Happy New Year to you all! I hope these first few weeks have brought you all lots of calm, quiet and happiness. And if you love a party, I hope you have also had lots of loud, musical connections.
In what seems to have become my signature style, I stopped blogging in August of 2023. Mostly it was because I only read 2 books from August through to December whereas I read 93 books in the first half of the year, many of which I have already written about. During my August – December months, I was overwhelmed with three contract jobs and I found myself unable to read or write (here or on any social media). Even my viewing was limited to reruns of old favourites and TikTok favourites. Now let me go back to my books for 2023. This is purely a list and it is devoid of extra commentary. I may not have written anything further about my fave books but I have hyperlinked them back to my original posts.
I’m not going to list all 25 books here as quite a few were the set readings for the subjects I teach (yes – I am that special level of nerdy). Instead, I have chosen my best of the best list.
Unlike last year, I do not have a Best What-The-Fuck-Did-I-Just-Read book though I certainly had several worst What-The-Fuck-Did-I-Just-Read books (I am looking at you Jimenez’s The Friend Zone, and you’re not that far behind Bellefleur’s Hang The Moon) . However, I did have a best of What-The-Fuck-Did_I-Just-Watch movie. The Barbie movie captured me so deeply and profoundly that I went and watched it at the movies three times in as many weeks. I have tried crafting a blog post to describe the movie several times but I keep floundering. Perhaps that will be my next post.
Meanwhile, my plan for 2024 is to read whatever comes my way that captures my attention and hopefully I will be motivated enough to blog about. I will again attempt to take part in SuperWendy’s TBR Challenge. I will watch all the reruns of shows that give me comfort, I hope I stay riveted to TikTok creators who give me such joy – dance, cooking, urban design, cute critters and academic TikTok (very little booktok for me!). I have no plans on becoming a creator at this point but I am convinced that it is the most engaging of social media platforms in the current time, and I am there as Shallowreader despite their dodgy data mining.
A belated post which will cover my three months of quiet.
Observation note 118:Pain Again. I have come to realise that winter is not my best time to write. For many years now, I start with semi-regular posts early in the year, just to drop the ball when I actually have the most time to write. I think it is because I am a sunshine person. It drives me and invigorates me and even though it is usually quite bright in winter Sydney, it still is not bright enough for me. In Observation note 117, I had discussed my couple of months of pain, having just started limping after sciatic and intercostal pain. Well, it ends up pain likes the number three because I thought the limping was muscle strain with perhaps some arthritis in my ankle, was much more. As the x-ray showed nothing, I assumed it was arthritis, so I kept moving my foot, even going to a Fat Boy Slim concert trying to get circulation to counter arthritic stiffness. I eventually I got an MRI which showed my ankle was broken (gah!!!!), and possibly I shouldn’t have tried to dance (or walked or moved).
So I was in a moonboot for 8 weeks (!). This also kept me from driving during that time because it was my braking/driving foot. Housebound in winter is crappy but this year I was living with my mum and “caring” for her. I couldn’t shop, I couldn’t clean (lucky!) so we spent the weeks talking and watching old Greek movies and soaps, as well as spending time on mum’s weirdass tiktok feed (all octagenarians should have one!!!). This was much more complex than what I write here and for the most part I was deep in busy-ness in that time. I am happy to be home again and reading again while preparing for Spring semester teaching starting in a few days. The moonboot is off and I even went for a super-long walk on the weekend.
Meanwhile, throughout May, June and July, I managed to read 18 books. I won’t discuss them all but I will point out a few which stay on my mind. And I would stop reading now if you object to spoilers. Here are some pretty book covers to give you time to look away.
I tried to write this post in the depths of Autumn semester, when I rarely have time to spend time reading for pleasure nor much time to blog. I failed. Instead, I have finished it after the last week of classes.
