Archive for: February, 2011

Monday Stepback: Big News! Links! And way too many Opinions!

Feb 14 2011 Published by under Monday Morning Stepback

The weekly links, opinion, and personal updates post

Links of Interest

Macmillan’s new Romance site is up. It’s called Heroes and Heartbreakers, and yours truly will be blogging there on occasion, along with a bunch of other folks:

Heroes and Heartbreakers is a community website featuring daily content for serious fans of the romance genre in all of its forms.  Not everyone can understand the desire to argue for thirty minutes about Dain vs. Derek, to challenge the casting for the latest Jane Austen movie, or to debate whether the True Blood love triangle worked better on paper or on TV.

Heroes and Heartbreakers understands the woot! and the squee! of all of that.  Add in the original short stories and excerpts from upcoming romance novels, and it’s like a romance enthusiast’s paradise (the kind with extremely attractive men bringing you umbrella drinks).

Like our science fiction/fantasy sister site, Tor.com, we are publisher-neutral in our selection of books, authors and materials for coverage and discussion. We don’t play favorites because we think a real romance community site should be all-inclusive.  You don’t want to miss a thing, and neither do we.

Advertising Age has a story on Heroes and Heartbreakers, and similar sites such as eHarlequin. It’s 100% snark free! Apparently romance is “future proofed” (via @jafurtado):

It helps that romance was well prepared, in many ways without trying, for the challenges that would come. Its fans like to talk to one another, to the eventual advantage of the romance sites and social-media plays that have now emerged. And its books were typically priced pretty low. There’s more free content every day, but romance publishers are proving that cheap can be pretty persuasive, too.

*****

The program has been posted at Teach Me Tonight for the International Association of Popular Romance Studies conference this summer in NYC, and registration is now open. I’m so excited for this!

*****

Borders True Romance blog (Please don’t close your Bangor store. Please don’t close your Bangor store. Please please please.)  is giving away tickets for RomCon in Denver in August. I went last year and had an amazing time. Highly recommended.

*****

SFF author Carolyn Crane is offering tips to stay on track at her blog.

4. Social media like twitter has to be a decision, not a default mode. I can’t just go on twitter or whatever because I’m between things.

I think that one could be a life changer for me.

*****

At Things Mean a Lot, Ana/Nymeth has a Sunday Salon post, Not All Readings Are Created Equal, where she tries to balance respect for literary training and expertise with an acknowledgment that no degree or credential is required to say something important about a book:

The reason why I believe in democratising critical discourse is not because I think every single person in the world will make incredibly insightful, relevant and well-argued points about literature at all times (however you define those). It’s rather because I believe that we should recognise who does and does not make sense based on what they’re saying, not who they are or who they associate with. I’m not arguing against anyone’s right to take some viewpoints, readings or interpretations of a book more seriously than others; merely against following a pre-packaged formula to decide who you take seriously or not. It saddens me to see intelligence and insight be defined solely by the right sort of allegiance. This inevitably results in the dismissal of a lot of excellence points, and also in a lot of badly disguised idiocy being treated with subservience.

*****

At the Book Bench, Reviewers on Reviewing

I was at an event last week featuring an interview with Zadie Smith, co-sponsored by N.Y.U. and Harper’s, where Smith has just become the reviewer for the New Books column, at which she said many interesting things about book-reviewing. She insisted on being called a reviewer, in fact, and not a critic, a distinction I understood as being between an all-powerful and hoity-toity judge-type (the critic) and a sort of fellow-traveller (the reviewer), one who approaches a book in a spirit of camaraderie and aims to represent that book in a piece of writing as carefully crafted as the book itself (which is not to say “softly”). Smith cited Virginia Woolf, who reviewed whatever caught her fancy—trashy romances, if she wanted—and whose reviews were as much about her own perceptions of the world as they were about the book.

Do you know, did Woolf ever review a “trashy romance” (note the suggestion there is no other kind)? I would like to read that.

But a comment on that blog post caught my eye. It’s a call for authors to fight back:

My recent experience as an author of a book with a malignant review on Amazon was very instructive, and suggests that these reviews shouldn’t be taken lightly or ignored. Amazon is the largest single source of consumer information by review on the Internet. Like it or not, we authors of other than bestsellers have to understand an Amazon review as a sign of warning or encouragement right at the most important point of sale of our intellectual product. …  In the case of my bad review I responded to the review in a signed comment that diplomatically suggested another way of looking at the reviewer’s complaints. In return, the reviewer rewrote the review to make it worse, reduced it to one star and made it appear to be the original version of his review instead of a rewrite. I returned the serve by adding a sentence to my comment noting and dating the evidently angry rewrite to which he responded by revising it again and taking it, as I expected he would, off the deep end and far beyond an image of just an old man railing at clouds. After a long struggle, Amazon finally agreed that it had to be taken down. I can see great advantages to Amazon for authors and I’m trying to get better at using them. But I think that those of us who write books have got to start taking back the night, so to speak, from the wild west that Amazon book reviews have become. [emphasis added]

Is this author just a bit nutty, or is there an author backlash against negative reader reviews? I’m thinking both. Witness the kerfuffle of last week, when an author took to her blog to rail against “unprofessional”, i.e. “negative” review sites (too many people wrote their own blog posts on this dustup last week to even begin to list them. Just Google the author’s name and you’ve got a solid 6 hours of opinions to read. Or maybe 5 minutes, since all the opinions except one are pretty much the same.).

Then you have Carla Kelly taking to the AAR boards to complain about an Amazon review she had removed (I’m not questioning whether the Amazon review should have been removed, only the need to vent in a reader forum with a post entitled “If you don’t like a book…”). And an author, Victoria Howard, correcting a reviewer at the site The Romance Reviews (a site which is GIVEAWAY! after CONTEST! after GIVEAWAY! and therefore not of much interest to me in general. YMMV.).

