to read this book again, because it’s just too good-looking. My problem, though, is that the cover looks like a contemporary - her dress, that hairstyle - and then I crack it open and it’s...a Tudor?

Holy erotic cover, Batman. WOW. That is one evocative image, and while I’d have to cover that bad boy up on the bus in the morning, whooo damn. That is some erotic, sensual imagery right there. Love the dark hand against the bodice. I’m fanning myself, in fact.

And there you have it - covers I like. I’m a big fan of not seeing people’s faces, it seems, as I like covers that end at the collarbone - the headless cover model doesn’t bother me at all. I’m also a sucker for covers that show people from the back or side, or in masked profile, though I couldn’t recall any specifically that I’d marked mentally as a “love this cover” book.

But mostly, I love artistic, lush covers that aren’t about clinchy sensuality. I’m not a huge fan of the one color covers with a picture of an estate or manor in the distance, either, though, as they seem to be the antithesis of the clinch cover, staid and plain for the sake of being so. I’m always interested to see reissues of older books, like early Julia Quinns that go from wild-haired clinch cover to staid one-shade cover with small watercolor house in the distance around the middle like a belt.

I’m always happy, then, to find covers that are romantic without clinching all over the place, and yet are interesting to look at. 

I just read some excellent news: Laura Kinsale won the Best Long Historical Romance RITA with Shadowheart, and Jennifer Crusie won the Best Contemporary Single Title Romance RITA with Bet Me. YES! *fistpump* This goes a long way towards ameliorating some of the rather puzzling decisions the RITA committee has made in the past. (I mean, c’mon, Worth Any Price was the best Short Historical for 2004? Da hell? Was it an especially lean year for historicals? And I’m big Lisa Kleypas fan, even, the kind who buys her books as soon as they come out and devours them within a day, whether they’re any good or not.)

Anyway, congratulations to Laura Kinsale and Jennifer Crusie. I’m doing the Happy Snoopy Dance.

Heather correctly guessed the answers to today’s Personal Ad challenge. All hail Heather!

And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for: Kneel, Heather, for the Smart Bitches dub thee:

See? Told you the title would be all classy and shit.

I really do need to stay away from the AAR boards. I tell myself this, but I click on the linkies anyway. Oh dear. This one is Jorie’s fault.

One reader blames romance novels for the death of normal relationships.

I think romance novels are death to normal, real relationships. You start thinking all that action, adventure and passion is the norm in the real world. You start to look for a man with romance novel hero traits. As a woman who started reading romance in her teens I didn’t realize I was doing this until my early twenties. If the guy wasn’t exciting and romance novel like I didn’t want him.

OK, I’ll admit that this post wouldn’t have bugged me as much if the poster hadn’t made such a sweeping statement. Death to normal, real relationships? Not for me. Much as I love to read romance novels, I wouldn’t want to live one. Too much turmoil and heartbreak for my taste. But reading it and living through it vicariously? Hell yeah.

Hey, I wouldn’t want to live a mystery, SF, fantasy or, hell, even a lit fic novel, either.

If romance novels are fucking with your head, then by all means say as much. “I am unable to read romance novels without allowing them to fuck with my head. I will cease reading them because the fuckery is spilling into my life and the decisions I make.” That’s a perfectly acceptable sentiment. Saying that it’s the romance novel’s fault, though, instead of your own inability to separate fiction from expectations of reality? Pah. And trying to generalize this further and make it seem as if they’re responsible for a greater social phenomenon? Double pah.

And another musing came courtesy of Elizabeth Mahon, who spotted the following tidbit on Hollywood-Elsewhere:

Why do the women reading paperback books in subways and airport lounges always seem to be reading mass-market fiction? Why don’t I ever see one, just one, reading a book by, say, William Faulkner or Gore Vidal?

OK, anyone smell the fragrant sexist bullshit wafting off this observation? I rode public transport for years and years, and I saw precious few people, male, female or pre-or-post-op transsexual reading Faulkner or Vidal or other such lofty authors on the bus or MAX. Most of the men weren’t reading, period, and if they were, they were every bit as guilty of indulging in mass market paperbacks as women. The exceptions would be people reading newspapers (men seemed a bit more likely to do this than women) and college students doing some last-minute swotting on the bus, something female students seemed to do as frequently as male students.

At any rate, if this asshole had ridden public transport in Portland and seen me reading, he would’ve seen me reading everything from Lolita to Moby Dick to Le Petit Nicolas to The Shadow and the Star. I even read The Sound and The Fury on the bus. Does that make me all special and shit? Should I take a photo and e-mail it to this jerkwad?

The reply he wrote to Elizabeth when she e-mailed him about it was even more distasteful:

I don’t like mass-market popular fiction, as a rule. It’s basically junk-food stuff. There is a world out there...an amazing wonderful world of knowledge and exotic places and fresh atttitude and beliefs and sensuality and illumination...all of which is barely paid attention to by mass-market fiction writers. Don’t try and justify lazy, degraded literary appetites. So you read this crap yourself, right? That’s what your letter was about? You feeling vaguely guilty about putting junk-food fiction into your brain and your soul, and wanting to rationalize the anti-intellectual, impulse-minded, short-attention-span tendences of women of your generation? Something along these lines?

Woo damn. You know, when I see those godawful monstrous SUVs, H2s and pickup trucks all blinged out and growling along in the urban wilderness of Portland, sometimes I think “Holy shit, penis enhancer much?” This is the first time I’ve thought the same thing about somebody’s opinion about literature.

“LOOK AT ME! MY TASTE IN LITERATURE IS AWESOME! THE THICKER THE SPINE, THE MORE OBTUSE THE PROSE, THE BIGGER MY COCK! KNEEL BEFORE ME, BITCHES!”

All right, bitches. ‘Tis another Friday, and time for another Personal Ad challenge. Guess the author, title and heroine’s name (don’t forget the heroine’s name!) correctly, and lo, find thyself the proud owner of a happy, shiny, beyootiful and always-tasteful *koff* Smart Bitch aristocratic title.

Long Snake Moan

SWF, shiftless late-night DJ, currently unemployed, appreciative of PJ Harvey and REM (among others), looking for my even flakier sister and maybe some love along the way. Hot recluses who have undergone some sort of crazy emotional trauma a plus.