There was Valentine’s Day of course, and with it articles about romance and romance fiction. There were the comments about embodiment on my last post, and Jessica’s wonderful post about embodiment (don’t miss the comments). And then there were all the outraged tweets and Facebook posts about the birth control hearings where no women spoke and Virginia’s new law requiring a woman seeking an abortion to submit to a trans-vaginal ultrasound.

I think my favorite link from all the political WTF-ery was to a blog post from The Daily Caller (which I’d never heard of before, and which I plan to forget ASAP) entitled “What are women for?” James Poulos’ piece is so poorly written and argued that if it were a student paper, it would be lucky to get a bare pass. (He was slightly less addled when writing the follow-up). The upshot, though, seems to be that since women can bear children, they don’t get to decide individually what to do with their bodies; society does (it’s telling that apparently when he first tweeted the article link, he @ alerted only men to it). 

Poulos also suggests that women’s unique “natural bodies” give them a role in creating a more civilized society (I guess because we are nurturers by nature). There is, he claims, a broad consensus across the political spectrum that this is so. I had thought that consensus was left behind with the Victorian doctrine of separate spheres, the view that women must be protected from the contamination of the public world of business and politics so that they could function as the angel in the house, the moral guide of husbands and children. I guess I was deluded in thinking this an artifact of history.

This view of women’s moral superiority is a kind of benevolent sexism, “a set of interrelated attitudes toward women that are sexist in terms of viewing women stereotypically and in restricted roles but that are subjectively positive in feeling tone.” Merrian linked to in a couple of comment threads, prompting a great post from Heather Massey on benevolent sexism in sci fi romance. Heather asks (and I think she’s posed similar questions before) why writers setting their stories in future worlds often don’t imagine gender and sexuality in ways that look much different from our own.

So the week’s reading brought to the front of my mind a number of issues: the extent to which women’s control over our bodies is under threat, the extent to which our culture defines women as bodies, the extent to which gender is biologically determined (less than a lot of people assume; a great book on this is Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender). That’s partly why, when I read Maria Bustillos’ much-linked piece in The Awl on “Romance Novels, the Last Great Bastion of Underground Writing,” I first tweeted the link and promptly followed up with “Just because something is by, for and about women does not make it a feminist document, FFS.”

This seems to have touched a nerve (see Magdalen’s post for an example). But “by, for and about women” is not the definition of feminist. Not any definition of feminist. Yes, there are lots of debates within feminism, but the definition isn’t content-free, just decide for yourself. Just because a woman chooses something does not make it a feminist choice or exempt from critique from a feminist perspective. Women’s choices can be constrained by society and sometimes by their own conventional views of gender. All-female enterprises can be both empowering in some ways and sexist in others, because they are not separate from the larger, still in some ways sexist culture. College sororities would be one example of this, I think. And I’m pretty sure Romance–individual books, the genre as a whole, and the industry itself–is another. How could it not be?

It’s no surprise that Romanceland is wary and conflicted about its relationship to feminism. There’s a strand of reader-shaming and genre-shaming in some feminist views of romance (“you’re contributing to your own oppression by reading this awful trash, and you’re too dumb to see it,” essentially). It can feel important, then, to celebrate romance as unquestionably feminist (at least now; sometimes this celebration involves a problematic disavowal of the rape-y past). Challenges to that view are often controversial. This post by Laura Vivanco on a Kelly Hunter book in which the heroine disclaims feminism, and the subsequent long discussion thread, gives a pretty good picture of the issues and positions at stake in any discussion of feminism and romance.

I don’t think all romance is entirely sexist. It’s much too big a genre to make such generalizations about (and equally too sweeping to say that every romance novel is a feminist document). I don’t think the whole romance publishing industry is sexist. I think there’s a lot to celebrate in them from a feminist point of view–and setting feminism aside, a lot to celebrate just because romance can be fun, moving, beautiful, and thought-provoking. And the pleasure romance novels have given me can make me reluctant to critique or question them.

But I do have questions. Here are a few:

• I’m curious about why I enjoy many books whose ideology I find on some level problematic (not every book, no, but plenty). These are hard questions, because they do ask me to consider whether I’ve internalized sexist views, and whether reading which has given me much pleasure has encouraged me to do so. I think these are questions each reader much choose to grapple with, or not, herself. I’m not interested in dictating to anyone else on this point.
• It’s risky, again, to generalize about such a big genre, but taken as a whole, it can seem fairly conservative. For instance, I’ve never read a romance heroine who considered abortion or even adoption when she had an unplanned pregnancy, though I’ve heard there are a few out there. Why not? Could the genre tolerate more stories that more closely reflect real women’s choices and struggles, not just in this area but in others? Does the focus on courtship which is defined as a key element of romance fiction preclude those stories?
• The market research of companies like Harlequin is often cited as a sign that the romance industry is giving female readers exactly what they want. I wonder about this, though. I hear a lot of gender-stereotypical assumptions from editors, writers and readers about what readers want: readers read to fall in love with the hero; readers want the hero to be at least a little stronger and more powerful than the heroine, so he has something to offer her. Well, not this reader, or at least not all the time. I realize my online circle is a very small subset of romance readers, but many of us are asking for something different. Are publishers asking questions in their market research that would allow people to ask for something different? (This doesn’t always happen. Today my employer asked me if I wanted to use their wifi to access the Internet. I expect Harlequin surveys are more sophisticated, but how much?) If publishers tried offering more variety, would they create demand for it? Could they broaden their readership? 
• What about what I understand to be the RWA’s resistance to including smaller e-presses and self-publishers, typically female entrepreneurs, a practice which favors traditional publishing–now mostly multi-national conglomerates which are still male dominated at the top, no matter how female the editorial staff may be? I wonder whether the RWA is really doing all it could to empower female authors, or whether it is afraid to challenge the publishing status quo.

A number of posts in the past couple of days have made me want to read more adventurously:

• Sandy at All About Romance asks “Are You an Adventurous Reader?” Like a lot of commenters, digital reading and audiobooks have widened my horizons.
• Jessica wrote a great post applying the idea of hard and soft limits to reading fiction; now I’m thinking about where my limits are and how I can push them (does that make me the sub and books my Dom?).
• January reviewed a book outside Dear Author‘s soft limits; both she and Jane liked it despite disturbing elements, and I wondered if I could enjoy something so far outside my own comfort zone.