I wonder if, in the push to get authors to get out there among the digital fandom and promote their own books, to be savvy and skillful — but authentic! and real! –  social networkers, it was not inevitable that authors would turn around and use the same tools — blog, forums, twitter –  to, in their view, protect their reputations against “deranged”, “unprofessional”,  or “angry” readers. If it is important to use social media to enhance one’s reputation, does it follow that one should use social media to protect it?

Luckily authors who aren’t sure what do in these challenging times can just read Meljean Brook’s Internet Survival Guide for Authors. Most of her points are great for anyone on the internets, really.

*****

Looking for a short list of great SFF for the romance reader? Janicu put one together over at starmetal oak book blog.

*****

In case you missed the news, Charlaine Harris has announced the end of the Sookie Stackhouse Southern Vampire Mysteries series … after 2 more books. I think this is a good thing, and I’m a huge fan of the series.

Apparently, working on a video game has been taking up a lot of her time. I’m not a gamer, so I haven’t played the games based on works by Nora Roberts, for example, or the Harlequin games. TV is one thing — at least it’s still long form narrative — but if video games are taking an author’s time away from writing books, I’m not sure I approve.

*****

After following the threads on men, porn, and sexual dysfunction, I don’t EVER want to hear another word about the dangers of the high expectations for men set by heroes in romance novels:

When you watch porn, “you’re bonding with it,” Kuszewski says. “And those chemicals make you want to keep coming back to have that feeling.” Which allows men not only to get off on porn but to potentially develop a neurological attachment to it. They can, in essence, date porn.

Two women discuss this issue at the Hairpin:

The thing that makes me GROAN SO HARD about this piece is that Rothbart and his group of pouty-faced masturbators feel put upon by porn! A kingdom of women putting all sorts of things in all kinds of holes, and they’re the ones with the sour puss.

*****

More press for the new book Academically Adrift at NPR:

According to the study, one possible reason for a decline in academic rigor and, consequentially, in writing and reasoning skills, is that the principal evaluation of faculty performance comes from student evaluations at the end of the semester. Those evaluations, Arum says, tend to coincide with the expected grade that the student thinks he or she will receive from the instructor.

“There’s a huge incentive set up in the system [for] asking students very little, grading them easily, entertaining them, and your course evaluations will be high,” Arum says.

I find it very hard to believe that “the principal evaluation of faculty performance” is based on an assessment of teaching, let alone student evaluations of such. It certainly is not true at my university.

*****

Neil Gaiman has changed his tune on piracy (video). Quoted from Comics Alliance:

“You’re not losing sales by getting stuff out there. When I do a big talk now on these kinds of subjects and people ask “What about the sales you are losing by having stuff floating out there?” I started asking the audience to raise their hands for one question — Do you have a favorite author? And they say yes and I say good. What I want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book put up your hand. Then anybody who discovered their favorite author by walking into a book story and buying a book. And it’s probably about 5-10%, if that, of the people who discovered their favorite author who is the person they buy everything of and they buy the hardbacks. And they treasure the fact they’ve got this author. Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They did not pay for it. That’s how they found their favorite author. And that’s really all this is; it’s people lending books.”

*****

Lots and lots of press for romance novels due to the Valentine’s holiday. This one about a new documentary on romance readers at The Telegraph had the usual good/bad (30/70%) mix, but I was interested to learn about Mr. Sanderson:

I’ve always found the characters unrealistic in their stereotypical attractiveness and conduct. However, lots of women – 1.3 million a month – never tire of the tanned hunks and usually sappy females (however “sassy-mouthed’’ they might be). And this is why Roger Sanderson, who has written almost 50 M&B novels under the pen-name Gill Sanderson, says he would never try to introduce a less than perfect Alpha male as the hero. “He’s got to have a good body, and there’s no way he can be fat or badly dressed,” he says in a new documentary, Guilty Pleasures, which explores the enduring phenomenon of M&B. “And I never have – and never will have – a red-headed hero.”

(via @lizfielding)

USA Today has done a bunch of articles on romance. I tend not to be such a fan of press on romance novels when it suggests that writing — or reading — romance novels makes authors (or readers) experts in relationships, because I’d rather see the books being taken seriously as fiction, not as how to guides. But maybe the line is finer than I like to admit: while I don’t think Margaret Atwood is going to be interviewed for a serious science article on genetic engineering, I could see her being asked to say something about the topic in a “lifestyle” or “health” piece, I guess. Anyway, I found this comment interesting in terms of its contrast to the quote above (although it’s about heroines, not heroes):

And the depiction of heroines as impossibly perfect beauties is an outdated image that “was always unbelievable and has changed and changed quickly,” [author Sarah] Wendell says. “The standard has become much more sophisticated and diverse.”

I’m not sure I would go as far as Wendell on this issue, but this was my favorite article of the bunch, with good stuff also from Nalini Singh and Beverley Jenkins.

*****

I really liked this post at When Falls the Coliseum on sentimentality versus emotion in art, with a discussion of the copout at the end of Inception:

So, here’s the thing, modern artists: it isn’t emotion that’s the sin in your work; it is the phony conjuring of emotion that is not supported by logic and “circumstances.”

Sentimentality thrives in pop songs when the forlorn lover says he wants to die when she’s away. (What if she’s just in the bathroom?) It haunts movies when poorly-rendered outcasts weep about their exclusion from the world. It surfs on every brush stroke of a painting of a pink dog with eyes the size of pizzas. The problem is not the emotion, it is emotion without intellectual or circumstantial justification.

*****

Did you know feminists aren’t allowed to flirt? Ayup.

Male or female, if somebody subscribes to the tenets of feminism, they’re shit out of luck when it comes to flirting. Because flirting is inherently objectifying, right? And yet even feminists get lucky sometimes. How does this even happen? Well, I have some guesses…

*****

Laura Miller comes to Jane Eyre’s defense in Salon (from back in January, via @Infogenium):

For a great novel, “Jane Eyre” has endured more than its fair share of misguided, condescending misinterpretations, but none quite so extravagant as an essay published in the British newspaper the Telegraph last week by novelist Sebastian Faulks. “Jane Eyre is a heroine,” he announces in the opening sentence, while “Becky Sharp, the main character of Thackeray’s ‘Vanity Fair’ (1847-48), is a hero.” Furthermore, “No one seems to question the distinction: it’s obvious.”

