![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsBooks 4-6 in the Eve Dallas “sci fi” romance mysteries, by one of Nora Roberts’s pseudonyms. It’s 2059, and our heroine continues to be a cop in the New York of the future. She also continues to have a traumatic past and a steamy marriage to the richest man on the planet, who continues to have no last name.
I picked these up because I vaguely enjoyed the first few, and I’m kind of desperately in need of books that don’t require much work on my part. How could I go wrong, I thought.
It took me three days to figure out that my escalating bad temper wasn’t traceable to lack of sleep or regular meals or any of the other usual culprits, but was in fact correlated with my pleasure reading. See, here’s the thing I’ve been trying to pin down for over a year now. I almost never read romance for a lot of the reasons that regularly get sporked by romance fans -- it’s generally brainless, ridiculous tripe. But I’ve been resisting that because I kept asking myself why it was tripe, and why this women’s literature in particular, and what precisely was coding my reactions and etc. etc. Insert the entire debate here.
And I think I finally got it. I would enjoy these books a lot more -- I would be able to tolerate them at all -- if they were honest and self-conscious. If they were like, hi, I’m a romance novel featuring a woman who has orgasms when her soulmate just blows on her right, and I guarantee you my emotional arc will never deviate more than half a degree off the mean, and I have this glittery skiffy-ish foil wrapping where I think I’m totally feminist and awesome but I’m actually deeply patriarchal, but really you’ll enjoy me anyway because everyone needs a book like me sometimes, I’d be on board. Because I do need a book like that sometimes. Instead, it’s all, hi, I’m a book about romance -- the great heart-stopping power of true love, and also the gritty romance of fighting the good fight on the mean cold streets. And that makes me laugh, and then I get cranky. Because . . . no.
I haven’t given up on the genre, obviously, but am chucking this series entirely.
I picked these up because I vaguely enjoyed the first few, and I’m kind of desperately in need of books that don’t require much work on my part. How could I go wrong, I thought.
It took me three days to figure out that my escalating bad temper wasn’t traceable to lack of sleep or regular meals or any of the other usual culprits, but was in fact correlated with my pleasure reading. See, here’s the thing I’ve been trying to pin down for over a year now. I almost never read romance for a lot of the reasons that regularly get sporked by romance fans -- it’s generally brainless, ridiculous tripe. But I’ve been resisting that because I kept asking myself why it was tripe, and why this women’s literature in particular, and what precisely was coding my reactions and etc. etc. Insert the entire debate here.
And I think I finally got it. I would enjoy these books a lot more -- I would be able to tolerate them at all -- if they were honest and self-conscious. If they were like, hi, I’m a romance novel featuring a woman who has orgasms when her soulmate just blows on her right, and I guarantee you my emotional arc will never deviate more than half a degree off the mean, and I have this glittery skiffy-ish foil wrapping where I think I’m totally feminist and awesome but I’m actually deeply patriarchal, but really you’ll enjoy me anyway because everyone needs a book like me sometimes, I’d be on board. Because I do need a book like that sometimes. Instead, it’s all, hi, I’m a book about romance -- the great heart-stopping power of true love, and also the gritty romance of fighting the good fight on the mean cold streets. And that makes me laugh, and then I get cranky. Because . . . no.
I haven’t given up on the genre, obviously, but am chucking this series entirely.