Observation Note 117: Pain.I unwisely took on an overwhelmingly large teaching load in February. I had nothing offered to me in Spring semester last year, leaving me stuck doing some contract work in road safety education which is totally fine but not what I want to be doing. So when I found myself drowning in offers in February, I decided a heavy teaching load was fine as I was feeling strong and healthy in February (despite the plague having finally befallen me). I was fine until I literally fell off the end of my bed injuring my back. I lay on the floor for half an hour, unable to get up, with hubs away on a work trip and my son taking a long hot shower. I was calm but winded. I couldn’t call out and my phone was nowhere near me. When my son finally came through he freaked out, helped me into my bed, checked me for breaks, concussion etc. But in the end, we decided I was just winded. I limped and was bruised, I saw my doctor who agreed with me. I felt mostly fine until a fortnight later when I started the gargantuan task of marking 170 student essays and then my whole body went to pot. Sciatic pain I had never experienced on my right hand side took hold of my life and pierced me with spasms and continues to do so. Weeks later I injured my ribs while I was doing some gentle gardening, giving me more grief and the inability to breathe deeply. And then last week I injured my ankle just by standing up. No rolls, no trip over, nothing. Once again, I am off my feet, because of pain, but I can’t lie down because of my ribs, and I can’t sit because of the sciatic pain. Because life needs to come in threes when it hurts. I found that I could not sleep, mark, function, at all. So, with all that, there is little surprise that I only read two novels in April, and one text book on web usability which is set reading for my students. No surprises, I won’t be discussing the text book.
Along with being late posting my April books, I also have spoilers because when I am in pain, I have not filters. At all. You are warned. Look away. Especially for the schmoushy fab Harlequin I discuss in Reading Note 65 (I wanted to end on a happy note).
Reading Note 64: Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path. Let’s start with the blurb: Just days after Raynor learns that Moth, her husband of 32 years, is terminally ill, their home and livelihood is taken away. With nothing left and little time, they make the brave and impulsive decision to walk the 630 miles of the sea-swept South West Coast Path, from Somerset to Dorset, via Devon and Cornwall. They have almost no money for food or shelter and must carry only the essentials for survival on their backs as they live wild in the ancient, weathered landscape of cliffs, sea and sky. Yet through every step, every encounter, and every test along the way, their walk becomes a remarkable journey.
The Salt Path is an honest and life-affirming true story of coming to terms with grief and the healing power of the natural world. Ultimately, it is a portrayal of home, and how it can be lost, rebuilt, and rediscovered in the most unexpected ways.
For many of you who have been reading my blog for a long time, you will know how much I hate camping and the fact that Raynor Winn and her husband choose to camp wild while they walk the UK’s South West Coast Path when they were rendered bankrupt and homeless was nearly the worst nightmare possible for me (pipped to the post by the thought of plummeting to my fiery death on a plane though that would be quicker torture than camping, right?).
In my attempt to write a post every month addressing SuperWendy’s TBR Challenge, I am mentioning ever-so-briefly the one and only Unusual Historical I have read this year (in February). Having seen so many readers laud this book, I feel that I am an outlier. And a heads up – the blurb to this book is longer than my commentary.
Reading Note 63: India Holton’s The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels.
A prim and proper lady thief must save her aunt from a crazed pirate and his dangerously charming henchman in this fantastical historical romance.
Cecilia Bassingwaite is the ideal Victorian lady. She’s also a thief. Like the other members of the Wisteria Society crime sorority, she flies around England drinking tea, blackmailing friends, and acquiring treasure by interesting means. Sure, she has a dark and traumatic past and an overbearing aunt, but all things considered, it’s a pleasant existence. Until the men show up.
Ned Lightbourne is a sometimes assassin who is smitten with Cecilia from the moment they meet. Unfortunately, that happens to be while he’s under direct orders to kill her. His employer, Captain Morvath, who possesses a gothic abbey bristling with cannons and an unbridled hate for the world, intends to rid England of all its presumptuous women, starting with the Wisteria Society. Ned has plans of his own. But both men have made one grave mistake. Never underestimate a woman.
When Morvath imperils the Wisteria Society, Cecilia is forced to team up with her handsome would-be assassin to save the women who raised her–hopefully proving, once and for all, that she’s as much of a scoundrel as the rest of them.
Sooooo….this paranormal historical romance novel was a rather unremarkable read for me. Floating houses, strong magic women, enemies, foes, lots of tea drinking and rules of decorum? I felt like I should have loved this book but instead I gave up after ten chapters (I think?) when a house lands in a field where Cecilia is sparring with love interest Ned Lightbourne. I skim read the rest. My biggest impression is that I had this book on my TBR since 2021. I feel let down by the nearly two year wait. I couldn’t lose myself in the story.