For Jane, the “fixed point and priority” of her life is not “her feelings for a man,” but the self-determination expressed in her ability to choose her own truth over those feelings and even, if necessary, over life itself. Her abandonment of Rochester is her coming of age. It’s hard to see how such a personality, and the drama of that personality reaching this apex of despair, clarity and fortitude, could be seen as un-heroic, especially compared to the adventures of a sociopath like Becky Sharp.

*****

Via Books on the Knob, now’s your chance to grab a free Kindle copy of Pride and Prejudice: Wild and Wanton Edition:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife . . . in bed. Unfortunately, you’ve never been able to see Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam indulging their every desire between the sheets–until now. In this deliciously naughty update of the beloved classic, you can peek behind the closed doors of Pemberley’s master bedroom–and revel in the sexual delights of your favorite couple.

Because really talented writers know that sex scenes have nothing to do with the text and everything to do with readers’ preferences. I’m looking forward to the time when, instead of different “lines” with different heat levels, we just have one book we can order however we want. ;)

Personal

We’re celebrating Valentine’s Day with a drive to Ellsworth and dinner with friends at a Mediterranean bistro we really like.

I am in grading purgatory this week.

I’ll have a review of Jo Beverley’s Forbidden Affections, a novella published … a long time ago (can’t find date. 1996?) … and just reissued by Zebra in the anthology An Invitation to Sin, which features a 16 year old heroine and a 30 year old hero. And a SECRET PASSAGE. (No, not that kind.)

HAPPY WEEK!

27 responses so far

10 Shocking Things About JR Ward’s Lover Awakened!

Feb 09 2011 Published by under Reviews

…that I noticed on a reread. No, they probably won’t shock you guys, careful readers that you are. But I must have read this one in a rush back in 2007, because when I reread it — and re-enjoyed it –  three years later, I was shocked! Shocked I tell you! By the following:

1. The Black Dagger Brotherhood aren’t undead. They drink blood, but they also eat and digest food. They are warm, with beating hearts and lungs that pump air in and out. They normally do not feed on, and are no threat to, humans. The traits they share with more traditional vampires are their need of blood for sustenance, their immortality, and their vulnerability to sunlight.

The contrast between the BDB and what I would call “real” vampires is heightened in the text whenever possible: the BDB refer to the Lessers as “the undead”, and refer to their 50 degree F body temps, for example.

In terms of the literary vampire tradition, and also in terms of the folkloric one, being undead — having once been a human with a mortal life — is the sine qua non of vampirism. So I think the Lessers are truer vampires than the BDB.

2. The worldbuilding is thin. We are told so little about the vampires outside the BDB that they may as well not exist. These non-BDB vamps are referred to — unhelpfully — as “the aristocracy” pretty much every time they are mentioned, as in:

He hated the aristocracy he was stuck in, he really did.

A couple of females from the aristocracy used to run the Winter Solstice party.

You know how the aristocracy is.

Here’s an example of how the home of a member of the aristocracy is described:

The manse was formal and wealthy befitting the aristocracy.

Really evocative, huh?

Another example of thin worldbuilding is the adding of “h” to regular words as if that alone makes them unique. There is no special lore or history or tradition that distinguishes “ahvenge” from the way the average reader would understand “avenge”. So why bother?

Finally, and this may be a better example of “inconsistency” than “thin worldbuilding”, but here goes: Bonding. With reference to every other bonded couple in the BDB, bonding is powerful and inescapable. Z and Bella bond — his pores emit the Oldh Shpice and everything — yet even at the end of the book, he is still telling himself, and anyone who will listen, that Bella can have a happy life with some other guy … even if she is pregnant with her and Z’s baby. Ok, either “bonding” is an ironclad, unbreakable combination of instinct and tradition, or it isn’t. Which?

3. Nice boys. The BDB are supposed to be alpha, and edgy. Bad boys. And they are indeed really big and strong. They have to be, as warriors who fight the Lessers to protect their species. They are avid lovers, possessive of “their females”, etc. The text reinforces this constantly, as when we are told Zsadist smells of “distilled male power.”

But, on a second read, I noticed that they are, deep down, the kind of boys any momma would be proud of. Here are a couple of examples:

a. Butch is at the club, and is approached by a random prostitute:

He knew where this was headed. He’d end up doing her in one of the private bathrooms over there. Would take maybe ten minutes, if that. He’d get her off, do his business, then beat feet to get away from her.

Did you see that? “He’d get her off” is the first order of business.

b. Bella is in her “needing”, which means every unmated guy in the house wants to have sex with her. Add a bunch of warriors, “massive straining erections” and free flowing Grey Goose, and you’ve got trouble. At one point, Z physically attacks another brother. Afterwards, this:

Z swung his leg up and dismounted, letting himself roll onto the floor. … he wondered idly what had happened to the blunt he’d been smoking. Glancing over at the window, he found he’d had the decency to balance it on the sill before he’s launched at Vishous like a rocket.

Musn’t burn the carpets!

c. Phury’s use of “Red Smoke.” What is red smoke? It sounds ominous every time it’s mentioned. Have we finally found a true bad boy? Um:

Red smoke was just a mild muscle relaxant, really, nothing like marijuana or any of the dangerous stuff.

He relied on blunts to keep him level, just like other folks used cocktails.

4. The crying. Talk about leaky faucets! Suzanne Brockmann’s Navy SEALS have nothing on the BDB.

Here’s Butch, thinking about having sex with a prostitute:

And it was really just masturbation disguised as sex. No big deal.
He thought of Marissa … and felt his tear ducts sting.
“I’m sorry. I can’t.”

And Revhenge, when Marissa is drinking blood from him:

As she sucked at him vein, he had the absurd impulse to cry.

John Matthew, the pre-transition BDB member-in-training, when he finds out a female friend has died:

John burst into tears. He didn’t mean to.

