Read React Review

Rethinking romance and other fine fiction

Archive for February, 2010

Welcome post (a quickie)

Feb 28

Posted by Jessica in Uncategorized | 15 Comments

Welcome!

A few quick things:

1. I plan to make this blog look better, eventually. For now, you will have to put up with quality content and inferior aesthetics.

2. If you would like to subscribe, please scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the RSS feed button.

3. If you enjoyed reading Racy Romance Reviews, I think you will enjoy Read React Review. But I plan to do more a bit reviewing outside the genre and more philosophy of fiction.

4. I am still working on a tagline. Suggestions welcome.

Thank you for reading. Thank you thank you.

10 Peeves and 10 Pleasures and 10 Things I’ve learned About Blogging

Feb 27

Posted by Jessica in Blogs and blogging, Navel gazing | 10 Comments

Just some randomness while I await the change to my new website. Thanks again for hanging in.

Peeves

1. Losing my Audiobook place on my iPod. Takes ages to find it again. This is the worst … my absolute number 1 peeve.

2. Juice box company repackaging a 10 pack as an 8 pack for a higher price. Then adding back the two juice boxes and slapping a sticker on the package that says “20% more free!!!”. (also looking at you cereal makers!)

3. The moment when I realize I forgot a lesson I have already learned.

4. Seeing one of my kids in a too-small or stained item of clothing I meant to discard or donate, but instead washed and dried, again.

5. Loud talkers at the gym. Especially when they are on their cell phones.

6. Walking to class sans tissues, and having to sniffle my way through most of it.

7. Promo codes. I have never been offered one of these in my life. Dammit.

8. No hook (for my coat or bag) on a public bathroom stall door.

9. My cats crying to go outside at 6:00am and then taking their sweet time while I stand with the door ajar in our usual 5 degree temps.

10.  Glasses, period. Example:  accidentally washing my face or falling asleep with them on; sliding down my face; getting raindrops on them as I walk to class; losing them,  you name it. Hate wearing glasses.

Pleasures


1. My youngest, an 8 year old boy who sometimes feels too big to hold mommy’s hand, absently grabbing my hand on a walk

2. The moment when I realize a book I am reading is going to be awesome.

3. When someone clicks the “Add to Any” button to subscribe to this blog.

4. Seeing my dogs, standing on their hind legs, wagging their tails, looking out the window at doggie daycare when I pick them up.

5. Finding out one of my students has gotten into the grad school of their choice (this week: two pre med students got early admission to Tufts!)

6. The sound — and sight, when I am lucky — of a black capped chickadee.

7. Watching something absolutely trashy on TV as I fold laundry in the relative quiet and solitude of my bedroom on a weekend afternoon while all hell is breaking loose downstairs

8. Realizing I’ve accumulated enough quarters to buy myself a Vitamin Water from a vending machine on campus

9. Trolling the charity used book bin at my supermarket and actually finding a treasure

10. Seeing my husband in his assistant soccer coach uniform. I thought I married a bookish Jew. Where did this hot jock come from?

Blogging:

1. The way to grow your blog is to post good content

2. Occasional drama is unavoidable: better to visit it than to host it

3. Twitter, while enjoyable, doesn’t really help me with blogging. I’ve nuked my Twitter account 3 times, and each time have seen my stats and comments go up during the period I was Twitter free, probably because I had more time for better and more frequent posts.

4. Your blog readers are not necessarily your friends. They just read your blog. They may not even like you, impossible as that seems. ;)

5. Don’t be afraid to ask experienced bloggers for help, on anything from handling code to an out of control discussion thread.

6. Trolls must be ignored. No matter how skilled you think you are, you can’t reason with them, because they are not arguing with you in good faith. Ignoring works wonders, though.

7. Be natural. Don’t strategize when it comes to frequency of posts or content or comments. Do what feels natural, or blogging will just become another chore. You can’t predict what people will like or what you will find gratifying anyway, so save yourself the wasted energy.

