Thursday, February 15, 2007

Booking Through Thursday

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)

7 comments:

  1. 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.

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  2. Anonymous9:45 PM

    I enjoy good writing about all aspects of life...

    http://turningpages.wordpress.com/2007/02/15/ummm-love-stories/

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  3. Anonymous9:53 PM

    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!

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  4. Haha, 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.

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  5. Cecilia Holland/Jean Plaidy, and I believe she had a few other pseudonyms, were the romances I don't mind saying I've read.

    I 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.

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  6. Correction, Victoria Hold/Jean Plaidy.

    Cecilia Holland was another writer.

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  7. I've read a Cecilia Holland. It was about train robbers.

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