Z’s twin bother Phury:

There was no reply. So Z glanced over again — just as a tear slid down Phury’s cheek.

But the biggest crybaby of all? Is Zsadist. There’ s a lot of crying when he’s enslaved, but we’ll give that a pass. Here are just a few of the instances of weepage in the “present” time of the narrative:

When he thinks Bella has been incinerated:

He scrubbed his face and then stared at his palm. there was wetness on it. Tears?

When — again, late in the book, Z thinks he has lost Bella:

And then he thought of Bella. Tears came to his eyes…

At the end, when Z realizes Bella loves him and all is well:

He reached up and touched her face. He was not going to cry. He was not* –
Oh, to hell with it.
He smiled up at her as the tears started rolling.

And the brothers are not the only boys who cry.

(There’s a lot of distancing language around the tears, as many of these quotes indicate.)

A male lesser thinks his lover is dead:

O wiped desperate tears out of his eyes.

A civilian male vampire awaits his death:

A tear snaked down his bruised cheek.

5. Fear of a giant penis. I pondered the genre phenomenon of the heroine being scared of the hero’s penis in another post. But in Lover Awakened, the hero is also terrified of it! In fairness, it is described as “twitching wildly” and having “punch action”, which sounds ominous indeed.

Zsadist:

he glanced down at the tent between his legs. Christ, that goddamn thing in there was huge; he looked like he had another arm in his pants. And hiding a log like that would require scaffolding.

Bella:

His arousal was enormous. A perfectly beautiful, rock-solid aberration of nature.
Holy … Moses. Would he even fit?

6. The branding. So constant! And, often, inconsistent with who these guys are. Consider this example from Butch:

He figured this session with the shrink was an hour, so his Patek Philippe’s long hand had to take forty-seven more trips around before he could stuff the kid back in the care and bust on out of here.

Now, Butch is a cop with who refers to ZeroSum — the club in town — as “frickin precious”, and whose distinguishing fashion feature has so far been his Red Sox hat, pulled low.

Why are we told that the gym bag issues to new BDB recruits is a Nike bag? Or why say “He was flushed with sweat from his head to his Nikes” instead of “toes”?

Or,

with a curse, Butch leaned onto his knees, put his hand up to his forehead, and looked down at his Ferragamos.

Or,

the diamond eyes were sharp, undimmed even by the Grey Goose

Or consider John Matthew, a young kid who has lived on the streets his whole young life. Is this really how he would describe Butch on first seeing him?

This Butch O’Neal was … well, the man was dressed like a GQ model, for one thing. Under a black cashmere coat he had on a fancy pin striped suit, an awesome red tie, a bright white shirt. His dark hair was brushed off his forehead in a casual, finger-brushed way that totally rocked out. And his shoes … wow. Gucci, really Gucci … black leather, red-and-green band, shiny gold stuff.

To me, this read like the way an adult female romance novelist would describe Butch, not the way a homeless teen would. The addition of slang words like “stuff” and “rocked out” doesn’t help: it only seems more incongruous with the acute observation of the way Butch’s hair is “finger brushed”.

7. If I told you I was reading a PNR, with a heroine who had been abused and enslaved, escaped slavery and became a kick ass fighter, was sexually inexperienced and insecure, felt she was ugly and unworthy of the hero, tried to fix him up with her sister, misinterpreted his desire for her as pity or self-loathing, and had thoughts like this:

…she really would have preferred bringing him something, some [food] that she’d made. Not that she knew how to do that. Christ, she couldn’t read, couldn’t work a damn washing machine, couldn’t cook.

And what if I told you, in the end, despite all her kick-assedness, her weapons, and her tough talk, the hero is the one who kills the bad guys and saves the day?

You wouldn’t bat an eye, right? Been there, read that. But I’ve just described (and quoted) Zsadist! I think Ward did something pretty interesting here with this subgenre. She took all the tropes of the PNR kick ass heroine … and made her a man.

Which leads me to …

8. Bella rocks. I had a memory of Ward heroines as wishy washy. Not this one. She is the one who is sexually experienced. She is the one who is sexually assertive and confident in the relationship. She exhausts him sexually, to the point where he can’t even move. She is the one who breaks it off when her needs aren’t being met. And she is the one who avenges herself. Here’s a bit of representative dialogue:

[Bella:] Do us both a favor and don’t try to think for me, okay? Because you’re going to get it wrong every damn time.

Z follows her unto the bathroom, where she is starting to cry.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered. “If I …uh, hurt your feelings or something.”
She glared at him. “I’m not hurt. I’m pissed off and sexually frustrated.”

She is not remotely afraid of Z, as this passage shows:

Zsadist didn’t speak a word. Just stared at her, all power and male strength.
“Did you come to loom at me?” she snapped. “Or is there a point to this?”

And at the climax, not only does Bella save herself, but she saves two Brothers and a fellow kidnapped female. She kills the Lesser at close range, with a knife. When she turns to the nearly dead Zsadist to offer him her blood, and he refuses, she has had it:

“Shut up,” she told him, and bit into her own wrist. “Drink this or die, your choice. But make up your mind quick, because I need to check on Phury and then I’ve got to get the two of you out of here.”

9. The homosociality, by which I mean the most important and charged emotional connections are really between the men, not just the Brothers, but between the Lessers, the Brothers and the Lessers, etc. And also, the … I want to say “latent homosexuality“, but that term so often goes hand in hand with homophobia, which is not really present at all, I don’t think, in the text, that I hesitate to use it (although there is a lot of explicit distancing from homosexual orientation, so I’m not sure). There are way too many examples to even begin to cite them between the brothers, not least of which is that the only sexual release the very horny Butch has in the text is due to interacting with Vishous, or, more humorously, that when Z arranges a meeting with the Lesser who has kidnapped Bella, they decide to meet in the back row of a theater playing The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

But here I will just point out that even the moments which you might think of as the most masculine, and therefore the most hetero (because in our culture, masculinity and heterosexuality are still strongly linked), i.e. the fight scenes or scenes of conflict, are seething with male-male erotic tension. Here are two examples:

“You picking a fight with me?
You going to kiss me before the sex? the Reverend murmured, still playing,
...
Phury laid a hard one on the male’s mouth, the kiss a punch between faces, not anything remotely sexual.

