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

If this entry were to be categorized on Jeopardy!, it would definitely be “Pot Pourri.”

Also: Suck it, Trebek.

Anyway, thanks to Michelle Styles, I have an updated autobiography to look forward to. Harlequin will be releasing an updated edition of Ida Cook’s autobiography Safe Passage, which tells how Cook and her sister used funds from her writing to help save Jews from the Holocaust. Styles reports that she saw a copy at a recent event, and the book has a new forward and new pictures. “Part of the reason for the publication is all the interest renewed interest in her story,” Styles says - which makes sense to me. We cite the Cook sisters in The Smart Bitch Book as examples of the power and use of romance novels - and as useful evidence to shut down even the most irritating of detractors. I’m a big fan of the sisters Cook, and am all about this new edition.

And speaking of romance novelists forging new paths - here’s a totally different direction for authors: Roslyn Holcomb is at Sephora’s beauty blog revealing the three beauty products that every romance heroine needs:

More than one hero has found himself being rescued by a woman that has somehow managed to slaughter a roomful of bad guys while maintaining a luminescent beauty that renders him speechless. Not only that, but they’re frequently haring off to some exotic location on a moment’s notice.

I won’t spoil the fun, but without question, lip balm? She is 100% right about that.

And you should look good while banging your head on the desk - so here’s your daily opportunity to use that well-worn dent in your desk: vintage ads that are so sexist you’ll want to go buy yourself a vibrator to make everything all better. Thanks (I think!) to Tae for the link. 

Someone at the Graph Jam might want to adjust the numbers as to the squeeful hyperbolic 5 star reviews. Klausner alone accounts for at least a 10-12% increase. 

David Foster Wallace didn’t write romances, and this article I’m about to link to doesn’t talk about romance novels, so in context it has little to do with the general subject of this here hot pink wunderblog, except for one little thing: Wallace’s commencement address as reprinted in the Wall Street Journal talks about choosing to think, choosing to engage one’s mind outside the petty, petulant self-absorbed auto-pilot, and finding ways to care about other people:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day....

It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars—compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff’s necessarily true: The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship…

Since this here hot pink wunderblog is about romance, and the literature that examines it over and over, and the plots that are filled deliberately with stories of two people learning to care about one another, the act of reading a romance can often remind me that the world isn’t circling on an axis around me and my problems, and that if I had to choose a worship, as Wallace discusses in that speech, I’d like to think I’d choose to worship happiness and romance novels are part of that choice. Thanks, Mr. Wallace, for the reminder. I’m off to find me another romance. 

Ready, Set, Go - time to caption a cover so strange, we have to ask you to give it a caption. Voting takes place in the comments, and she who hath the most votes gets the prize. The prize? $20 to the bookstore of your choice - Amazon or Powell’s. So, have at it.

This one brings new meaning to the word “private box.” Or, maybe not so private. 

Feeling poorly because you’ve got a new grey hair? Maybe your first? Maybe your forty-fifteenth? Whatever. You’re still sexy. Trust us.