Entries in the Category "smart bitches trashy novels"
Interesting Literary Debate!
...and nobody is still reading.
I wrote recently about Twilight and why I don’t care to sample that particular cultural phenomenon. Basically, literature is important to me, and all the accounts that I’ve had of Twilight suggest that in those books the literary development is subordinated to sensationalism and girlish squealing. I tend to get those things in other places.
In that post, I said that I didn’t care to read romance novels, but a debate that’s been percolating online has clued me in to the fact that I should be less dismissive and tease out my aversion to the genre in a way that’s not patronizing. Learning!
The post, about why we shouldn’t judge romance novels by the Fabio on the cover, is here at Smart Bitches Trashy Books. (Yes, that’s the name of the site.) They’re commenting on a post that appeared over at the Huffington Post written by some old man (who, it appears, is mostly concerned with promoting his own book). (I was tipped to the debate, as usual, by Linda from Monkey See.)
The writer over at SB makes the excellent point that the old guy has no right to draw a broad generalization based on checking a random stack of romances out of the library. She acknowledges, as do the numerous commenters on the site, that the romance genre is replete with crap writers and the fill-in-the-blanks style of plotting. But what the site appears to be designed for is acknowledging the romantic fiction that goes the extra mile and is good. SB makes a strong case that romance is a broader category than people generally realize and that, to employ a cliché in a post about good and bad writing, there are diamonds in that rough.
I don’t doubt it. And some of the commenters at SB made really good observations about the fallibility of the old guy’s argument. One says, “I don’t want someone who’s not familiar with pop music reviewing the latest CDs for me,” and another says, “Maybe what he really needs to do is take a statistics class and get a refresher on what it would take to get a statistically relevant sample.” Yes, absolutely. He was not qualified to make the judgment that he did, and yet! that fact points towards why I tend to avoid romance novels altogether.
I don’t know how to filter the bad from the good. I don’t know where to start. I don’t want to have to read ten bad romance novels to discover one terrific writer. I never know whose opinion I can trust—except for my own—and I just don’t have the reading time; my to-be-read list is long enough already, thanks.
Even catching one good one does not guarantee others. I remember reading Circle of Friends by Maeve Binchy in college because I really liked the movie. That was a terrific book (which has since disappeared from my shelves—I think, in fact, that it may have been absorbed by my sister’s bookshelf, ahem). It took me four more mediocre Binchy novels to decide that Circle of Friends was an anomaly.
In literary fiction, I’ve made inroads. I know which authors I like, I know which authors are like the ones I like; basically, I know the lay of the land. It would be a substantial project to explore a new genre and the takeaway—I would get to read really good romance novels—is not good enough. I read plenty of really good books and some of them have romance in them, and that’s enough for me.