At one point, Z thinks:

he wanted to fight his enemy with a desperation that was downright sexual.

Looking back on this series, and on the growth of m/m romance written for women romance readers in the past few years, I have to wonder (and I am certainly not the first to do so) if the popularity of the BDB reflected, in part, that its mostly female het audience was ready, even if it didn’t know it yet, for more explicit m/m couplings.

10. The BDB was always urban fantasy. I stopped reading the BDB at book 5. At the time, I told myself it was because Ward had moved from a traditional romance novel to UF. I remember feeling vindicated when the books started being labeled UF. But you know what? She never wrote a traditional romance novel with the BDB. In LA, you have whole chapters devoted to people other than the h/h, even to the enemies of the BDB. I honestly cannot recall another romance novel which spends so many pages on other characters, not just a secondary romance, but equally important characters and plots. I think it’s a sign of how skilled Ward is at writing romance that many people –ok, I — didn’t notice this at first.

I know some of these points are critical, but the BDB got me reading romance, something for which I will be forever grateful, and it’s the only romance series I reread periodically. I still have a very soft spot in my reader heart for them, especially this one.

54 responses so far

Monday Stepback: The Glowing Review with the B- Grade

Feb 07 2011 Published by under Monday Morning Stepback

The weekly links, opinion, and personal updates post

1. Links of Interest

I was feeling pretty spiffy a few months ago when I added the WP  Touch Pro plugin so that viewers of this blog could have access to a clean, scaled version for their mobile phones. But now I have to wonder, Is Your Website Ready for the Coming Tablet Revolution? (via @jafurtado).

*****

Novelist Emily St. John Mandel on Bad Reviews at the Millions.

*****

The kerfuffle of the week: Bitch Media posted a list of 100 Feminist YA Books, got some heat for a few titles, considered the complaints, and removed them. I think Bitch should not have put out a list they couldn’t defend, about a reading genre with such a passionate online community, and should have had a better plan in place for handling criticism and discussion. While creating a list of 100 is fine, because it doesn’t follow that all the books left off aren’t feminist, taking books off that list does imply that about the books removed. So removing books is much more fraught and needed to be handled a lot more deftly. I think authors have every right to chime in and ask that their books be removed from the list, but I think it’s Bitch’s list and they have the right to keep them on. I also think the reaction is overblown on all sides. The folks at Bitch made some mistakes, but nobody’s killing puppies. For a great response, see this terrific post by The Book Smugglers, who got dragged into it when one of their reviews was used as the basis for complaints about one of the offending books. Both posts have long long threads, which include comments that might well make you sad and/or angry.

*****

From reader Liz, Sexless Novels, in Esquire, which demonstrates clearly what happens when you exempt half the writing population based on gender:

Today, many writers have largely abandoned sex as an area of concern. There are exceptions. Predictably, the French are still capable of producing an enfant terrible, though in the case of Michel Houellebecq, he is no longer particularly enfant nor terrible. The best writing about sex I’ve read recently comes from England, where Geoff Dyer seems to have a right and healthy attitude about the way these things can work — a little cocaine, some free booze, a chance encounter over a few days in Venice — voilà … healthy, happy orgasms for all!

*****

Are eBooks heralding the End of Ownership? An interesting interview with Librarything’s founder:

Once you realise your Kindle book is not fully yours, you’ll accept it being mostly not yours. Google Ebooks are a further step away from ownership. Eventually you get to a faucet model, as music has done, either low-price (Netflix) or free (Pandora, YouTube).

“By itself, such changes might be culturally and economically neutral. Ownership of paper books wasn’t so much a consumer preference as a side effect of their physical nature, and law followed and solemnized that state of affairs. Maybe the faucet model will produce more readers, more reading, more good books, more paid authors, etc. Or maybe it will produce less. Who knows?”

*****

I’ve been thinking about doing a video blog (Be afraid. Be very afraid.), and have been interested in how others do it. There are some deadly boring ones out there. But author Nicole Peeler shows us how it’s done with this video review of Andrew Shaffer’s Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love (a book I will do a writeup on in the near future). I mentioned in my last post that I am writing an essay for a Hunger Games and Philosophy volume, and am pleased to say Andrew is making a contribution as well, on schadefreude!

*****

Can authentic social media engagement sell books? Well, Sonomalass bought Stephanie Dray’s Lily of the Nile based on a tweet about Dray’s post on the relationship between historical romance and historical fiction.

*****

Tweeter extraordinaire and former reviewer at TGTBTU, Limecello, has struck out on her own and has a blog, with reviews, contests, and more serious posts. Check it out.

*****

Not book related, but via The Awl, I found this great website that collects links to cover performances of various artists, from Lucinda Williams to Phil Ochs to Ani Difranco. Love it!

*****

From When Falls the Coliseum, a teenager faces an uphill battle when she tries to convince her persuasive writing teacher father to buy her a cell phone. Very cute.

2. When Reviews and Grades Don’t Add Up

I think we all know that sometimes the book review itself and the final grade (or number of stars, or number of wineglasses, books, roses, etc.) don’t match. Usually, this is because the grade seems high given the serious criticisms in the body of the review.

But lately, I have noticed the opposite trend. The grade might be a B- or C+, but the review contains nothing but positive or neutral comments. Can you imagine if I handed a paper back to my students, with a B- grade, that didn’t explain why it’s not an A? I feel the same way about reviews.

So this is a plea. If a book is not an “A” or “A-” read, please let us know why in your review. Thanks!

3. Personal

Nothing much to report. I did have a great time with 15 other people last night celebrating Chinese New Year with a 25 course meal. Too good of a time to take pictures, sorry to say. It turns out I am a Rooster, and thus will not have such a good year, according to our host, whom I subsequently did not tip.* ** ***

I’m teaching parts of Tod Chambers’ The Fiction of Bioethics this week in the seminar, and finishing up Kant and giving an exam in Ethics.

