My this ‘n that post was such fun last week, that I’m going to see if I can make a regular — although shorter — habit of it.

Here are 5 things I’m thinking about this Friday:

1. Romance reviews as a genre

In my narrative medicine class we’ve been reading through Tod Chambers’ The Fiction of Bioethics. Chambers demonstrates that the clinical ethics case — which is basically the tool of my trade — is a specific genre with its own features (filter, reportability, closure, characters, chronotrope, and gender). I’ve been writing and teaching ethics cases for a decade now without ever thinking much about them as genre, and I found Chambers’ analysis very illuminating.

I wonder what the features are of online romance reviews as a genre? I’m not talking about what the reviews should be like, but about what they are like. I bet it wouldn’t be too hard to come up with a list. It would likely include a plot summary, description of conflict, intertextuality to situate the book in relation to the genre, subjective declarations to situate the reviewer in relation to the book, heat level, a certain length (between 300 and 3000 words, for example), etc. That would be an interesting project for someone!

2. The boys are very into their reading. My 9 year old, while working his way through the Harry Potter series, has read another Doug TenNapel comic book, Iron West, and all three Amulet books, which his older brother promptly grabbed and read. My 11 year old is obsessed with The Edge Chronicles, and I’ve just picked up a copy of Howl’s Moving Castle based on this review at The Book Smugglers.

We’ll see if they can be cajoled into a blog post!

3. I’ve been thinking about simple ways to increase this blog’s numbers, and realized that most of the things I’ve tried over the past two years, like BlogCatalog, haven’t worked very well. But there is one thing I wanted to mention, which is this site. Bloggers have to put their own blogs up there, so any blog you see was posted by the blog owner. It’s an easy process. I wouldn’t rely too much on the specific numbers they post (although mine are pretty accurate), but I will say that I get visits from people coming from that site many times a day.

Of course, the more of you who put your blogs up there the lower my ranking will go. D’oh!! Anyway, if you have any suggestions for getting your blog out there to new readers, let me know. Nathan Bransford asked recently “Have blogs peaked?” , and the hundreds of replies are pretty interesting reading.

4. My first post is going up tomorrow at Heroes and Heartbreakers. It’s about nonverbal signaling of the hero’s feelings. I’ll provide a link tomorrow. That’s the only one I have written, so my resolution for this weekend is to write at least two more.

One of those posts is going to be about the pleasure in the kind of imagining we do when we read fiction. Recent work in the philosophy of psychology suggests that it’s just the supposing things are different than they are which is pleasurable in reading fiction, regardless of whether something tragic or happy or sexy or sad is portrayed in the book. Perhaps more interestingly from the point of view of a certain dichotomy we are familiar with in romance circles, recent research suggests that our engagement with fiction is much more subtle than the language of “identification” versus “nonidentification.” Specifically, our imagining when we read can be engaging and strong and emotional while being impersonal. We do not have to place ourselves in the spatio-temporal framework of the narrated events of the novel to get lost in a book. I don’t think I’ll get into all that for H&H, but it’s interesting stuff (read Harris, P. L. (2000). The work of the imagination. Malden, MA: Blackwell. for more.)

5. I downgraded my Audible membership and still can’t seem to keep up. I spent my 5 credits this week, on the new Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Call Me Irresistible, Darynda Jones’ First Grave on the Right, Darkfever, Married By Morning by Lisa Kleypas and To Beguile a Beast by Elizabeth Hoyt.  I’m about 25% into the last, and it’s so compelling that I am tempted to run upstairs and get the paper copy I bought at RomCon and just read the damn thing — much faster.

I hear the wine has been uncorked, so I’m off. Have a great weekend!