8. Taking back anything you say on the internet, including on your own blog, is like trying to get the pee out of a pool. Think twice before hitting send.

9. There is always room for another blog, another voice, another point of view. Be confident in your own voice and welcoming  of others’ voices.

10. Blogging is an incredibly rewarding activity.

New website: rough weather ahead (ReadReactReview.com)

Feb 25

Posted by Jessica in Blogs and blogging | 13 Comments

This is just to let you know that I have a new domain name — http://readreactreview.com — and a new host. In the next couple of days, everything should be moved over.

Please bear with me as I make this change.

I’m working on a tagline. It will probably have the word “romance” in it. I don’t plan to make a big shift in content, so if you enjoy reading Racy Romance Reviews, you’ll probably enjoy reading ReadReactReview.com. But as I mentioned in Monday’s post, I am now blogging under my real life identity, so there may be less erotic romance reviewing and fewer references to weeping cocks.

Or maybe not.

Thank you!

Imma Be … Textbook Free: Going Paperless in the University Classroom

Feb 23

Posted by Jessica in Academia | 10 Comments

It is that time of the semester: I have to order my textbooks for fall. And, yet again, my textbook for Contemporary Moral Problems is going into a new edition. Which is hardly “new” at all — some years, the publisher merely restores the same articles that were removed for the current edition and calls that “revised”!  Publishers produce new editions of textbooks in my field  at a rate of every 2-3 years, to combat losses incurred by the used book market. Protesting that textbooks are priced for one use, textbook publishers blame the resale market for rising prices, which have far outpaced inflation. Professors, trying to protect students from skyrocketing textbook prices (and also, it must be admitted, in order to forestall the tedious work of fixing all the page references of our lecture notes) are free to assign older editions, but after a year or two, it become impossible to guarantee all students will be able to obtain copies. Eventually, we relent and move to the new edition.

Different universities are handling the cost problem in different ways. Some have textbook rental programs, for paper textbooks. Others, like North Carolina State, bought a license to host a physics textbook online for students, who can read it online for free, or pay $45 for a print version. My own university has taken the small step of  giving any department that gets its textbook orders in quickly a $50 award (this helps keep costs down in the short term by helping bookstore get used copies).

U.S. PIRG has made textbooks a major issue. They point out that textbook prices have risen at four times the rate of inflation in the past two decades, textbooks cost 30-50% of tuition for students, and that publishers bundle CD roms, workbooks, etc., and other useless material with textbooks to drive up prices.

Are etextbooks the solution?

After introducing the larger, more textbook friendly Kindle DX, Amazon partnered with several universities= in pilot programs to introduce Kindles to the classroom. Each university tried out the Kindle DX  in different ways (some giving Kindles to half the students in a class, with the others as a control group, for example; others giving Kindles to an entire segment of the university, as in an Honors College). The idea, from the universities’ point of view, is to (a) cut costs, (b) provide new pedagogical options (for example, possibilities that open up when a professor can refer to material studied a month prior, or not to be studied for a month yet, and students have that material on hand), and, in some cases, (c) reduce environmental impact. From the publishers’ point of view, the idea is to keep making money (Other universities have experimented with the Sony reader.)

How is it going? Several universities backed out before the trial even began, some citing the problems with accessibility for blind students (Arizona just settled its lawsuit with the National Federation of the Blind, which argued that use of the Kindle violated federal law). One professor, who, like me, teaches seminar style with close reading of passages, reports that it doesn’t work well at all. As a Kindle 2 owner myself, I could have predicted that. Highlighting, note taking, and finding particular passages is very cumbersome on the Kindle. Kindle for PC is no panacea, since there are formatting issues and pages load one at a time. And what about Kindle for Macs? Nonexistent as yet.  Location numbers — Kindle’s version of page numbers — are also annoying, non-intuitive, and cumbersome to utilize on any device.