I’m reading His at Night by Sherry Thomas and No Souvenirs by K.A. Mitchell and enjoying both tremendously.

Have a great week!

*that’s a joke people.
** what I meant to say was that I would have withheld a tip, but it was included in the price.
***again, joking.

29 responses so far

This and That: What I’m Up To, Books Read but Not Reviewed, Etc.

Feb 04 2011 Published by under Feminist contentions, Genre musings, Navel gazing

A little birdie told me that the key to avoiding a blogging slump is to “lower my standards”. Hence this post.

1. My friend Elizabeth and I are giving talk on campus in April. She’s a faculty member in the English department who specializes in Minerva Press and the sensation novels of the 18th century. She plans to discuss The Mysterious Warning, by Eliza Parsons, which I am now reading.

Some of you might know this book through your reading of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. The following is from from Wikipedia:


The Northanger Horrid Novels are seven early works of Gothic fiction recommended by Isabella Thorpe to Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey (1818):

“Dear creature! how much I am obliged to you; and when you have finished Udolpho, we will read The Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you.”

“Have you, indeed! How glad I am! — What are they all?”

“I will read you their names directly; here they are, in my pocket-book. Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Those will last us some time.”

“Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?”

“Yes, quite sure; for a particular friend of mine, a Miss Andrews, a sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the world, has read every one of them.”

Elizabeth and I are going to discuss critiques of Minerva Press novels, and compare them to critiques of today’s romance novels. Both types of novels, despite being separated by two centuries, share many features: female authors and readership, mass market publication, female protagonists, somewhat scandalous plots and characters, happy endings, not taken seriously as literature, etc. And the critiques also share similarities: conventional, formulaic, unimaginative, bad for women, etc.


Elizabeth is going to focus on Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminist critique of Minerva Press books, and she is going to argue, using the Parsons, that in fact the books are more complex and more subversive than Wollstonecraft gave them credit for. I’m going to do the same.



I’d like to focus on one specific book as well, and I think it would be neat to find a romance published in the past 20 years which bears some similarities to The Mysterious Warning. Elizabeth will read whichever book I choose. If you have any suggestions, feel free to make them here.



2. I decided to contribute an essay to a forthcoming book, The Hunger Games and Philosophy. Here’s the title and abstract. Of course, the finished paper will likely look a bit different:

“She has no idea, the effect she can have”: The Gender of Success in the Hunger Games

In contrast to other wildly popular young adult SFF series, such as The Twilight Saga, The Hunger Games features a triumphant female protagonist who succeeds in virtue of her intelligence, strength, and loyalty. Katniss rejects many feminine norms: she is not forgiving, nice, or humble, she refuses to cry, she is untrusting, “sullen and hostile”. She enjoys hunting, her appearance is androgynous, and she has no desire to marry or have children.

Yet, undeniably, Katniss’s gender becomes significant to her chances of success when her fellow competitor from District 12, Peeta, declares his love for her.  Regardless of her gender neutral, or even masculine, self-image and lifestyle up to that point, Katniss is positioned as a “feminine lover” for the Games. As she prepares to win the favor of the audience, she adopts traditionally feminine mannerisms, such as giggling, “sitting like a lady”, twirling in a pretty dress, and,  later, during the Games, only allowing herself to show emotions appropriate to a young woman in love.

The proposed paper will explore the ways The Hunger Games both relies upon and subverts traditional notions of gender, with a focus on Katniss, as a means to explore the philosophical question of what gender is. Attention will also be paid to Peeta, and how his positioning as masculine, as “active lover”, is challenged by his status as passive recipient of Katniss’s ministrations and aid. The essay will help illuminate some contemporary issues in gender theory, including the social construction of gender, as well as challenges to the very concept of gender posed by some postmodern theorists such as Judith Butler.

3. I registered for RWA in New York City this summer, and I am so excited I can hardly stand it. I actually have family all over the city and on the Island, but the chance to room again with Carolyn Crane was too tempting to forgo. We already have all kind of exciting plans that include matching shoes, an in room fridge, and granola bars, but I can’t say any more about them right now. One of the most pathetic things I have been doing lately is searching for the hashtag #RWA11 on Twitter just to see who else is going and what they are planning to do. I’m so excited to meet several online friends I feel like I have known forever, and to see some of the folks I met at Romcon again.

4. Just prior to RWA is IASPR, also in NYC. I was privileged to read through the abstracts and am so excited for the presentation of some really diverse and fascinating work in popular romance studies. Thinking about IASPR will have to get me though the terrible withdrawal fits I will have when everybody is in Texas in April at the PCA/ACA.

5. I’ve been reading but not reviewing lately. I really liked What the Librarian Did by Karina Bliss, although I am not sure I loved it as much as so many other did. One book I absolutely loved, and wish I had time to review, was Collision Course by K.A. Mitchell. Another book I loved but cannot seem to write a review of was Ziska, by Marie Corelli. Obviously, I also read and really enjoyed The Hunger Games.

6. This has been a cold snowy winter in Maine, and I am so ready for it to be over. Unfortunately, winter sticks with us through at least March. We are heading to Disney World in TWENTY NINE DAYS, not that I am counting. As a result, I am back on the Disney forums, getting into debates about whether the installation of lap bars on Splash Mountain ruins the ride, and whether one should jog left or right to beat the rope drop crowds to Toy Story Mania in Disney Studios. Naturally, I have lunch and dinner reservations for every meal already and have had for weeks. And a spreadsheet.

7. I’ve been working out very enthusiastically, and am consequently suffering terribly from illiotibial band syndrome. I seem to spend half my time lying on the floor rolling on a foam thing. Ugh.

8. I have a new Hospice friend, a retired Melville scholar. He is awesome.

9. I’ve been pretty busy with a variety of things. I am teaching the senior seminar on narrative medicine, and I am so thrilled with the students. I think I will make this a regular part of my teaching rotation. I’ve given lots of talks and had lots of ethics calls at the hospital. I gave a talk to the OR recently and I used an  Alternative Pain Chart by Hyperbole and a Half. It went over very well.

