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

HelenKay pointed out today that chick lit is being blamed for all sorts of ills. Now, mind you, the few chick lit books I’ve read have annoyed me (for which I got lots of flack), but I certainly don’t think they’re destroying all that is good and right with civilization.

Few things annoy me more than some self-righteous douche trying to blame some undesirable social aspect or another on fiction. In the case of so-called feminists who get their panties in a massive wad about the pernicious influence of chick lit or romance novels, I feel the overwhelming urge to shake them while bellowing “HOW STUPID AND IMPRESSIONABLE DO YOU THINK WOMEN ARE, YA CONDESCENDING ASSMUNCH?” I mean, please. For people who are supposedly all rah-rah women’s rights, we deserve equal treatment and equal respect yadda yadda yadda, they have a pretty low opinion of the average woman’s ability to think, reason and distinguish reality from make-believe. But THEY’RE not average, of course. They’re brilliant, and are able to discern which works are dangerous to our impressionable little minds and which ones aren’t.

If this sort of attitude sounds suspiciously similar to the asshats ranting and raving about how dangerous Rainbow Party is to children and how reading about teenagers engaging in oral sex will turn 13-year-old Joanna into a godless, ravening whore who constantly craves hot, hard cock, that’s because it is.

So the two articles HelenKay links to are pretty interesting, but the one that really got my hackles up was the Nerve.com article Monica Jackson linked to a while ago. Alas, the article is now subscription-only, but thanks to the magic of Google’s caching technology, the article can still be viewed in its entirety here, though there are no guarantees how long the cached page will remain. Anyway, I’d forgotten about it, then reading HelenKay’s article reminded me, and re-reading it--gah gah gaaaaaaaah I can’t even express to you MUCH this self-righteous douche annoys me.

Let’s start with some choice quotes, shall we?

Kate Rothwell has a totally bitchin’ contest that you should enter. If you don’t participate, she has a list of threats, and I have no doubt--NO DOUBT--that she will have no trouble carrying out all of them in the inimitable ruthless Rothwell fashion.

So please. Think of the doughnut, and those lonely Bosnia socks.

Queens, Princesses, Duchesses, Marchionesses, Countesses, Viscountesses and Baronesses, and members of the Court of Bitchery, We have a Winner in the haiku contest!

In a stunning and slightly amusing tie, PC Cast and her Phabulous Daughter have won the haiku contest, garnering equal numbers of votes for their haikus, number #4 and #5:

Ode to Mantittyfruit

4.
Succulent, firm flesh
Manfruit waiting to be plucked
Nipple dew…so sweet

5.
Hair on man titties?
Nay! (gasp) Abomination!
My Dear Sweet Lord – WAX.

So without further ado, we hereby crown PC Cast and her daughter:

We also had a number of honorable mention votes for E. D’Trix’s #11 and #12, so congratulations on fine efforts as well. We seem to all be suckers for anything that makes the baby Jesus cry. 

Update: It’s official: I’m a retard, and I should not attempt to read complex sentences before 10 a.m. The sentence is fine as-is. Disregard this entry entirely, or just use it as proof of my general retardedness.




I’ve heard a lot of buzz about Lori Handeland’s Blue Moon, so off I toddled to Amazon.com to see if the book featured one of those nifty “Look Inside This Book!” features. And whaddaya know, it did.

However, I have been completely unable to read past the first sentence. Check it out:

The summer I discovered the world was not black-and-white--the way I liked it--but a host of annoying shades of gray was the summer a lot more changed than my vision.

Don’t believe me? See for yourself.

Trying to figure out this sentence is breaking my brain.

People who have read this book and grammarians in general: Am I missing something here? Or is the sentence at least two different sentences squished together with some critical words missing? Or is the Amazon.com scan completely wonky?

I need to know. If the sentence in the book is exactly as the Amazon.com page presents it, I can’t read the book. I can’t. That first sentence haunts me. It makes no sense.

Now that a great many of us are Smart Bitches, thanks to the membership feature of this here site, I have a question to the general Bitchery: What is your A book?

I don’t necessarily mean your all-time favorite, since sometimes the book you call your most lovely favorite is a book wherein you must acknowledge the flaws in the structure or plotting or character, and love the book despite its imperfections.

I mean the book that made you go, “Well, beat me with a donkey’s ass, that was a fucking awesome romance novel!”

For me, there are desperately few of these books: Bitten by Kelley Armstrong is one of my A books, because it just knocked me over and I still think about it. It was also the book that created my utter fascination with paranormal romance. 

Also, Kinsale’s Flowers from the Storm, because this book beat down the weeds in the side yard of the estate of romance and created a whole new field of readng for me: The Holy-Shit Good Romance. Can you imagine the editor’s meeting for that one? “No, really, he’s a immoral, licentious duke, but he had a stroke, and she’s a Quaker, so he’s locked in an institution unable to communicate clearly, and she’s locked in to a different institution that she loves but feels she is betraying - hey, where are you going? This is too a romance!”

I’m still working on my “All About Sarah” entry (I have twice as many cats plus a dog so I have to take a lot more pictures) but since one of the questions is about my A book, I want to know- what’s yours?