Some textbook companies are offering free downloads of e textbooks, in the hopes of getting consumers to buy more print products.  For example, the inauspiciously named Flat World Knowledge,

has spent about $150,000 on each of the 11 online textbooks it offers, [CEO] Mr. Frank says. Anyone can read the books free online, but students can buy a black-and-white print version for about $30, or a color copy for about $60. About 65 percent of the students in courses that require the “open textbooks,” as they are called, have bought some product from the company, he reports. (One popular item is a printed study guide.) “We think we’ll get to 70 or 75 percent,” he says.

As reported widely in the past week,

DynamicBooks aims to deliver textbooks Wikipedia-style, allowing college instructors to edit, modify, add video and pictures to, and rewrite chapters or paragraphs of textbooks as they see fit — all without consulting the original authors. “Basically they will go online, log on to the authoring tool, have the content right there and make whatever changes they want,” Macmillan president Brian Napack told the newspaper. “And we don’t even look at it.”

This just gets better and better. Imagine the possibilities in fiction: I always thought Sauron should have gotten his ring back, that Eve and Roarke should perish in a hail of bullets, and that the plot of Of Mice and Men was a tad too gloomy for my PETA tastes. If only I could get in there and “tweak” a little!

Another etextbook company, Course Smart’s, Terms of Service makes potential pirates out of all of its customers. It informs users that downloads of course material may be used on only one device, and will expire. Printing is limited to ten pages at a time.  And students must choose between using their textbook online or offline — they can;t both download and have online access.  The cost of textbooks from Course Smart is hardly negligible — it’s $42.75 to rent for 180 days the textbook I use. A paper version of the same book costs $80, but students can recoup some of that by reselling to the bookstore. In good conscience, I cannot recommend the e-option  to my students.

The Open Educational Resources Center for California offers a clearinghouse of free online course materials, aiming to “provide support for community college educators to find, create, remix, use, and share openly licensed learning content.” I hope similar sites are developed for four year institutions.

As a Kindle owner and enthusiastic reader of e-books in my spare time, it strikes me that many of the problems leisure readers have with e-books are replicated in the realm of textbooks: cost, format, quality, device issues, ease of access, copyright, etc. I know these are complex issues, and when you combine them, as I must, with pedagogical considerations (many students do not want to read on a computer, or lack reliable computer or internet access) it gets even more complicated. Needless to say, the Kindle DX’s price point — $489 — was a huge sticker shock to students at the universities who piloted the Amazon program.

Many people are “waiting it out” on the format wars, the e-reader wars, the Apple v. Amazon v. Everybody Else wars.  But my textbook orders are due in two weeks.

Right now, I plan to support open textbooks distributed under an open license, to utilize free online articles (many of which are as good as, or even identical to, what you can find in textbooks), and rely on my university library’s e-reserve (which makes copyrighted material available for download by individual students who have the course  password) for the rest. I may make a course packet available for students who feel they really need pre-packaged bound paper versions.

But I refuse to order another paper textbook for this particular class.

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Monday Morning Stepback: How To Write A Lot, Pondering Pseudo-anonymity

Feb 22

Posted by Jessica in Monday Morning Stepback | 28 Comments

The weekly “if it’s new to me, it’s news” post of links, commentary and inanity

1. Links of Interest

Post of the week: Kenda’s appreciation of one my favorite films, Starship Troopers, a movie that represents one of the best cinematic parodies of ultra right wing politics ever made.

The plagiarism case everyone is talking about. The New York Times reported on 17 year old German writer Helene Hegemann’s plagiarism, in her celebrated recent release, “Axolotl Roadkill,” of the book “Strobo” by a writer who goes by the name of Airen. Hegemann calls it “mixing and matching.” As the Times puts it:

Ms. Hegemann finds herself in the middle of a collision — if not road kill exactly — between the staid, literary establishment in a country that venerates writers from Goethe to Mann to Grass, and the Berlin youth culture of D.J.’s and artists that sample freely and thereby breathe creativity into old forms. … “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” [she says.]

Der Spiegel online defends Hegemann. Laura Miller at Salon provides the rebuttal.

Accomplice Press gets the shout out from Katiebabs and Lusty Reader. Their new romance line, Curvalicious,

will be short novella length love stories with happy endings featuring beautiful, strong, intelligent plus-size heroines. They will showcase woman who know who they are and don’t feel the need to lose weight or change their bodies to get the man of their dreams. These enticing romances are designed to build self confidence in their readers while entertaining them with intriguing plots and well developed characters.

Note the last sentence and what it implies about whether fiction can have effects on readers. Also, Animejune’s question about whether heroes, too, would be curvy, was not answered.

You can hear Virginia Woolf using words like, “incarnadine” and explaining why “you cannot use a brand new word in an old language” if you hop over to Kate’s Book Blog and listen to the radio clip.

The gals at Risky Regencies are narrowing down their choices for the Georgette Heyer Readalong. Georgette Heyer’s Regency World will be reissued in August of this year.

The great Boosktore/Blogger Experiment of 2009 has officially ended as the last holdout, Michelle Buonfiglio/B&N announced they have parted ways.

I enjoyed this list of the 10 most unreliable narrators in fiction by Henry Sutton in the Guardian.

Also from the Guardian, an article, and 50 interesting comments, on writers crowdfunding their to be written books.

Book Blogger con has announced its keynote speaker. They also have a page listing all the bloggers who will be in attendance. I think that’s such a great idea. Anybody do that for cons like RT, RomCon or RWA? If not, I will host a page for bloggers attending RWA, when we get closer to the date.

Nominees for the 2010 Audies (Audiobooks of the year) were announced. I haven’t listened to any of the romance noms:

ROMANCE
For excellence in narration, direction, engineering, mix, and an abridgment when applicable of an audiobook of romance, including romantic suspense, historical romance, and other romance subgenres.

A Rogue of My Own, by Johanna Lindsey, narrated by Rosalyn Landor
(Brilliance Audio)

Dark Slayer, by Christine Feehan, narrated by Phil Gigante and Jane Brown
(Brilliance Audio)

The House on Tradd Street, by Karen White, narrated by Aimee Bruneau
(Listen & Live Audio)

The Untamed Bride, by Stephanie Laurens, narrated by Simon Prebble
(HarperAudio)

What I Did for Love, by Susan Elizabeth Phillips, narrated by Julia Gibson
(HarperAudio)

The TLS Online is talking about romance, medieval style.

Medieval romance created and authorized the making of fictions in Western literature. Its preoccupations – the failure of idealism in social institutions, the self-realization of the individual, the tensions and anxieties within the family, the agency of women, and the pressures of masculinity – reappear throughout the centuries, in the successor to romance, the novel, as well as in a multitude of other media from primetime television to opera. Romance’s varied contexts, its long history and its development into new forms in the twenty-first century, whether drawing on the national myth of Arthur or on the popular plots of romances such as “Sir Gowther”, in which a devil sires a baby on a desperate mother, all provide, as these four books show, fertile ground for thinking about our past, our present and our future.

Obviously “romance” means something different here than we are used to (excluding medievalists from that “we”), but this essay reviewing four books that explore medieval romance is fascinating.

Writer Ann Somerville’s unhappiness with m/m romances deepens, as she explains in this post.

Mark Athitakis’s American Fiction Notes on Book Reviewers– Who Needs ‘Em?

Robin’s open letter to publishers from the point of view of a frustrated reader over at Readers Gab had me ruefully nodding my head:

Ironically, the more paraphernalia I have acquired to enable ever more diverse and numerous book purchases – dedicated digital reader, multi-function devices, multiple software downloads to read various DRM formats – the more difficult it has been for me to buy and read as many books as I would like. And seriously, I don’t think it’s supposed to work that way.