10. I changed the pic in my About page. I took the new one yesterday in my office. I was motivated to do so after reading the dead on What People Are Trying to Communicate With Their Profile Pics. I am not sure what I am trying to communicate now.

11. We are going to a 25 course Chinese New Year party Sunday night. You can tell our friends are really into football. A few people on Twitter asked me to take pics, so look for those.

12. I really am going to write that Lover Awakened post, now called “10 Things I Noticed on a Reread of Lover Awakened”. Maybe even later today.

Time to make the breakfasts…

Happy Friday!

42 responses so far

Joint review: The Italian’s Future Bride, by Michelle Reid

Feb 02 2011 Published by under Duelling/Joint Reviews, Reviews

Tumperkin read this one and asked me to chime in. I did, with my usual brevity.

First, Tumperkin:

Jessica, don’t take this the wrong way, but when I read this book, I thought of you.

Before I say more, let me contextualise the comments that are going to follow a little bit:

* Whilst Michelle Reid is not an autobuy author for me, I’ve read and enjoyed a number of her books in the past;
* She writes a particular brand of angsty, contemporary category romance (squarely within the HQPresents-paradigm) that I rather enjoy;
* This book suffers from “camel-back-breaking” syndrome i.e. the things I am going to complain about crop up in lots of other romances but sometimes, as a reader, a particular issue will come to a head when you read a particular book.

So what was the issue here, for me?

It started, when I read the following passage that takes place after the H/H have had a one night stand and realise they have not used a condom:

“Marriage comes before babies in my family,” he enlightened.

Marriage – ? “Oh, for goodness’ sake.” It made her feel sick to her stomach to say it, but – “I’ll take one of those m-morning after pills that – ”

“No, you will not,” he cut in.

She stood up. “That is not your decision.”

His silver eyes speared her. “So you are happy to see off a fragile life before it has been given the chance to exist?”

“God, no.” She even shuddered. “But I think it would be – ”

“Well, don’t think,” he said coldly. “We will not add to our sins if you please. This is our fault not the fault of the innocent child which may result. Therefore we will deal with it the honourable way – if or when it comes to it.”

Do I even need to say why I find this passage so objectionable?

Firstly, there’s the positioning of the morning after pill as equivalent to cold-blooded murder. Clearly there’s a whole debate about the morning after pill that segues into the debate about abortion. However, it’s not really that that I want to address. The thing that offends me here is the positioning of this complex issue, on which there are different views, as something which is essentially a “no-brainer”. Whilst the heroine raises the possibility of taking a morning after pill, it made her feel sick to her stomach to do so.

As if that’s not enough, we get a patronising, oppressive hero who decides that the heroine oughtn’t to have a say in what happens to her own body. Well, don’t think, he tells her, charmingly. And “We will not add to our sins if you please” … a prissy, paternalistic statement that made me want to eviscerate him.

For me, this strayed beyond the vocabulary of the standard domineering hero. This was the hero as a figure of authority (high status, older, male) and he was saying: don’t think, you have no say in what happens to your body, you will do as I say. To say it was a clear affirmation of the patriarchy circa 1956 would not, I think, be far off.

I want to emphasise again that this is not precisely an unusual passage to read in a romance of this type. And I don’t want anyone to infer that I am projecting particular views onto Ms Reid. I have no idea what Ms Reid makes of this particular issue. Further, many category romance plotlines (particularly in the Presents line) depend on core notions/ values that aren’t consistent with the social mores of the real world the reader lives in. (See this recent post on Teach Me Tonight, in which Laura Vivanco explores the divergence between reader values and book value ).

The passage above was extreme enough to prompt me to tweet about it, but even then, I think I’d have forgotten it had there been nothing else of note in the book As it was, however, the particularity of the morning after pill scene then proved to be just one example of a wider issue: the alarming control exercised by the hero over the heroine’s physical body. He has her followed when she goes out, telling her when she returns “I know where you have been… Tony works for me, not you”; When he takes her out to meet his friends and she strikes up a conversation with them, he takes her chin in his hand and turns her to look at him to say “You are here with me … don’t ignore me.” He acts as though he owns her:

His scrutiny paused right there and suddenly something else was adding to the turbulent mix. Rachel knew what he was thinking. She felt the muscles around her womb clench tightly as if it was acknowledging that it already belonged to him.

But if the heroine is a uterus on legs, at least she’s an attractive one. The H/Hs mutual lust in this book is – as is again typical in this paradigm – extreme. If only it wasn’t so completely rooted in the body, I might be able to believe there was something between them that might last more than five minutes.

So those were my thoughts.

Jessica?

************

Hey T!

Well, the scene you started with — the morning after pill — jumped out at me as well. In later passages that view of the morning after pill is concretized:

She felt like screaming! He really, truly and honestly believed that she was ruthless enough to calmly take something to rectify the wrong they had done, his wonderful fatalist attitude giving him the right to believe that his morals were superior to his own.

Why not tag her off as a woman who was capable of seeing off a baby before she was even sure there was one?

Later, the couple uses condoms, but this is inconsistent. If it is morally wrong to “see off” one possible (nonexistent, potential) baby, why is it not morally wrong to use condoms, which, like Plan B, attempt to “see off” another possible baby? In fact, it may be her moral duty not only to not attempt to prevent a contraception, but to have as many pregnancies as possible, a position memorably satirized by Monty Python.

Every sperm is sacred
Every sperm is great
If a sperm is wasted
God gets quite irate.

Perhaps they believe, wrongly, that Plan B not only prevents contraception, but prevents implantation in the uterus after conception, which would make it not a contraceptive but an abortifacient, at least under Vatican law (but not according to the AMA, which considers anything that prevents pregnancy in first 7 days after intercourse, regardless of whether conception and implantation has taken place, contraception). They would be wrong, by the way, on that. But characters can be factually wrong, as real people so often are.