Like a lot of readers I know, Jane and January are trying more self-published books in a search for something new and different. I’d like to, but I’ve barely ventured (only to authors whose traditionally published work I’ve already liked). Part of it is that competent grammar and editing are “musts” for me. 

But I like the idea of discovering a book all by myself, without anyone’s recommendation, and having it surprise me. I’m just not sure where to start in finding them. I’ve felt a bit “flat” about my reading lately, and I think stretching myself would help. But I’m a coward, too. I have trouble with books that harrow or shock me.

In the beginning, romance reading was limit-pushing for me. First I regarded it as trash, read now and then in secret (even as I sought out literary fiction with a courtship plot and happy ending). Then historicals were OK, but I would never read those cheesy contemporary romances. OK, OK, but nothing with vampires. You get the picture. I’ve pushed a lot of limits. But now I mostly read romances in my comfort zone, and it’s time to redraw the lines again.

Passionate Reading Update

I got so many great comments, here and elsewhere, on my passionate reading post. Part of what I was asking for there, it occurs to me now, were books out of my comfort zone. I decided to start with suggestions already in my TBR, which I am trying to whittle down. That sounds like cheating. I’ve already bought these books, so how are they outside my usual limits? But I haven’t read them yet, so something in me is resisting (my twisted relationship with my TBR pile/files is way tl;dr, and I don’t fully understand it myself). So these are the books I’m moving up the pile, in no particular order:

Laura Kinsale, The Shadow and the Star (SonomaLass and Janine)

Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan series–I’ve got several on audio, and have read Cordelia’s Honor (Victoria and Merrian)

Marie Sexton, Promises and K. A. Mitchell, No Souvenirs (Kaetrin)

Martha Wells, The Cloud Roads (Victoria)

And, totally cheating because not already in my TBR, but I’ve been wanting to read these for years and realized they are now e-available, Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles (Rohan)

I’ll keep other suggestions in mind! Thanks so much, everyone, for your wonderful comments on that post.

Let’s Talk About Sex

Today’s Globe and Mail seemed a bit conflicted about Valentine’s Day. On the one hand, the Style section featured pricey red gifts, fuchsia nail polishes, and chocolate dessert recipes for the holiday. On the other, there was Margaret Wente’s column proclaiming romantic love overrated and arguing that women in their 30s need to give up fantasies about The One and settle for . . . well, I’m not sure what she was arguing. For the record, I can’t stand Wente and any opinion of hers on post-secondary education is guaranteed to make me Hulk Smash Angry. While I’d agree that the fantasy of One True Love can be a problem, I didn’t like the way Wente wrote as if her own experience would apply to everyone. I’m here to tell you, Ms. Wente, that if you’re lucky, a lightning bolt at 21 can lead to lasting love. There are many ways to get there.

Then there was the Books page. The cover teased: “What gets Scott Turow hot under the collar–plus other blush-worthy erotica.” Inside, giant letters scream ”Hot Type” and I’m promised writers (and Globe readers) will “weigh in on their favourite sexy and sensual works of art” and “steamy favourites.” You know where this is going, right? Read for yourself. 

A lot of the books mentioned did not sound in the least bit erotic. I noticed on-line that some readers suggested romance novels (Meredith Duran, for instance), but none of those made the cut in the print paper, though some actual erotica did. Look, I’m as annoyed when genre readers bash literary fiction as I am when the reverse happens (we’re not totally separate groups, for one thing). And people can find all sorts of books erotic, so I’m not saying these writers were lying.

But I do regret that literary fiction is so often less able to be frank about sex than romance fiction is, and that when asked about “steamy reads” so many writers seemed to bend over backwards to find non-erotic books about sex. How about Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, who chose Lolita? Not, thankfully, because he found it sexy, but because “it is the first book I know of to show the terrible consequence of child sexual abuse.” That is what you come up with when asked for a sexy read? WTF?

Are people so afraid to talk about what turns them on? Do these writers never read something just because it will turn them on? Or, as a wise reader-friend said, “to see what will turn me on”? Or will they just not admit to it in a national newspaper?

For ages, I’ve been pondering a post about the sexy side of romance reading, but I’m not sure exactly what I want to say, or how to say it without going on way too long with way too much information. I’m not comfortable talking about these things. I’m still working on it. But for now, I’ll say this: I’m uncomfortable when readers say things like “hubs was glad I read book X” or “this book saved my sex life.” That’s TMI for uptight WASPy me.

But. Sometimes what I’m reading turns me on. Sometimes I choose a book on purpose to get turned on. Reading romance has helped me feel more comfortable acknowledging my own desires, to myself and my partner (apparently I still needed help with that at my advanced age). Because it’s helped me see them as normal, not shameful. You don’t even have to read the books. Skim a few erotica blurbs at All Romance E-Books, and you realize that your sexual imaginings are definitely no stranger than other people’s.

So for that, Happy Valentine’s Day to romance fiction, and to the many, many writers who are unafraid to depict sex frankly in their books and to create characters who are unashamed of their sexuality, and Happy Valentine’s Day to readers who are unafraid to discuss books that give them all kinds of pleasure.

Feel free to share your own steamy favorites, literary or otherwise, in the comments. If you dare.

But Franzen’s comment did make me think about what books I buy in digital form and what I still buy in paper. Do I treat some books as more impermanent than others? Almost all my romance reading is digital, and there are lots of good reasons for that: I buy and read a lot of them, and my house is already crammed with books; I became a regular romance reader after (OK, because) I got an e-reader; mass-market paperbacks aren’t all that nice or, pace Franzen, long-lasting. But I wonder if the ease of buying digital and the “invisibility” of those books in my files makes me treat them as more disposable. I read romances I love, but if I can’t see them on a shelf the way I can paper favorites, will I re-read them?

When I buy literary fiction, it’s usually in paper or even hardcover. Why? I’m no more likely to want to re-read these books than I am romance. I am more likely to know another reader to pass them on to. But I’m wondering now whether I see paper as a “superior” format, and see literary fiction as more “worthy” of paper than romance. Damn, more reading prejudices uncovered!

I bought A. S. Byatt’s Ragnarök: The End of the Gods in hardback as soon as it came out. And I don’t regret doing so. For one thing, like many of Byatt’s books, it’s a beautiful object: a red and gold dustjacket, good paper with those lovely ragged edges, a classic typeface (Van Dijck, apparently; I love notes on type in the back of books), wide margins, illustrations (annoyingly unattributed, but I suspect from the 19th-century Asgard and the Gods this book refers to).

Did my view that Byatt is a Really Good and Important writer affect my view that she’s worthy of hardback purchase? Yes, it probably did. (Are you thinking of the “sponge-worthy” Seinfeld episode now? I am.) But more significant is the fact that Byatt is Very Important to me. Possession is one of my favorite books, and the Frederica Quartet had a big impact on me as well.

I was glad of the format because Ragnarök is a book I read slowly, a bit at a time, interspersed with other books. It demanded my full attention, and I frequently found myself flipping back a few pages to re-read passages. That’s harder to do with an e-book (at least for me). The main interest of this book for me was Byatt’s prose style, and I read it the way I would poetry.

Ragnorök is an odd book. As the title suggests, it’s essentially a retelling of Norse myths about the end of the gods, woven through with autobiographical reflections on the impact Byatt’s childhood reading of those myths had on her. She says in the “Thoughts on Myths” at the end (which I could have done without; they’re interesting, but it’s as if she didn’t trust the book to speak for itself) that she didn’t want to treat these stories as allegories for the environmental destruction of our world, but that hangs over the book, and intentionally so, as a bibliography with a section headed “Warnings” makes clear.

This wasn’t the best Byatt book I ever read, by a long shot, and sometimes it bored me. But here’s what I loved:

1. The sheer voraciousness of the author’s intellect. Byatt loves dense, detailed descriptions; she seems fascinated by facts and ideas; she piles these things up in lists. Paragraph after paragraph in the early pages records the vibrant multiplicity of the life that will be destroyed in the end. There’s both the world created in the myths and the natural world of wartime England observed by the “thin child” (Byatt) reading them:

In the spring the field was thick with cowslips, and in the hedgerows, in the tangled bank, under the hawthorn hedge and the ash tree, there were pale primroses and violets of many colours, from rich purple to a white touched with mauve. Dandelion, dent-de-lion, lionstooth, her mother told her. Her mother liked words. There were vetches and lady’s bedstraw, forgetmenots and speedwells, foxgloves, viper’s bugloss, cow parsley  . . .

You get the picture.

2. That “tangled bank” is an allusion to a famous passage at the end of Darwin’s Origin of Species:

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. . . . There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Spotting that allusion made me feel clever (the passage is much anthologized, and I’ve used it in class). It also made me wonder what I was missing.

3. If Byatt has faith (in the religious sense) in anything, I think it’s in the grandeur and multiplicity of nature. She writes about how the Norse myths spoke to her childhood imagination in a way that the Christian story (presented as bland pictures of gentle Jesus surrounded by baby animals) did not. As a not-very-good-Christian (I sometimes describe church-going as a habit I have failed to break) who has done an even worse job conveying to my children that there might be something to my faith, I was provoked to consider how poorly, as a whole, Christians have done recently at telling their stories in a way that inspires children. I loved Narnia and still do, but even as a child I wondered about some of Lewis’ judgements (so if I like lipstick and boys I won’t get into heaven??). Madeleine L’Engle, too, had a profound influence on me. But as a writer and creator of worlds, I think Philip Pullman beats them both.

4. There is some wonderful imagery here, like this at the very end of the end of the world: “All there was was a flat surface of black liquid glinting in the small pale points of light that still came through the starholes. A few gold chessmen floated and bobbed on the dark ripples.” Those chessman gave me shivers.

5. I loved the moments when Byatt’s language echoed that of Norse sagas: “The Odin said he must ride there on eight-legged Sleipnir, swifest of horses, leader of the Wild Hunt, Odin’s own horse.”

This is a minor work in Byatt’s oeuvre but there’s still a lot to like.

I am not exactly a fan of passion in my personal life. I mistrust anything that carries me beyond reason or makes me feel out of control. For me, there’s a whiff of the fanatic (the demon-possessed) in fan, and of suffering (the Passion of Christ) in passion. That’s probably why I’ve seldom been really drunk, and never been tempted to try drugs.

I didn’t enjoy falling in love that much. The soaring highs and steep drops. Roller-coasters make me motion sick; falling in love felt kind of queasy, too. I like being in love just fine, though. Some lovers seem to thrive on drama, fights, sobbing, reckless acts, think the best sex is make-up sex. Not me. I like quiet contentment. (In case you’re worried, or you’re my husband, I’m not implying my sex life is dull. There are occasions when being carried beyond reason works just fine for me.)

This is a paradoxical thing for a romance-reader to say, but I’m often not a fan of passionate books, either. I found my way to romance through Austen and Heyer. Many of the romances I enjoy most are traditional Regencies and contemporary comedies. It’s not that I’m unmoved, or wish to be, by my reading. But I find that angsty, dramatic books about larger-than-life people carried away by passion, books which grip and enthrall many other readers, are usually not for me. When I want a more highly emotional reading experience, I turn to a realistic contemporary, like a Harlequin SuperRomance, where the emotions come from regular people’s everyday problems.

I’m not a passionate reader, exactly, either. I love reading. It’s a big part of my professional vocation and of my leisure time. But I’m trained to read analytically, and I do so by temperament too. I don’t think I’ve been uncritically lost in a book since childhood. I had my readerly Romantic fall from Innocence to Experience long ago. Unlike Wordsworth, I don’t mourn “the hour / Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower.” I’m content to give up intense immersion in exchange for the pleasures of critical thinking.

Waiting to pick up my daughter from school today, I meditated on this post as I finished Sheila Simonson’s trad Regency Lady Elizabeth’s Comet. And I came upon this in the hero’s declaration to the heroine:

“I prefer a mature and elevating attachment to the idiocies of calf love. Far more dignified, don’t you think?” He kissed my hair. Thence another interlude–elevated, of course.

This passage is characteristic of the restraint and humour I enjoyed in the book. This is a couple in love, and in lust (though that’s offstage, in the dash), but they aren’t so overpowered by passion that they can’t make jokes. You can see why I enjoyed this book so much. And I enjoyed it more because I was thinking about how the passage worked and why it appealed to me so much right then. For me, that was a perfect reading moment. 

But not for every reader. This is an account of my development as a certain kind of reader, and I don’t expect or require everyone to be like me. I don’t judge readers who are passionate about passionate books–as long as they don’t judge me.

At least, I thought I didn’t, until this week (some of you who move in the same circles of Romancelandia as I do may guess what prompted this post, but that’s not the important part, and I don’t want to rake it up again).

Look, I’m judgmental. You know the Meyers-Briggs personality types? INTJ is me. I find judging fun. I have to admit I can get pretty passionate about it. I judge Sarah Palin to be a wrong-headed idiot, for instance. And I judge anyone who thought she was a good choice for VP to be an idiot. And I enjoy ranting about stuff like that. Um, yeah. The passion I’m most likely to experience? Anger. Oh dear. I’m a fighter, not a lover?

When I’m reading for pleasure, I judge books to be good or bad or indifferent. I like to believe I’m rational, not passionate, about these judgments, and that I’m fine with other readers judging books differently. But sometimes I feel my judgments of taste as Kantian categorical imperatives; I “will that [they] should become a universal law.” How could any right-thinking person disagree with me, after all? Many readers fall into that trap when they feel passionately about a book, and my tendency to do so now and then means that I am more swayed by passion than I’d like to admit.

But taste in books isn’t a moral issue and thus can’t be a Kantian imperative. I believe fiction can have moral (and other) effects on its readers, but those effects are incalculable, unpredictable, vary from reader to reader. A book which profoundly influences me may leave others cold (I’m guessing there’s a dwindling number of Middlemarch lovers out there). I fall into judging other readers when they are most passionate. Because I don’t feel (OK, OK, I don’t want to believe I feel) unreasoning love for books, I judge others who do. (By unreasoning here I don’t mean stupid, I mean that’s its a largely emotional attachment that they can’t or don’t give reasons for).

I last fell in love at 21, more than half my lifetime ago. I last had a completely immersive, unthinking, uncritical reading experience . . . I dunno, but well before that. I realized this week, thanks to some thoughtful conversations with various people, that because of my history, I might just tend, mostly unconsciously and because of my personal history and temperament, to think of readers who are passionate fans of passionate books as being somewhat juvenile.

And you know what? Sometimes they act in ways that confirm my prejudice. Their acts, I feel free to judge. But their tastes? I shouldn’t. I may not understand some people’s tastes, but they’re no less valid than mine. De gustibus non est disputandum (in Latin and everything! must be true).

Now, dear readers, I’d like you to help me challenge my prejudice against reading with passion. Recommend some passion-filled books and/or books about which you are passionate. There are only two rules:

1. You have to be able to be reasonable about your passion. Are you going to go off on me if I don’t share your love? No sale.

2. No books that are so surrounded by passionate buzz and controversy and backlash and back-backlash that I won’t be able to read them with an open mind. You know the books I mean. There are so many of them these days, sadly.

Not all the Heyer heroines of this type are so down-trodden. But several are trapped by duty to their families or to random stray teenagers (in a nice twist, Sprig Muslin burdens its hero with troublesome runaway Amanda “Smith”). There’s Abby in Black Sheep, Annis in Lady of Quality, and Frederica and Venetia in their eponymous novels. Some of their charges are more annoying than others, but all of them limit the heroines’ ability to seek their own happiness (so, of course, do the conventions of their era, but these women don’t wish for particularly unconventional lives).

The way in which love frees the heroine is particularly clear in Black Sheep and Lady of Quality. Spoilers ahead, though not huge ones (I mean, you know the hero and heroine are getting together, right?). Skip to the paragraph after the block quote to give them a miss.

Abby in Black Sheep loves Miles, but can’t bring herself to abandon her idiot sister and niece to marry him. So Miles, who feels no attachment or duty to his own family, elopes with her, essentially forcing her to give in to her own desires. At the end of the rather similar Lady of Quality (I don’t mind the similarity; I love both these books), hero Oliver cheerfully finds another home for his niece and ward Lucilla, whom Annis had temporarily taken charge of. As Oliver explains, he doesn’t wish to include a third person in their household:

“I want a wife, not a chaperon for my niece!  . . . A companion, Annis! Someone who may say, if I suggest that we should jaunt over to Paris, that she doesn’t feel inclined to go to Paris, but who won’t say: ‘But how can I leave Lucilla?’”

Sounds dreamy, of course, but my feeling on reading this is always, “Oliver! Dude! You come closer to saying you can’t wait to get her into bed than most Heyer heroes ever do. What the heck do you think is going to happen in the early 19th century?!?!? That third is going to come along before you know it, and you won’t be able to leave him/her with nurse while you jaunt off to Paris forever.”

End spoilers.

This fantasy of escaping from family obligations into a blissfully free romantic duo ends a good many Heyer novels. Other characters may say it’s time the hero was setting up his nursery, and he may acknowledge that responsibility himself, but he rarely if ever makes it part of his declaration to the heroine. Mooning over the image of his beloved’s belly swollen with his child is not for him.

How different the contemporary romance. Today, a couple can choose to remain child-free so that they can jet off to Paris at will. Yet few contemporary romance couples do. Even more, as a recent Twitter conversation bemoaned, it’s not uncommon for them to be brought together by an unplanned pregnancy. Harlequin Presents (and to a lesser extent Superromance) are the most egregious perpetrators of “you’re having my baby, you must marry me” plots, but they crop up elsewhere. Romance heroines almost never consider alternatives to continuing a pregnancy and keeping the baby, though they’re more likely to consider not marrying the father. I don’t wish to mock that decision when made by real-life women. But it’s certainly not a reflection of reality that so few heroines even consider the morning-after pill, abortion, or adoption. In some books, that seems realistic for the particular character (an older, financially independent heroine who thought she might not have a chance to be a mother, for instance), but in many it is decidedly not.

This contrast between Heyer and her literary descendents made me think about how the fantasies–of family or not–they offer relate to their historical context. It’s easy to point to the conservatism of the romance genre and of its American readership. After all, American TV and movies seldom dare to represent a “good” character who chooses abortion either. That’s true enough, but I think there’s more to it.

North Americans live in a time and place where divorce rates are high, and there’s a lot of sadness and disappointment behind those statistics. I think women who have abortions would rather not have had to make that choice (I’m certainly grateful I was never confronted with it). Don’t get me wrong: I think divorce should be legal; I think abortion should be legal and that American women should have much better access to it than many of them do right now; I think both and divorce and abortion can be wise, right choices for people to make, and that they should be able to make them based on their own values, not other people’s. But I also understand why a fictional world where people don’t confront those hard choices, where an unplanned pregancy leads to a happy-ever-after family, can be appealing to some people these days.

Heyer, on the other hand, wrote in the first half of the 20th century, when an unplanned pregnancy often did mean marriage (and/or shame) and people were largely trapped if their marriage was not a happy one. A time when women were disproportionately burdened by the responsibility of caring for children. It makes sense, then, that she and her readers might find the fantasy of freedom from such responsibilities appealing.

In some ways, Heyer’s happy endings are far less conservative than modern ones; characters like Annis might be more at home in the era of the pill and childlessness by choice than are many contemporary romance heroines who cheerfully ditch their careers, move to small towns, and start popping out babies. While that progression might seem backwards, viewed in historical context it makes some sense.

I’d still like to see more variety and risk-taking in contemporary romance, though. Does it have to offer us so much fantasy, or can we see more happy endings that reflect the full range of ways modern women define that for themselves?

For years I’ve started my Academic Writing class by talking about reading. I explain that most academic writing begins with reading: the writer is entering into an ongoing scholarly conversation and drawing on the work of others in making her contribution. I show them how I’d highlight, take notes on, and ask questions about a short text. I assign reading questions to help them focus on key points.

Increasingly, though, I have felt that I haven’t backed this beginning up by spending enough class time on the reading material to show them it really matters. That feeling was reinforced by reading about The Citation Project, “a multi-institution research project responding to educators’ concerns about plagiarism and the teaching of writing.” The project is discovering that plagiarism stems not so much from students’ failure to understand rules of citation as from their failure to understand the sources they are citing. In other words, students are “underreading” or reading shallowly, and thus don’t have enough understanding of the readings to synthesize and make use of them in their own arguments. I’ve tweaked the class to emphasize these skills more.

This professional problem intersected with my personal reading when Read React Review‘s Jessica did a post linking an academic discussion of underreading and overreading to on-line reviewing and some of the recent kerfuffles over controlling what “counts” as a review, what kinds of reading and responses to reading are “valid.” Jessica pointed out that the line between “overreading” (an interpretation not supported by the text) and experienced genre reading can be hard to draw: for instance, early in a romance novel, the hero and heroine may not act like a potential romantic couple, but the experienced reader expects them to get together because they are the central male and female characters.

Is that person “overreading,” or picking up on subtle structural cues? I’m thinking here of how often readers comment on Dear Author ”first page” posts that you can’t start a romance from the point of view of a character who is neither the hero nor the heroine, or at least if you do so, you’re going to confuse your reader. I’d say a reader picking up on those cues is skilled, not overreading. In some ways, the kind of reading I want to teach my students is no different from the attentive, nuanced reading done by a devoted genre fan, though it is usually driven less by love of or, unfortunately, even interest in the text.

Much recent rhetoric and composition theory has focused on academic writing as a genre. (Like most people in North America who teach introductory academic writing, I am not a specialist in the area. Whether or not this is a problem is, in my view, open for debate). Unlike some of my colleagues, I don’t overtly introduce my students to this theory or to technical language of the field. But I am much less hostile to such an approach than I used to be, partly because becoming a genre reader made me more interested in the ways that any text conforms to or subverts certain conventions and guides a reader’s interpretations by doing so.

The risk of introducing the language of genre theory into a first-year classroom where many students are still struggling to write clear sentences is that taught at a basic level, it can come off as implying that academic writing is merely a series of rhetorical tricks a student needs to master rather than a process demanding deep thinking. In darker moments, I fear that students are frequently rewarded for demonstrating a shallow grasp of the rhetorical moves common in a field even when higher-level thinking is missing.

I do, though, talk to my students about the fact that they need to master certain rules and conventions of writing in an academic context because academic readers (their teachers, for instance) expect them to. The reading we do for class is partly a model of those conventions. In some ways, academic writing is hardest in the first two years of college, when students are taking a wider variety of courses that may have quite different writing expectations. I’m upfront with my students about the fact that I can’t be expert in all the disciplines they study, and that they need to read assignments and ask questions to understand how the rules differ from class to class. As they move further in their studies and focus on a major or professional program, they will increasingly master the narrower set of rules required for that particular field.

I thought about reading and genre expectations from a different angle when I reread Georgette Heyer’s Sprig Muslin last week, spurred by Sunita’s review at Dear Author. I’d say that rereading appealed to me at this moment because it allowed me to underread, to pay only partial attention and rely on my familiarity with the text to fill in any gaps (in the same way, I chose to listen to Elizabeth Peters’ Crocodile on the Sandbank, the first Amelia Peabody book and an old favorite I’ve probably read almost once a year in the two decades I’ve discovered it. If I doze off while listening, no big deal). And it’s true that as I read I was often skimming sleepily over the words.

Ironically, though, I also noticed the way the book requires overreading. Although Heyer is an inspiration for many a Regency romance writer,  her novels often don’t conform to current romance conventions. Sir Gareth and Lady Hester, the hero and heroine of Sprig Muslin, don’t get a lot of page time together. At the novel’s beginning, Gareth proposes to Hester, and she rejects him because marrying a man she loves but who merely respects and esteems her would be “anguish.” By the end–no surprise to a romance reader–he’s come to see a side of her that he didn’t before, and when he proposes again, she accepts, recognizing that this time it’s different.

Almost all of that change of heart, though, happens off stage. Heyer’s omniscient narrator doesn’t enter deeply into her characters’ points of view, and we have to infer Gareth’s change of heart from very few cues. I think that for readers not familiar with the genre, this could make the novel frustrating: does this love come out of nowhere? How and why did his view change? But readers of Heyer, and of romance generally, fill in the things she doesn’t say because we’ve seen them so many times before.

Those interpretive assumptions serve someone reading for pleasure just fine. But if you’re an academic reader and writer, you’d better be ready to back them up!

• Meljean Brook’s series of “Diary of an Author” posts, starting here, offers a hilarious and spot-on parody version
• Dear Author‘s Jane reflects on the opposing viewpoints that might contribute to such kerfuffles in a much commented-on post on “The Reader Author Paradigm” 
• CuddleBuggery has a post rounding up relevant links if you must rubberneck firsthand
• While Janet/Robin’s post on “The Entitled Reader” wasn’t inspired by the Great New Year Author Flameouts, the huge comment thread touches on a lot of relevant issues

I wasn’t going to say anything about all this. But then people brought their English teachers and Robert Browning into the comments on Jane’s post, and it was personal! So I am taking to my powerful platform here to lecture all five of my minions readers on how you should read and what makes you worthy to review.

Not really! But I was interested (and sometimes annoyed) by the attempts some commenters made to distinguish “reviewers” from “readers with opinions” and the way this distinction seemed to be linked in some people’s minds not just to how someone approaches writing reviews but to how she approaches reading a book.

The categories of reader and reviewer are overlapping, not distinct. Reviewers are readers. I don’t care how “big” and “powerful” your blog is, if you’re still reading books, you’re a reader. (And yes, authors are readers, and they can comment wherever they want as readers of other people’s books, though they won’t make themselves popular if they appear to be merely shills or enforcers for their author-friends. When it comes to their own books, things are trickier.).

But are you a competent reader? I spend a lot of time beating out of students’ heads the things commenters were saying they learned about critical reading in high school English classes.

In my class, the student’s opinion of the text (i.e. whether she liked it) doesn’t matter. Literary criticism isn’t really evaluation, it’s analysis: what does the text mean, and how does it mean it? how does it work? These claims are opinions of a kind, of course, but they can be argued about and defended with evidence from the text. That means that in the classroom, there are more and less competent readers, because this kind of reading is a skill developed by practice. There are no absolute right answers, but there are wrong ones: interpretations that can’t be defended by reference to the text.

But when someone is reading for pleasure, how can she be incompetent? (I guess, arguably, if she’s not fully literate). She can read the text however she likes, and her opinions about it can be a matter of taste, about which there is no disputing. “I love alpha heroes” is as valid a response as an analysis of the author’s imagery. While I’m impressed by the knowledge and thoughtfulness so many romance readers have about the genre, I don’t think anyone has to be that kind of reader to express her opinion on the internet.

And what are we going to call that opinion besides a review? In its most basic sense, a review just means taking another look at something. A reader who records her response to a book on her blog, at Goodreads, at Amazon, etc. is doing just that. “Ordinary,” incompetent readers have always had opinions. What’s new is that they (we) have public places to express them. Once upon a time (in 1975), John Updike could lay down rules for reviewing. They are fine rules if you want to be taken seriously in places that publish critical reviews (not negative, but indepth analysis and evaluation). But when the internet with its proliferating and various sites for “amateur” review came along, such rules no longer made sense.

Reviewers are writers as well as readers, and they have their own audiences and purposes in mind. I’m not the audience for “Squee! 5 stars for Lora Leigh’s latest Breeds book! I love barbed peen!” But probably someone is (I’m not the audience for Leigh’s books, either, but they definitely have one). Reviewers can write according to their own rules, and they’ll find an audience–or not–who enjoys that review and finds it useful. Who has the authority to make rules about all this?

But here’s the tricky part. In the classroom, the Author is dead (even if the person who wrote the book is still alive, that person has no authority over the text). We don’t know his/her intention, and we don’t care either. The words on the page are what we’ve got, and we can interpret them in many ways, as long as we can defend those interpretations.

But on the internet, the author may not be dead. I learned this the hard, very embarrassing way years ago, when I made a flip comment on a listserv about a Philip Pullman speech someone linked to. Guess what? Pullman was on the listserv too, and he responded. (I apologized for my tone.) To me, Philip Pullman was Dead.  He wasn’t a real person, just an author-function. It never occurred to me he’d read what I wrote.

I wish I could say I learned that lesson once and for all, but I’m still getting used to the way people you don’t expect may be looking over your shoulder on the net. I suspect I’m not the only one. A lot of reviewers who post snarky reviews are probably thinking about entertaining their audience, not about the author who might see their words.

Once, a reader’s relationship was only with the book. She might not even have had other readers to discuss books with. Now, she may have a relationship with the author, too. In the same way, authors have much closer relationships with their readers, interacting on Twitter and blogs; authors can also respond to reviews much more easily.  This is all pretty new, and we’re still figuring out how to do it and what it means.

I feel weird, for instance, when I comment on a book here and suddenly the author is following me on Twitter (but doesn’t actually tweet me). What’s that about? Are those people checking up on me? Hoping my tweetstream is endless promo for them? I don’t really think that, but why do they care what else I have to say? These relationships can be enriching, but awkward too. The enriching far outweighs the awkward, though, just as the authors who don’t have public meltdowns about bad reviews far outnumber those who do. I expect we’ll all figure it out, more or less, one day.

I haven’t really answered the question in my title. I’m a reader, of course, and by the definition I’ve just offered, I’m a reviewer. I don’t think of myself that way, though. My blog posts and Goodreads reviews don’t rise (sink?) to the level of academic or Updikean criticism. They don’t often review in the traditional sense: I don’t bother with a summary if there are plenty out there already, and I don’t aim to influence people to buy or not buy. I just want to record how I felt about a book and talk to other readers about it. If an author wants to talk about books, too, I don’t mind. As long as she remembers she’s Dead!

Ellen Kushner, Swordspoint (audiobook produced by Neil Gaiman Presents)

Though I’ve enjoyed some romantic suspense with joint male and female narrators, I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about an audiobook with a full cast and sound effects; it seems awfully far from the experience of reading a book. Turns out, I loved it. Most of the book is narrated by Kushner herself (as an NPR host, she has the skills, unlike some writers), and only a handful of key scenes are dramatized. In a quieter novel, that might be distracting, but it worked well for a book subtitled “a melodrama of manners.” 

Perhaps inspired by that subtitle, Gaiman describes Swordspoint as “if Jane Austen wrote fantasy,” but I think the Goodreads reviewers who compared it to Dangerous Liaisons are closer to the mark. This book is all sexual and political (or both) power games and a lot of fun.

Cecilia Grant, A Lady Awakened

The widow in this novel isn’t actually notorious, though she gets up to some pretty surprising things. But the book is getting a lot of buzz. I don’t usually read books right when they’re released, but it seems that everyone I know in Romancelandia is reading and talking about this one, so I couldn’t wait. I figure most people who wander by here will already know about A Lady Awakened, so I’m not going to discuss it in detail; if you want more, here’s a rave review from Jane of Dear Author and an opposing view from Meoskop at It’s My Genre, Baby. The Dear Author review has a great, spoilerific discussion in the comments; I pretty much agree with what Janine had to say there, though I found Robin/Janet’s comments astute as well. (And, while I liked the book a lot more than Meoskop, whose aggrieved live-tweeting was hilarious, I think her criticisms are right on the mark).

I loved the first third of the book, which seemed really unusual for a romance. The sex was bad! Martha didn’t admire Theo’s beautiful manly form! Learning about land management started them on the path to love! I liked the middle third okay, but found the end implausible, both in the solution reached and in how quickly everything wrapped up. I was really engrossed at first, but then things began niggling at me. That may have been me more than the book: I had such high expectations, given all the praise it was getting, and the discussions of it on Twitter became a kind of distracting noise in the background (do I agree with X, or Y?). Would ignoring Twitter have changed things? I’m not sure.

Even though aspects of the book disappointed me, a lot felt fresh and different. The history was mostly good, though some interactions between the hero and heroine and their servants and tenants felt off to me (e.g. I doubt they’d think of or address female servants as “ladies”). The writing was very good, too, though an e-reader crash lost my bookmarks so I lack examples. I look forward to more from Grant, whose debut book this is.

Marina Endicott, The Little Shadows

I read and enjoyed Endicott’s previous novel, Good to a Fault, but what really inspired me to read this one was an article in the Globe and Mail describing it as “a counter-narrative to the dominant man’s-eye view of the Wild West.” Sold! Set just before and during World War I (sold again!), The Little Shadows tells the story of three sisters, Aurora, Clover, and Bella Avery, and their quest to become vaudeville stars.

Endicott structures the novel as a vaudeville show, with sections labelled Act One, Finale, and so on. This turned out to be a bit risky. As the novel (which seems very well-researched but wears its information lightly) explains, the opener is a “dumb act,” something requiring little attention as late-comers find their seats and people finish conversations with neighbors. The book, too, started very slowly and didn’t initially compel my attention.

Chapters are broken into short segments, and the narrative point of view shifts frequently, mostly among the three sisters but also to other characters. Endicott handles this well (it isn’t head-hopping), but it did take me quite a bit of time to warm up to the characters. Maybe that’s because I’m used to the deep third-person point of view of romance, and this felt more distanced. There is not a lot of plot at first, either, and I wondered if the novel was going to be slow and episodic.

By the end, however, I was completely hooked. It is episodic, but the cumulative effect of those episodes is powerful, and I loved the Finale (this was the opposite of my reading experience with Grant’s book). The impact lingers, too; I’m still thinking about it days later and admiring it even more in retrospect. The novel’s themes are those of the West: survival, endurance, making a place for yourself in the world. It’s just that it takes place in cities (well, sort of), hotels, and theatres rather than homesteads, mountains, or wagon trails. There are grim moments, certainly, but happy ones too, and a hopeful ending. The descriptions of the vaudeville acts are brilliant and made me wish I could take in a show.

This is also, of course, a book about art and what it means to be an artist. The Avery sisters know that they are not “real singers” and are merely competent dancers. They don’t expect ever to be artists. But they do aspire to affect audiences. They are good at creating illusions–at seeming more beautiful and talented than they are. They sometimes need those protective illusions to help them bear their lives, too. Near the novel’s end,  Clover wonders what the point of vaudeville is, in the face of the war’s disasters. Another character, a wounded soldier, replies, “Perfecting it. Making it–realer, or less real. . . . We are only pointing at the moon, but it is the moon.”

Moments like these are why I read fiction. The idea that art saves us in some way, that it points us to what’s real and true and beautiful, even when it is itself imperfect, isn’t new. It reminded me, in fact, of one of my favorite Browning poems, “Andrea del Sarto,” in which the artist muses, “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,/Or what’s a heaven for?” A work of art can take such worn-out truisms and make them fresh again, remind us of why they are true. By the time we get to that remark about pointing at the moon, it’s been earned. It doesn’t feel at all like a cliché. I’m really, really glad I didn’t leave Endicott’s show in the slow first act, but gave her artistes a chance to show what they could do.

But when I thought about doing my own “Best of” list, I found not many books stood out. It’s not you, books, it’s me. This was a somewhat turbulent year, and a lot of the time I was reading to mute my feelings and distract myself.  Here are some highlights, though:

Historical Romance: I came to romance-reading through Austen and Heyer. Historicals were my first love, and my best romance reads of the year. Sherry Thomas’ His at Night (2010, but won a RITA this year) and Miranda Neville’s Amorous Education of Celia Seaton: smart, funny books that played with genre conventions in interesting ways. I also really liked Eloisa James’ When Beauty Tamed the Beast, though I’d count it as more fantasy than historical.

Contemporary: I think the standout was Rainbow Rowell’s Attachments, which is as much a rather belated coming-of-age story as a romance. I really liked Victoria Dahl’s “Midnight Assignment” in Harlequin’s New Year (last year) anthology Midnight Kiss. I need to get to her Donovan books ASAP, because those are contemporaries I hope to love. A lot of the contemporary romance I read this year was category-length from Harlequin. Some of those were very enjoyable, but not especially memorable. I think that’s partly because I read short books when I’m stressed so they didn’t get my full attention.

Books I Can’t Explain My Love For: I discovered Jayne Castle/Jayne Anne Krentz’s Harmony series (on audio) this year. I don’t think they’re great books, but I enjoy them like crazy, and they got me through some pretty dark nights.

Happy Discoveries: Sara Creasy‘s sci-fi-with-a-bit-of-romance Song of Scarabaeus and Children of Scarabaeus. I enjoyed the science stuff, but to be honest, my favorite part was the way the psychic “leash” between Edie and Finn made this like a marriage of convenience story on steroids. If they didn’t find a way to stay physically close and work together, Finn would be dead. Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London (Midnight Riot) taught me that while I don’t like much paranormal romance, urban fantasy can work for me–when it’s truly urban. Regency reissues are great quick comfort reads for me; they usually feature smart dialogue. I enjoyed books by Jo Beverley, Joan Wolf, Joan Smith, Patricia Wynn and Gayle Buck, thanks to Twitter recommendations. Meg Maguire/Cara McKenna (romance under MM name, erotica under CM): I haven’t read a lot yet, but liked what I have read. Unusual, flawed characters. Jill Sorenson for sexy romantic suspense with real characters and interesting settings. That’s a good list of discoveries, actually, but there’s not a lot of new straight-up romance there.

Re-reading Magic: I adore Diana Wynne Jones, and her death was the occasion for revisiting a favorite, Howl’s Moving Castle. I read it to my daughter, and listened to it in the car with both kids. Everyone loved it. I also enjoyed revisiting some Victorian favorites for work: Dickens’ Bleak House and Gaskell’s North and South. Both still great. That led to my Middlemarch re-read, which you may have noticed I’m stuck on.

Other Successes: The most engrossing literary fiction I read this year was Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. I read much less mystery than usual this year, a lot of it on audio, but I continued my love for Julia Spencer-Fleming with One Was A Soldier. The Episcopal priest heroine is home ground for me.

Non-Reading Highlights: Surprise! Kittens!  Also, Twitter and blogging, both new for me this year. Those conversations have been enriching, and so much fun.

Reading Goals: New Year’s Eve. Ugh. The panic of an impending new term which I’m not quiiite ready for collides with the pressure to come up with grandiose self-improvement projects. So these goals are modest and aimed at lessening anxiety:

1. Read more outside of the romance genre. For the last couple of years, I’ve read mainly romance. It’s been a great “discovery,” but towards the end of this year, I realized I was burning out and a lot of my reading felt tired and familiar. I need more variety.

2. Don’t buy every book that sounds interesting. The problem with e-reading is that it’s easy to buy and hard to see just how many unread books have piled up. But my e-TBR especially is now big enough to be causing me real anxiety. I can’t decide what to read, I can’t concentrate on what I am reading because I feel there’s something else I should be reading instead, I’m reading too many books at once . . . . This is not fun. I’m going to keep a wishlist and whittle down that TBR.

The way my workload worked out this year, I was half-time last term and will be full-time, and back in the classroom, in January. That will make reading and blogging time harder to carve out, but I want to keep doing those things. I’m teaching academic writing, not a literature class, so I don’t know that I’ll blog much about what I’m teaching, but you may find me talking about urban livability and thesis statements if things get desperate.

Happy 2012, everyone! Here’s to good reading ahead.

Get Your Own!

Jackie is giving away “The Lesson Plan” for Christmas. Details on her blog.

Reading and Reviewing a Twitter “Friend”

Jackie and I follow each other on Twitter, and through that discovered our two degrees of real-life separation: she and my mom shared a graduate advisor (many years apart, I hasten to add). I wouldn’t say that makes us friends, nor does it make me an unthinking shill for her books. But while some reviewers say that their social media interactions with writers and editors have no effect on their reviews, that isn’t my experience.

The consciousness that someone to whom I feel kindly disposed will be reading what I say about her writing does affect me. I’m aware of that link while I’m reading, which can make it harder to lose myself in the story. I’d say it affects the tone of my more critical comments rather than keeping me from making them, but if I really hated the book of a Twitter “friend,” I might just be silent. And for that reason, I prefer buying books myself (this is the first freebie I’ve been offered).

I interact with very few authors, and I do so because they’re readers, too, and I like the way they talk about books and the romance genre. I really value their perspective in Twitter conversations, but some pure reader-book relationship is lost when I’m aware of the third point of the triangle. It’s a trade-off I’m willing to make, but to a limited extent.

The Review-ish Part

You could say each of these novellas focuses on a particular kink. There’s a light, playful tone to all of them that worked well for me.

In “Grace Under Fire,” Atticus and Colin are deeply bonded by a childhood trauma. As a result, they share everything, and now they’re looking for a wife to share. I’m not sure why this trope is so popular. Personally, I find a threesome hotter if not justified by trauma, and more romantic if truly polyamorous (that is, if there were also a romantic bond between the male partners). But this story wasn’t very angsty and the respect and affection between the three made a happy future seem possible.

The romance arc wasn’t fully developed. Atticus and Colin had never spoken to Grace before the story begins, and it’s not really clear why they target her as their future bride. Perhaps because her clumsiness has made her a marriage-market reject, but she’s hot. That seems like a poor start to a romance, but this story shows that being desired can give a woman confidence, and that love is more central to happiness than social acceptance. For a “hot” story, it’s really quite sweet.

“Taking Liberties” surprised me. The kink was kinkier than the blurb led me to expect. But I can see why it isn’t revealed, because it’s kind of a spoiler. It would be a deal-breaker for some romance readers, though, and that’s why I’d classify this as erotic romance even though the sex scenes aren’t particularly graphic. The discovery of their shared kink in a game that takes a serious turn makes Nash and Tish realize they are right for each other. It’s the fact that the story is really about being right for each other, finding someone to accept you, that makes this erotic romance. Because it’s a short story, the self-discovery and acceptance happens implausibly fast; I was okay with that as short-hand because the story feels like fantasy.

“The Lesson Plan” was definitely my favorite. It showed up as 20 pages longer in my Sony reader, and felt more developed. Freddie and Conrad have known and been attracted to each other for years, so a fast romance arc is plausible.

This isn’t a Christmas story, but it feels like a gift to romance readers, because the set-up is a bonanza of beloved tropes: tomboy Freddie (it’s really Winifred) has a crush on straight-laced Conrad, her best friend’s older brother; Conrad and Freddie’s older brother (Nash of “Taking Liberties”) concoct a fake “abduction by highwayman” plot to teach Freddie the danger of her hoydenish ways. I’m sure you can all imagine what happens once uptight Conrad’s got Freddie at his mercy . . .  or is it the other way around?

The kink here is dominance/submission. If you can count it as a kink when it’s as mild as presented here. I mean, I’m just going by the internetz, of course, but is there a couple under 80 who hasn’t tried velcro handcuffs or spanking at least once? This was a couple I could believe would enjoy power games, and the sexual aspect of that was linked well to their personalities and other interactions. I liked the way they talked to each other and found the romance believable. This story was a lot of fun.

Let’s Talk About Sex

Someone commented on Twitter that in reading a particular book, she might have found her inner prude. I think reading romance has made me lose mine, if I ever had one. I have an outer prude, the one who makes me feel that when I write about my more erotic reading, I’m doing something embarrassingly personal. But I will read pretty much whatever without a blush. And my standards of what is “graphic” have changed. The door is wide open in these novellas, and there is some use of slang terms that are generally considered graphic, as well as your standard romance-novel euphemisms. But I didn’t consider them that “graphic” or “hot” compared to some things I’ve read. I have to think more about what “graphic” means to me now to explain that. There’s something about the tone or voice, I think, but that means “graphic” isn’t really the right word for the distinctions I’m making when I read. I’d like to write more about this, if I can get past my outer prude.

When Self-Publishing Works for Me

My favorite novella was the self-published one. It was definitely as well-written and edited as the traditionally-published pair. (That an e-only novella from Harlequin counts as “traditionally published” shows how quickly the landscape of genre publishing, in particular, is changing.)

I will read self-published when I know the author is having their work edited, and when I already know (from previous traditionally-published work or blog posts) that that person can write well. Or if recommended by a trusted friend. Otherwise, I’m not willing to venture. I’ve got plenty to read as is. I am already looking forward to Jackie’s next self-published novella, about Freddie’s twin. He’s going to be a vicar.

Happy Holidays

Merry Christmas, if you celebrate it! If not, December 25th is also my 44th birthday, so feel free to celebrate that instead, even though there was nothing miraculous about it.