D.G. Meyers is talking about “Fiction’s Job” at A Commonplace Blog. As a gal with a Jesuit education, any post that quotes GK Chesterton is alright by me. Links to several other interesting takes on the question as well.

2. How To Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing, by Paul J. Silvia, is a terrific (but not cheap, at $9.48 for only 150 pages) little book I just downloaded to my Kindle and read in one short sitting. This is the book Nora “ass in chair” Roberts would have written about writing … if she were an academic in a psych department, that is. Silvia tells us right away that this is not the book for you if you are looking to improve your skills or engage in deep psychotherapy about your “psychic blocks”. As to the latter, he writes, “we won’t talk about unleashing your inner anything. Put your ‘inner writer’ back on its leash and muzzle it.”

Despite this, the author uses studies in psychology to explain how certain things keep us from writing. For example, the first chapter lists “specious barriers” to writing. “I can’t find time to write” is the first one. This is a false belief, but it persists because it is comforting. Instead of “finding” time to write, Silvia tells us we must “allot” time to write. He jokes,

When people endorse this specious barrier, I imagine them roaming through their schedules like naturalists in search of Time to Write, that most elusive and secretive of creatures. Do you need to “find time to teach”? Of course not — you have a teaching schedule and you never miss it.

Other chapters on “Motivational Tools”, “Starting Your Own Agraphia Group”, and “Writing Journal Articles” are also very good, but be warned that Silvia focus on psychology, so you have to make allowances if you are coming from elsewhere. Also, this is a book for academic writers of research articles and books, not fiction writers. One last gem:

Your first drafts should sound like they were hastily translated from Icelandic by a nonnative speaker. Writing is part creation and part criticism, part id and part superego: Let the id unleash a discursive screed, and then let the superego evaluate it for correctness and appropriateness. Rejoice in writing your gnarled and impenetrable first drafts, just as you rejoice in later stamping out your fuzzy phrases and unwanted words.

Such good advice for the perfectionist in all of us!

3. Personal

First, I am back on Twitter, as @RRRJes (bastards wouldn’t let me re-activate the late great @RRRJessica. But it’s ok. With the nickname, now it feels like everyone who replies to me is my best pal.)

A blogging conundrum. I’m chafing under two restraints on this blog. One is writing under a pseudonym. (The other I am not ready to talk about yet.) Maybe it’s the Aristotelian in me, but I like to be whole. I’ve wanted to point students and colleagues in the direction of posts, but I hesitate. And I’ve even thought about having students blog with me when I assign a romance novel next year in Ethics and Literature or Feminist Theory. And why not? I don’t write about work or family or personal life in a way that would compromise me or anyone I know. I also don’t feel ashamed about reading romance novels. I read them and enjoy them and I don’t care who knows it.

But there is one thing I occasionally do on this blog that I think could be awkward: read and review erotic romance. Now there is a difference between privacy and shame. Compare: I have a sexual relationship with my spouse, of which I am not ashamed, but I would hardly talk about it to anyone else. Similarly, it is one thing to say, abstractly, “I sometimes read erotic romance”, but another to talk about and review specific books, using explicit words. It’s just personal (I know, I know, how “personal” can something be if you post about it on the internet?).

Maybe it’s that erotic romance edges closer to pornography, (it’s not porn, but on the continuum, it is closer, because it shares with porn an intent to arouse), and that makes it feel closer to talking about my real sex life and less like talking about literature.

When many people review erotic romance they will say things like “it hit all my buttons” or “it was really hot” and they are not speaking metaphorically. Now, why does it feel ok to log all of my other emotional reactions to a book (“It made me sad,” “It made me laugh”. Etc) but not the sexual one? This is a legitimate part of a book review: if someone is writing the kind of sex scenes that make me giggle, that’s a literary failure, isn’t it? And conversely, writing good believable sex scenes is a literary success. So, I can’t defend my desire to keep that stuff off the table — it’s just a personal preference (I know others make different choices).