And of course, characters can be conservative. Rachel is definitely very conservative sexually, at least when not actually having it, several times, with a complete stranger. For example, after their first conception-free interlude, Rafaelle — sensibly — asks Rachel about her sexual history, and she thinks, “she now had to endure the kind of conversation that belonged in a brothel!”.

Also, characters can be logically inconsistent, just like real people. Sometimes this makes for great reading.

Finally, also, as you say, none of this necessarily reflects the writer’s actual beliefs, and it wouldn’t matter to me if it did. The author’s actual beliefs are not relevant for reasons I set out in some detail here.

While I agree with you completely on the chilling and probably illogical nature of the ethical assumption in the Plan B scene, I think the failure of the hero and heroine to even consider Plan B was also problematic from a literary point of view in two ways, the first of which is minor, and the second of which goes to the major problem I had with this book.

First, these two do not know or like one another. Put aside their failure to use or even consider contraception. The big question is: how likely is it that a sexually experienced American woman of no discernible religious conviction, who is comfortable enough to sleep with a stranger, would feel this way about Plan B? And that the hero would as well? Very unlikely, but they have to feel this way for the plot to unfold. So, as a reader, it feels very forced.

Second, as you say, he takes control of her body and mind from the get go, and never gives it back. When they first meet, she kisses him (as part of an elaborate plan which I won’t go into) and just that one public kiss apparently licenses kidnapping her (“she’d never felt so afraid in her entire life … the panic had not subsided”), holding her hostage, and surveilling her for the rest of the book. After he literally drags her back to his apartment, they talk, and then she finds herself “being dragged down the hallway… her wrist still his prisoner … she had to follow where he pulled…”.

This woman gets nowhere except by being dragged or otherwise compelled by a man:

How did she get to Europe in the first place?

“No wonder Mark [the brother] dragged me back here.”

Rachel’s old boyfriend Alonso shows up at one point, and he, too takes immediate physical control of her: “Rachel found herself engulfed by the pair of arms…then found herself being kissed … She tried to pull back but he was not letting her. … And it was, just like old times, when he had used to sweep up in one fast car or another without a care while he waited for her to scramble in next to him. … Now it just scared her witless…”. And on and on.

You have already pointed out she is not allowed to think. He doesn’t let her speak, either. As you pointed out, mid book, he asks her if she enjoyed her day without him, and when she tries to answer, he interrupts her:

“I know where you have been,’ he cut in. “Tony works for me, not you.”

This takes place well after we are told that their relationship is now based on more than sex. Um, yes, it is also based on his power and control of her. Even in the last scene, he interrupts Rachel as she is trying to explain something, and instead of being annoyed, she thinks, “What a waste of breath.”

Rachel is constantly off balance, literally and figuratively. Reading about Rachel’s adventures was like reading about a bowl a bowl of jello, not a human being (these quotes span the entire book):

“the little tremor he could see happening with her lips”
“tense, apprehensive big blue eyes.”
“her legs had gone hollow”
“Rachel tensed … a strange little laugh”
“beginning to feel disturbingly hollow”
“taking a few shaky steps away from him”
“Rachel bit down hard on her bottom lip to keep it from quivering.”
“Rachel found herself coming to a trembling halt in yet another doorway.”
“Rachel’s stomach started rolling sickly.”
“…she tossed out helplessly”
“Her pink upper lip gave a vulnerable quiver.”
“… leaving her trembling and shaken…
“Rachel hovered, wanting to go to him but still too scared to move.”

She can’t even decide how she feels:

“She was too busy trying to decide if she was dizzy with relief because he hadn’t thrown her out to face the paparazzi alone, or if she was dizzy with fear over what was still to come.”

“Rachel stripped off her clothes and walked into the bathroom, not sure if she wanted to throw things or cry her eyes out.”

The woman cannot even pick a drink, answering “I don’t know — anything” when he offers one.

When Rafaelle forcibly kidnaps and confines her, she thinks: ““He had every right to be angry. She had no right to be anything at all.”

Rachel does eventually gain one active desire, that Rafaelle “want her for herself, and not just because she was here for the taking.” But she never questions why she is “here for the taking.” Why does this modern woman believe that one stolen kiss allows him unlimited access to her body?

And yet, in Rafaelle’s eyes, Rachel is not scared, uncertain, or worried. She is a femme fatale. A seductress who holds all the cards. He refers to her as “a fantasy siren most men would kill to possess”, “the sex nymph”. And how’s this for a good example of the double bind: “He’d been tempted by sirens far more adept at their craft.” If she’s bad at seduction, she’s bad, and if she’s good at it, she’s worse.

Another example of the double bind, and of twisted thinking, while I’m at it: in the opening scene, Raffaelle looks around at the women at a party, and thinks “Expensive tarts in expensive dresses were ten-a-Euro to buy in this room.” He mocks the women with “breasts implants and carefully straightened and dyed blond hair. They circled the room eyeing up victims…”.

And yet, Rafaelle, disgusted as he is with women, is obsessively interested in how they look. When he first meets the heroine, Rafaelle looks her up and down and wonders if the carpet matches the drapes. He checks out her cleavage. He even wonders about his stepsister, “Were Daniella’s breasts her own?”

Gee, why do some women expend so much effort on their appearance? Attracting a male partner has no bearing on anything in a woman’s life. And besides, men do not even care about these things. So inexplicable! Must be because they are greedy and vain. Ayuh.

But the main thing is really that this heroine begins and ends as a non-person, a trembling, reactive, rudderless ball of mush. A ball of mush who is supposed to be grateful that a handsome hero takes any interest in her at all, no matter how controlling and autonomy-defeating that interest is. And, because she appears in the romance genre, I am supposed to at least cheer for her, if not identify with her. I know that it is cool to like Presents. I know I am supposed to be clever and hip and ironic enough to read this thing as a coded fantastical message of female empowerment. But I just couldn’t.

21 responses so far

« Newer posts

Follow

Get every new post on this blog delivered to your Inbox.

Join other followers: