So, in honor of Valentine's Day . . .
Love stories? Yes or No? A qualified yes. I don't select reading material based on whether it contains a love story, but I'm certainly not opposed to them. I am opposed to crappy writing in books offering a love story.
If yes, "romances" as a genre? Or just, well, stories that have love stories? (Nobody's going to call "Pride & Prejudice" a "romance," right?) Definitely just stories that contain a love story. I was brought out of my romance novel reading stage in ninth grade, when my lab partner and his buddy began to read aloud the dialogue from a Barbara Cartland that a friend had passed to me earlier that day in band. The shame! The humiliation!
(via Booking Through Thursday)
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I've been remembering a few times (always summer!) when I specifically looked for a love story in the library. I wonder why. But those 9th graders . . . they still behave the same way! Wish they didn't.
ReplyDeleteI enjoy good writing about all aspects of life...
ReplyDeletehttp://turningpages.wordpress.com/2007/02/15/ummm-love-stories/
I went through a romance (the genre) phase when I was younger, but those days are long over with. I don't mind a story that has romance in it at all, but I don't necessarily seek that type story out. I do have a few comfort reads, though, that have romance in them that I tend to reread. It definitely needs to be good writing though. I once read a book a coworker lent me--I can't even remember what it was-some very unlikely time travel book, and there was an Amazon review (probably a more professional one in from a journal) that went into great detail talking about the plodding prose...and boy did I have to agree!
ReplyDeleteHaha, I remember those Cartland novels. They were truly awful, the dialogue usually the worst part. I still enjoy a few of the genre writers though; I'm not particularly drawn to novels-with-love-stories. Murakami and Byatt are probably the only lit fic authors I've read who handle that sort of thing with any mastery. I don't read Austen for the romance.
ReplyDeleteCecilia Holland/Jean Plaidy, and I believe she had a few other pseudonyms, were the romances I don't mind saying I've read.
ReplyDeleteI spent my first summer before high school, allowed to take books from the adult section, reading every romance in my branch library. Made myself thoroughly sick of them.
Correction, Victoria Hold/Jean Plaidy.
ReplyDeleteCecilia Holland was another writer.
I've read a Cecilia Holland. It was about train robbers.
ReplyDelete