In short, one of the costs to me of connecting this blog up to my professional website and being more open about it, is that this would have to become a PG-13 rated blog. But the cost of blogging pseudonymously, is that the more I blog, the more serious I get about research in popular romance studies, and that has to be done under my own name.

Right now, I am leaning to cutting out the R-rated stuff and taking professional ownership of my work here, but I am on the fence. On the other hand, random people in RL probably don’t give a shit about what I do in my off time. The people in RL I have told about this blog do not ever actually read it (bastards). So it maybe doesn’t matter either way.

This is just what I am thinking about right now. Thought I’d share. Feel free to share back.

HAPPY WEEK!!

Moral Repair and Ritual Death in the Romance Novel

Feb 20

Posted by Jessica in Genre musings | 15 Comments

(this post title sounds more formal than this post actually is. I’m just thinking out loud.)

In The Natural History of the Romance Novel) (pp. 30-39).Pamela Regis identifies 8 essential elements of the romance novel. One of them is the “point of ritual death”, the moment when love seems doomed, when the barrier seems insurmountable, and when all hope is nearly lost for an HEA (the other 7 elements are:  society defined, the meeting, the barrier, the attraction, the declaration, the point of ritual death, the recognition, the betrothal.)

Regis tells us that Northrop Frye, (see Eric Selinger’s  2006 reflections on how helpful Frye was to him in teaching romance) coined the term “point of ritual death” in his Anatomy of Criticism (1957).  In The Secular Scripture: A study of the structure of romance (1976), Frye writes:

One of the most fundamental human realizations is that the passing from death to rebirth is impossible for the same individual; hence the theme of substitution for death runs all through literature, religion, and ritual. Redemption is one form of substitution, though one more satisfying to theology than to romance (p. 89)

Regis doesn’t pursue the spiritual parallels at all, which is interesting, since they seem so central to Frye’s use of the phrase. There’s more work to be done there, and someone should do it.

In this post, though, I wanted to talk a little bit about one things that attracts me to romance, namely the way it deals with moral repair, and how it’s connected in many cases to ritual death and recognition.

Moral repair is a bit of a newfangled term in ethical theory, associated with late twentieth century feminist approaches to ethics, and especially the work of Margaret Urban Walker, whose book on the topic was recently published. In modern moral philosophy (by which I mean anything after Descartes), there has tended to be a lot of focus on moral judgment and action. A lot of emphasis on how we know what the right thing is to do, and should motivate us to do it.

Feminist moral philosophy tends to be a moral naturalized moral philosophy, but which I mean many things, but paramount for this discussion is a recognition of the lived experience, or phenomenology of moral life.  In contrast, traditional moral philosophy tends to be ideal moral philosophy, in the sense that it thinks of morality as more of an abstract system, and attempts to decipher what the ideal moral agent would do in various hypothetical cases. Unsurprisingly, given feminist philosophy’s insistence that the lived experience of women has been neglected and misrepresented in traditional philosophy, feminists tend to think about how real moral agents actually work, and the kinds of real moral problems they actually face.

One result of this difference in emphasis is the recognition that we often make the wrong choices, and that there is moral fallout: pain, anger, broken relationships, injustice, injury or death. “Moral repair” is the name for the kind of work we do after the moral wrong has been done. We have to go on, although you would never know that reading most traditional moral philosophy, which always takes the point of view of the moral agent at the moment of choice among a predetermined slate of possible actions and ends the discussion at the moment of decision.

Moral repair includes a cluster of concepts, concerns, attitudes, and actions that have been neglected in philosophical discourse about morality. Acceptance, forgetting, censure, public disavowal, remorse, repentance, apology, penance, pardoning, excuse, forgiveness, reparation, hostility. Moral repair is not just a response to a wrong: it is  a response to a wrong as a wrong. If you accidentally step on my foot on the dance floor, I may yell “ouch”, but if you say “sorry” and I see it is a mistake, I move on. I have responded to your action, but not as a moral wrong. On the other hand, if you stamp on my toe at a political rally to stop me from speaking out, that’s a moral wrong, and I will respond to it as a moral wrong. I’ll say “ouch”, for sure, but I will follow up in other ways, too.

Some of our attitudes and responses to wrongdoing make the situation worse. Those kinds of responses are often not reparative. Figuring out how to repair relations, or whether they can or should be repaired  — whether it is Tiger Woods’ marriage or race relations in South Africa after the fall of apartheid  — has to be a collaborative process, to some extent, and cannot be decided in advance. Different situations call for different responses.

There are many kind of ritual death in the romance novel.  It may be the result of an external problem (the hero has been kidnapped, or the heroine is near death), or it may be an internal conflict that doesn’t have a moral focus (the hero has an alcohol problem, the heroine’s past romantic failures lead her to doubt the hero’s love).

But sometimes, the estrangement between hero and heroine happens because of moral wrong doing, one or both has hurt the other in a way that is blameworthy in a moral sense. Sherry Thomas is someone who excels at writing this kind of book, and it is one of the reasons I am so attracted to her writing. In Private Arrangements, a major moral wrong committed by the heroine is responded to by the hero in s way that deepens the moral rift, and the rippling rifts reverberate throughout the book (hey, I can haz alliteration!). In Not Quote a Husband, it’s the hero’s infidelity that features as the moral wrong the couple has to repair, although it turns out to be more complicated than that, because the heroine’s response to the infidelity was not the kind that could facilitate any moral repair, whether that meant moving on or reconciling. So she compounded the problem,.

Another writer whose books attract me is Susan Elizabeth Phillips. When I think of Jane Darlington tricking Cal Bonner into getting her pregnant in Nobody’s Baby But Mine, or Molly sexually assaulting Kevin in This Heart of Mine, or Sugar Beth Carey’s reconciliation with Colin in Ain’t She Sweet, I can see SEP excelling at telling this kind of story.

Paranormal romance has its share of ritual deaths that involve moral rupture: Colin and Savi in Meljean Brook’s Demon Moon, Irena and Alejandro in Brook’s Demon Forged, Clay and Elena in Kelley Armstrong’s Bitten, etc.

I need to do some more thinking, and ask you what you think, about connecting ritual death to moral rifts. It seems that the catalyzing moral wrong and thus the moment of ritual death in novels like  Private Arrangements and Bitten took place before the action of the novel proper. Is that even possible? does the point of ritual death have to occur late in the novel? Here’s where my lack of training in literature serves me ill.

We talk a lot about “the grovel”, and sure enough, these books have some of that. But “the grovel” doesn’t begin to get at the complexity of what is going on, morally, in books like those I have named. “The grovel” brings to my mind something superficial, chocolates and roses, profuse apologies, one sided actions designed to achieve the end of reconciliation. I think the grovel has its role, but it’s either the last step or the first –  not the journey.What happens in good romances in which the conflict is around moral wrongs, is the achieving of new moral insight and sensitivity, deep character change, a complex process of reconciliation that is just an integral to these union as the good times. It makes perfect sense to me that this would be the case, because romance novels are about love, and one of the most loving things we can do for someone is to forgive them, or to do what it takes to be forgiven.

I think there is work to be done connecting this aspect of some romance  novels to the goals of feminist ethical theory, especially as related to the neglected but crucial topic of moral repair. And I’m trying to do a little bit of it right now.

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Serious v. Plain v. Paperback Readers: The Dumbest Table I Have Ever Seen

Feb 17

Posted by Jessica in Academia | 28 Comments

From Thomas J. Roberts’ An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction:

(Apologies for lack of formatting. More on this book to come)

Read down according to color…

Kind of reader: Serious Reader Plain Reader Paperback Reader

Example: Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, Gone with the Wind, The Godfather Genre fiction (romance, SFF, thriller)

Orientation: Reads by author Reads by book Reads by genre

Socializing: Writes about books Chats about books Reads alone

Expectations: Originality Information Gratification

Stimulus to read:  A good review Book club Titles, covers

Writers’ rewards: Fame Money Love

TBR Challenge Review: Dragon Slayer Virgin, Game Hell Whore, by Kathleen O’Reilly

Feb 17

Posted by Jessica in Reviews | 12 Comments

Ok, “Dragon Slayer Virgin, Game Hell Whore” is not the real title. It’s

Keishon’s Feburary challenge was a virgin hero, and we have one in Colin Wescott, Earl of Haverwood. The book has a great prologue: it’s Colin as a boy finding out his father was not the old Earl — who has brought him to the Old Bailey to witness a hanging — but the man about to be hanged, a rapist named Black Jack Cady. The sight of his father’s death coincides with the realization that his blood is tainted. The old Earl raises Colin to believe he has “the rutting blackness inside you”. Colin creates an alter ego, the Dragon Slayer, to fight the dragons he believes are in his heart.  As he grows, the Dragon Slayer gains a kind of reality: Colin becomes a spy for England.

The old Earl left one more nasty surprise for Colin in his will: he’s have to marry by the time he turns 28 or lose the orphanage he owns (??????). Forced to choose between ruining some innocent virgin and forcing a gaggle of orphans into the street, Colin chooses the former. His butler Giles (one of those insubodinate butlers who is more of a friend than servant) plans to round up a bevy of available women for a dinner party (????). But Colin has a chance encounter at the opera with Sarah Banks, daughter of a (dead) disgraced gaming club owner, who has always dreamed of a man with amber eyes, and decides right away Colin’s her fate.

Colin wants Sarah, but he is afraid he will hurt her. He is determined to marry another. But as luck would have it, someone keeps trying to kidnap Sarah. Colin has to be near her to protect her: he can’t stay away.

So there’s a kind of parallelism in their imaginary friends. But while Sarah abandons her amber eyed dream man when the real thing enters her life, Colin relies even more heavily on his. Colin constantly thinks of himself as his alter ego, in the third person, as in

What kind of a gentleman was he? He was supposed to be a Dragon Slayer for God’s sake!

in the middle of a diner party, which had me giggling. Or when they finally make love, he thinks

Right now she could be carrying his child. The child of a Dragon Slayer.

My husband and I had some fun with this last night. As in, Him: “Dinner’s ready.” Me: “Dinner for a Dragon Slayer????!!!”, or Me: “Can you let the dogs out?” Him: “The dogs of a Dragon Slayer!!!“.

Nothing much becomes of the kidnapping plot. And if I tell you that in the middle of the book Colin rescues, at knife point, an orphan prostitute and dumps her at Sarah’s house, and later the Earl gets punched in the stomach by the girl orphan’s boyfriend, you will see this is a bit of a crazy book.

The setting is not well realized. And the writing is pretty clunky. For example:

He forced a polite smile on his face, which he feared would appear like a pained grimace.

Or

He followed her to the foyer, watching the swing in her hips with the most dissolute lust raging in his heart.

It’s O’Reilly’s first novel, and IMHO, it shows. But this is not a horrible book, by any means. I enjoyed it, perhaps a bit less than the two contemporary trilogies I have enjoyed by this author. But the story is gripping from the first page (anyone who doesn’t like prologues should read this one to see how effective they can be), and the tortured virgin hero/no-nonsense, semi-outcast heroine, reminiscent in some ways of Kinsale’s The Shadow and the Star, is one I like in all its variations. The relationship between Sarah and Colin was very touching and believable.

Oh, and just FYI: Many of us know about AAR’s list, but in writing this review I discovered that Good Reads has a similar list. (although it may be less reliable: it includes Kelley Armstrong’s Bitten, which I just read, and Clay is no virgin).

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