PS After I wrote the above paragraph, I thought I would return to my GoodReads entry and this is what I wrote:
I liked the concept, I liked the way the chapters were introduced, and it was rather clever however the cleverness overwhelmed the story and I ended up skimming the second half of the book. That said, I really liked the last chapter. Jolly library ending and all that.
I guess that I couldn’t even remember that I thought it tried for cleverness. This may have been its downfall. Oh and the romance….totally forgettable too. I gave it two Goodreads stars.
Unlike the last three months, my reading has slowed down as I am back at work and prepping for the teaching semester. However, I still managed to read (nearly) 18 books, including two books which I DNF’d – I am going to argue that reading more than 25% of a super long book counts, especially as I had to tolerate reading a book that already is boring or annoying me. Notable books which I won’t go into detail include Lea Ypi’s Free: A Child and a Country at the End of the World on living through the Albanian shift from socialism to the “free market”, David Sedaris’s Happy-Go-Lucky with a fresh series of essays including the essays on his difficult father’s death, and only one reread – Lauren Layne’s Walk of Shame which continues to be delightful and flighty reading fun. So here are my favourite five starred books for this month:
Reading Note 58: Emily Henry’s Book Lovers. I didn’t know what to expect from this book. I hadn’t read the blurb before I picked it up, and I usually avoid books with bookaholic characters (LOL – so much for readers wanting to see themselves represented in books). Nora Stephens is an urbanite. She loves her city, she loves her job, and she is not one to go on holidays. She has this small problem with (ex)boyfriends who all seem toleave her for women who live in small-towns and she is not a fan of small-town romances. However, her pregnant, younger sister Libby (named for the library app perhaps?) coerces her to spend a month in a small-town which is where her sister’s favourite book was set. Annoyed but loyal to a T, Nora agrees and joins her sister. The irony is that she keeps bumping into Charlie Lastra, an editor she knows from New York City. The story unfolds beautifully. Nora is revealed as being still-waters-run-deep, and has so many levels of worries and anxieties. I love the way that she and Charlie found commonalities in their life aims but also stuck to their own convictions, until the end moment (no spoilers but I did like the ending).
This book does get a bit meta with its mentioning of popular culture and book trope, yet it is done comfortably and the mentions fit the narrative well. Far from being clever add ins, they moved the story forward, and gave it richness. I would definitely reread this book and I certainly recommend it.
Observation Note 112: Starting over. As I do every January, I start out with a post of my favourite books. But this year, that post is running late so instead, I’m going to mess with the natural order of things and do my first post on SuperWendy’s TBR reading challenge. Last year, I only managed to post in the first half of the year. However, let’s just say I was busier reading than writing. I did manage to read through a big chunk of my TBR which is my ass-backwards way of kicking off on the theme of Starting Over. Well….let me tell you how I took charge of my 220 TBR waiting-to-read books that had accumulated on my Goodreads over the 10 years I have been documenting my reading habits…
Observation Note 113: Looking back. So let’s start in November, I was heading to the Blue Mountains a few hours west of Sydney for an academic writer’s retreat where I was going to try to be scholarly and thinkerly (true word). I was being driven by a friend in what I would call a white-knuckle drive on a Friday afternoon crazy Sydney motorway weekend exit frenzy, when I saw a friend contacted me via Twitter (yes – I am still there and happy to accept the side-eyes) to tell me that Queens Public Library in New York City had an overseas non-US citizens membership availability. For US$50, I got to subscribe to the most incredible elibrary. So I paid and added that sweet library to my Libby app for I now had some procrastinating reading to do rather than writing.
Have I been reading a book a day for the past three months. I sure have! Have I been reading in bed? Yes I have. Have I been reading instead of watching TV. Damn yes! Have I been reading instead of swimming. Ummm….no. Even I have reading boundaries. I can’t read when the harbour view is astounding!
Well…my list has gone from 221 books to 121. 100 books are off my TBR. Of those 100, I have read 44, I have another 12 on hold, and another 44 which were reassessed off the TBR list – some due to sampling the first few chapters and finding I was no longer interested, and others just deleting as I couldn’t work out why or when I had added them. Of course, in the last week, I accidentally added another 10 to my TBR want-to-read list but I am not counting them here. Also, no book cover pics – I hate this wordpress layout. It makes adding images a nightmare.
So now for some of the more notable books I read:
Reading note 47: The Longest Wait
The Trouble with Joe by Emilie Richards.
I added this book, published in 1994, on the 29th of September, 2012 and read it on the 17th of November, 2022. A 10 year, 2 month wait. I have read and kept several Emilie Richards category romances from the 1990s so I was familiar with the calibre of the authors writing. She usually grapples with issues of the self, overcoming problems not necessarily of love, but of pressures that society can bring to a couple. The love between the protagonists is undeniable, however they are grappling with Joe’s infertility problems. Joe’s wife Samantha is a teacher and she has a neglected child, Corey, in her class. Over the summer holidays, the two of them find themselves as foster carers for Corey, unravelling a lot of emotions around what it means to be parents, have family, responsibility, love and neglect. This is the only romance I recall reading which also gives the child’s point of view and it adds such depth to the story. It was well worth the 10 year wait to read it.
Reading Note 48: The Best Wait.
Cara Bastone. About two years ago, in a catch-up conversation with Jayashree Kamblé, she recommended to me to try and find some Cara Bastone books to read. There were none in any of Sydney’s library systems so I left the recommendation hanging in the TBR. So I was delighted to find 3 of Bastone’s books at Queens Library: When We First Met, Can’t Help Falling and Flirting with Forever. All three novels had these fully fleshed, deeply understandable characters – not only the main protagonists but all their neighbours and friends and colleagues. The setting felt known and lived in, well understood, I felt like I could smell the air of the city through her writing. And the relationships, well they too were these nuanced courtship tales, thoughtful of differences and the tensions that can bring people together. I particularly loved the hero from Flirting with Forever. In the opening scene of the book, he comes across as awkward and thoughtless but as the book unfolds, you discover a deeply thoughtful, principled man with grace and reason. I highly recommend you seek out Cara Baston’s books.
Reading Note 49: Most Annoying Wait.
To Sir With Love by Lauren Lane – I cannot tell you how frustrated I’ve been with my public library where I had a long-standing purchase request with them for this book in 2021. It was finally satisfied 14 months after I placed the request, so my reserve on the request expired and it got borrowed by other people and I had another 3 month wait and I was just furious and annoyed and I just didn’t bother going and it was so much more pleasurable reading it online. 14 months wait and a shitty reservations system – just do better, Sydney.
Reading Note 50: Yeah books from the TBR.
Some of my reading highlights from the last three months.
Blended by Sharon Draper. This was on my TBR since 2018. A children’s novel about mixed race young girl dealing with her divorced parents and her difficult experience. This is a book about seeking your belonging, grappling with your parents custody issues, the concept of home, and how race and identity can differ depending upon which parent you are with. A good read.
Accidentally Engaged by Farah Heron. This is one my favourite books for this year so I won’t write too much about it on this post as I still plan to do a 2022 post in the next few days. Basically, this is fun, family dynamics, Tanzanian-Gujurati-British-Canadian migrant story, lots of food, lots of cultural expectations and cultural pushback all set in lovely Canada. A great read.
Anne of Manhattan by Brina Staler. Thoroughly Modern 21st century fanfiction of Anne of Green Gables as young adults living in Manhattan. It’s well-written and I really liked the book. The author definitely captured the (kindred) spirit of of Anne and Gilbert and their connection though it had quite a different plot trajectory. Well worth the two year wait to read it.
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Pérez. I wrote about this book in my previous post (Reading Note 46).
Tweet Cute by Emma Lord. A YA/teenage romance conducted across several social media platforms as well as being set in a New York high school. The usual teen coming of age issues compounded by pressures from parents especially around insisting their older teens making corporate social media decisions. It was complex, it was good, I really liked it. Well worth waiting to read it since 2019.
The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing. A memoir reflecting on the loneliness of the city, seeking connections and not finding them, the impact of the AIDS crisis, and how artists such as Andy Warhol and Edward Hopper grappled with their own loneliness. Impactful and wonderful. Another well worth waiting for since 2019.
Reading Note 51: Meh books from the TBR.
I am so far from the zeitgeist on these ones. Many of them are lauded as “hits” and “must-read” stars of booktok and romancetok. If this is the future of romance fiction, I will cry.
The Roommate by Rosie Danan. Bleh. Call me a prude. Porn hero was boring. The plot was inane (seriously – the heroine leaves her city to keep a low profile and then hooks up with a high profile porn star just doesn’t make sense) and there was zero tension. Just. waffle.
Below Zero by Ali Hazelwood. Double Bleh. I totally cannot stand the “smart” heroine romance trend. Let’s face it. All these STEM heroines are just another iteration of targeted career-girl romance novels. And this one – well the heroine may have had a high IQ but she was definitely lacking in emotional intelligence. Imagine cracking onto your research project’s interviewee IN HIS WORKPLACE! That’s is serious misconduct. Not sexy. A breach of work health and safety too. Just no.
Corner Office Confessions by Cynthia St. Aubin. Great title. The story didn’t grab me.
Dial A for Aunties by Jesse Sutanto. SPOILER ALERT FOR THIS ONE. Everyone raves about this book as being hilarious and great and I will admit that it started out that way – just super super funny and cheeky. But then the main character Meddelin accidently kills her date (who was catfished by her mother!) and rather than call emergency services, get him to a hospital, go to the police, etc., like a normal person would, she shoves him in the boot, takes him to her aunts where they hide him in a freezer and all of a sudden I am reading horror murder meets Weekend at Bernies. I know that I should be able to overlook all the problems in this book and haha have a laugh but IT WAS GHOULISH! A (fictional) person died. Someone has to care. Someone has to pay. And they didn’t. And I just couldn’t. Just say no!
The Wedding Party by Jasmine Guillory. Look, the premise was great – I do love a hook-up becomes lurvvve story and Guillory writes some lovely witty repartee but she substitutes way too much food in her novels for her lack of sexy times. Unlike Farah Heron’s book, the food is a prop in this novel, it beefs up the novel (sorry, not sorry) but it doesn’t further the plot. Not that books need detailed sex, but good god – that constant eating annoyed me. Waiting since February 2019.
The Two Lives of Lydia Bird by Josie Silver. A sliding doors story. Great premise, ho-hum delivery. It didn’t do it for me. Waiting since January 2020.
Time is a Mother by Ocean Vuoung. Listening to the audio narration also by Vuong was the wrong thing for me. Whispered wistful poetry is totally not my thing. I couldn’t bear it but I persisted to the end. Perhaps I would have liked the poetry better if I had just read the text, but now the poet’s voice is in my head and it won’t work for me. Suited to a whole different type of person. Frustrated at the anticipation of waiting since 2019 for On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous but opting for the 2022 publication instead due to availability.
Moral to the story is: stick with the book you have already listed on the TBR
Observation Note 114: In conclusion.
I feel so pleased with my overhaul of my TBR. I am so happy that Queens library membership has slayed my seven year reading slump, and I will definitely be renewing it for as long as it is offered to non-US citizens.
As for my procrastination during my writing retreat…it was a successful enough attempt at being “scholarly” that it kickstarted my re-engagement with a journal article which had been accepted pending revisions which I hadn’t completed for many different reasons. I managed to finish it and submit it a month later. I think the deep diving into the TBR reading probably energised me as much as the retreat, if not more so. Thanks, Super Wendy!
Occasionally I write not-so-shallow articles. This week my essay The Library Agrafa was published in The Aleph Review a Pakistani journal for creative expression. Here is an excerpt:
This story was anathema to me. It lacked the necessary romance and love that I would read about in the novels that I would buy from the newsagency on my way home from the one-room children’s library, arms laden with books borrowed and books bought. Romance to me was a meeting of two people who share a feeling of intimacy, desire, a visceral connection. Marrying for a business transaction, the joining of two large herds, lacked spark, lacked the necessary frisson of a dramatic coming together.
Observation Note 95:Collecting the books of others. In May of this year, I responded to an FB notice from romance researcher Donna Maree Hanson offering her romance collection to interested romance researchers. I was fortunate enough for Donna to have said Yes to my response. However, due to the 3 month long Sydney lockdown, as well as some other logistical issues, it took many months to finally get the books to my home this weekend thanks to my lovely husband who was working interstate and was able to pick the books up on his way back home.
Donna refers to these books as The Grace Collection which I think is so apt and lovely as I feel that I have been graced with the care of over one thousand romance novels. Donna too had received many of these books from someone else, a reader who had been collecting them for many years. Donna has also added many of her own books to this collection and as the new owner, I am not able to differentiate between readers and owners. At least not yet. But there are lovely markings on these books that are so familiar to me; the books with second hand books shop price tags, with library discard stamps, with spots and dots and lines and circled page numbers, broken spines and unbroken spines signifying books bought and read, as well as books bought and left unread, a readerly quirk so many of us know deeply. I have already seen books from the early 1970s and a few from the late 2010s. I am interested to see if the collection is overwhelmingly 20th or 21st century category romance publications – Mills & Boon, Harlequins of all lines, Loveswept, Silhouettes and Candlelight Ecstasy. All up, the Grace Collection had 7 plastic crates/containers, 3 archive boxes and two plastic bags of books. From what I can see, there is no other paperwork that accompanies the books. I have already gone through every container. Storing these books will be another blog post altogether!
It is not the first time that I have taken on another person’s romance novel collection. Many years ago, Merrian Weymouth graced me with a large part of her collection, the majority of which still sits on my romance shelves. They are literally romance shelves as I bought them from the now long-gone Burwood Book Exchange. This fabulous second hand bookshop on the Burwood Road was nine parts romance fiction and one part all the other fictions – a cornucopia of romance fiction closing in on you as you walked down their aisles. I would travel there multiple times a year to swap out my books while searching for new ones. Like so many romance bookstores, Burwood Book Exchange closed down early in the 2010s. I didn’t know the owners well so I never found out if it was due to the massive shift in romance readers moving from print to ebooks or something else but their closure impacted my own access to new-to-me books. I returned nearly weekly in those closing weeks, buying books and books and more books, hoarding for those desolate years ahead of me (LOL I’m so dramatic) with a dearth of access points for second hand print books (a dearth that continues – woe is me). In the last days before the shop closed I asked about their shelves and I managed to secure two shelves which are in my study/sunroom and house a third of my romance collection. I merged Merrian’s collection with my own sizeable one, sending any doubles I found to other reader/collectors, paying Merrian’s kindness forward which is what I hope to do with doubles from The Grace collection. My long term goal is to find an academic library that wants this collection for their own repository and book researchers – lofty dreams as I aim high, an unemployed ideologist in this awful era of higher education decimation and the freefall of humanities and sociology faculties in universities across Australia. With over 40, 000 university staff having been stood down or made redundant since 2020, my aim is like a smidgeon of hope. A way to keep going forward. In the meantime, I am going to sort through the books that I do have and hopefully make sense of all my holdings.
Observation Note 96:Work should stay at work unless you aren’t working and you are keeping a pandemic at bay. I have always resisted the urge to catalogue my own books. There is embracing your profession, being a boffin to its practices or just letting every aspect of your work permeate you every hour. I chose to leave my work at work (something that some people no longer can do). As I don’t consider reading for pleasure to be a core skill for being a librarian (shock! horror! let’s discuss this later!), I happily keep a list of all my reading over at Goodreads (included as a widget on this blog) as I choose to not consider it to be work (bear with me as I have many contradictions). I’ve often balked at the thought of keeping records of what I own, wanting it to be my reading that is my focus rather than an inventory of materials to which I can apply my professional cataloguing skills. I like having a separation from my work practices, and I kinda like sorting my books by colour as it is such an amusing anathema to so many people, as though aesthetics are not part of book production and the reading experience.
So, in embracing my inner (former? out of work? not even looking for this type of work? call it what you will?) librarian and finally documenting my own books, I have also decided to not use any apps or library specific websites to store this information. I looked up some suggestions and just got too tired of reading all the T&Cs, and all the ways that my data was going to be mined as business intelligence. I feel all data-mined out. Instead I am going to use a simple spreadsheet saved on my computer not on any cloud and I will see how I go from there.
Meanwhile, enjoy some photos of The Grace Collection from when it arrived at my home.
Boxes in the boot of the carThe Grace collection on my front veranda/h
Observation Note 94: Finally! I didn’t feel that I could go a whole month of blogging daily and not have read a romance in that time. It took me eight whole days to finish reading a novel which twenty, ten, eight, and even five years ago would have taken maybe two days to fly through. I don’t know if it was the book (doubtful), the person I now am (probably), or the anxiety brought on by the current Sydney lockdown (most likely) but I could not bring myself to read more than a chapter at a time. My attention was scattered, and the story didn’t resonate with me. In actual fact, there were elements that I quite disliked. I realise that I am an outlier on this.
Reading Note 37:A Romance – likes. So first I will touch on the parts of Talia Hibbert’s Take a hint, Dani Brown that were good. Those parts that made me persist in my reading of the book. Firstly, I really liked the characters. Zafir, the ex-rugby player turned security guard moonlighting as a coach for a youth team while giving them mental health support was a stellar character. He read romance, he was quiet and contemplative, that he was a Muslim man that embraced the tenets of his faith (lying is haram), that he understood himself, and he had experienced deep grief which had changed the person he was.
I liked Danika, her self confidence, her strength of convictions and her need to control her own narrative. I like that she was a witch, drawing on the tendrils of knowledge passed down to her from her grandmother. Her PhD life was ideal and her own anxieties over conferences and symposiums was relatable (anyone else curl up in a ball screaming with a panic attack a day before a presentation??? Yeah. Not doing that again).
Like the emotional grappling that both Zafir and Danika have to go through to reach an understanding of their own self and the way they wanted to lead their lives. I loved the way that they each were able to connect through laughter and through desire. Their compatibility and connection was palpable. Electric even. But this was not enough to make me like this story.
Now I have left for last my liking of the premise, I guess you could say the romance trope, that underpins this romance. I adore a fake relationship turned real. It usually buzzes with fun. As this one should have but sadly, it didn’t.
Reading Note 38:A romance – dislikes. I feel like I am the only person who became totally squicked out with the execution of fake relationship plot premise? The thing is that Zafir and Danika pretend to be in their fake relationship so that they can entice people to donate money to his mental health for kids organisation “Tackle it”. Part of the fake relationship include becoming fuck buddies for the duration of the public social media fundraiser and I did not feel comfortable with this at all. For two people who are so in touch with their emotions, especially Zafir and his aim for honesty and truth, falsifying his relationship with Danika for public consumption and monetary gain was never resolved for me. There was no remorse or even conscientious grappling with the ethical issues that it raised (I mean – there was a bit of a tussle that was glossed over with a “the end justifies the means” thought.
Then there was the constant mention of dick and cock and pussy and vagina in contexts which jarred the flow of the story. It felt overused and just threw me out of story, wondering why it was even mentioned (this is the point that I am annoyed with myself for not keeping notes while I read just so I can show examples but I can’t even bring myself to browse through the book to find one). The thing is, that a metaphor (bleh!) would not be good either. In the sex scenes, in the build up to intimacy, sure. There is a time and place. I just think that there were too many in this story. I am more than happy to be accused of being puritanical and uptight and that it is my prissy-ness that makes me feel this way but I personally don’t think I am any of these.
There was a library scene that just got my librarian (well former librarian) back up. Zafir finds Danika in the library and they get all hot and heavy and he gets an erection and they are performing for their social media fake relationship and I just wanted to shout at them to stop and that their PDA was not acceptable. Having had to interrupt many a young couple being WAY TOO AMOROUS in public libraries, being WAY TOO HORIZONTAL, being WAY TOO HEAVY BREATHING, I wanted to tear this scene up and scream NOOOOOOOOO! Be adults! Have some respect for the poor library staff.
And then there was the length. This is an old bug bear of mine. At 9pm tonight I still had 50 pages to go. 50! And they had only just had their big break up. My eyes feel like they are bleeding. 50 pages of black moment and make up/love/self realisation to sit through. Ugh. Too long. And then there were about 10 pages of fricken epilogue. Noooo! I mean, I finished the book by 10:30ish. But the length is my perennial complaint with most fiction. TOO LONG! Make it shorter. This is not about my focus or my attention span. I have plenty of that. This is about the propensity for navel gazing, copious amounts of backstory, and excuciatingly detailed filler angst in just about all fiction. YA fiction – too fucking long. Literary fiction – too fucking long. Fantasy fiction – too fucking long. Let me be clear here – my only ONLY reason for not reading 50 Shades of Grey has nothing to do with the story, the public perception, the kink, or any other alarmist shit. It has everything to do with 500 page doorstoppers per volume. *deep breath*
So yes. I felt Take a Hint, Dani Brown was too too long. I got bored when I should have just loved the whole story.
Observation Note 92:Desire. When I woke up this morning, I propped myself up in bed with my computer and watched a New Yorker live event called Words of Desire with Alexandra Schwartz interviewing Emma Cline, Garth Greenwell and Ottessa Moshfegh. From the outset I want to point out that I have never read any of these writers’ books or essays so I cannot make any comment about their own work. I was however curious as to what these four literary writers could bring to the discussion of desire. Unsurprisingly, The New Yorker didn’t include any romance writers or romance scholars into their panel so I didn’t expect the discussion to be deeply nuanced on the subject of desire or even sex. I also want to point out that I still was groggy from sleep, and my coffee was brought to me a good ten minutes into the discussion (thanks wonderful Husband!), so my notes and my memory may be rather dodgy. All mistakes and misunderstandings are the fault of my morning brain.
The panel started out being asked about what they read – who were the masters of writing sex. Of course, none named romance writers, however Cline did point to Scott Spencer’s Endless Love and I was all “A-ha! Didn’t all teen girls read Endless Love like I did, hiding in the bathroom so that my older sister didn’t discover that I had stolen her copy that she had claimed I was much too young to read”. It made Cline feel that tad relatable to me (and then I realised that she was born nearly a decade after I read it as a new release, and seriously, she would have read it in the ‘noughts and it just made me furrow my brow that it was even still available then – but I digress). Greenwell pointed to poets Dickinson and Whitman as well as queer writers (whose names I missed – one might have been Carl Philips???). However, it was Moshfegh that was the least surprising who said (and I am paraphrasing here) that she had never read a successful sex scene and that she considered their plot use as failure or revulsion. *sigh* … *double sigh*.
I can’t fault Moshfegh for how she described the use of sex in plots or even the role of sex and desire in both her books as well as the books she had read. I am not at all interested in attacking or criticising these ideas. I completely understand their importance in the way that fiction is written and felt by reader/writers. I was totally on board with her description of her fiction writing approach. But I did feel sad that she had never read a good sex scene. But, damn!
The questions moved on to discuss different ideas around sex, deviance (huh??? was this a hint to 50 Shades and the changes it has brought in reading???) and its new space in society – Greenwell points out that there will always be forbidden topics to write about, as well as the challenge of writing happiness. The two women seem constrained in their answers on happiness as that they can only get themselves to write comedy or dogs. They only notice “the moments that aren’t happy”. But once again Greenwell answered eloquently saying that any human emotion can reveal insights (I especially liked Garth Greenwell as a panelist though all were very good. He’s now on my TBR). I found that the panelists kept slipping and calling it “sex writing” not “desire” and I personally think these are both quite different writing styles with possible overlaps.
What I did find interesting, and I can’t remember who on the panel said it, was the idea that in literary fiction, the sex scene was where the tension between two characters was created – it was the point that caused problems. This is so different to romance fiction where quite often, it is in the sex scene that the characters find congruence, where they find compatibility, love and connection.
Reading Note 36. Hinting again. So despite not really feeling warmly towards Talia Hibbert’ Take A Hint, Dani Brown, (Reading Note 35) I decided that I would continue to read the novel to completion. The chapter I am up to has the protagonists Zafir and Danika finally in her apartment with the agreement that they were to become “fuck buddies”. They quite clinically laid down their ground rules of how long their arrangement will last, how they will negotiate any affection between the two of them, and some other minutiae. From their, their sex (not love at all) scene just went off. A whole detailed chapter that sizzled with desire and sex. I wouldn’t call it beautiful but it certainly was emotional and carnal, suited to the story’s trajectory. And it certainly was not a failure.
Observation Note 93:Choosing your panel accordingly. Actually, having such low expectations for this panel meant I was pleasantly surprised that it was thoughtful even though the conversation lacked the depth of the dialogues I have become accustomed to when I attend romance writer panels or author talks, whether they are at writer’s festivals or scholars presenting on romance fiction at conferences. The one viewer question did address the topic of romance fiction but I got a phone call from my doctor right at that point so I didn’t hear the answer (seriously! how inopportune!!!).
The thing about this New Yorker panel was that it felt like a missed opportunity. I felt disappointed. Though there was an unspoken sense of romance fiction’s presence. From Endless Love, deviance in writing, the really uncomfortable suggestion that perhaps the writing was autobiographical which was diplomatically dismissed by Greenwell (but yeah – why does that stupid question always come up when sex is discussed? Isn’t that the deviant idea? As romance authors are always pointing out, would you ask a crime author if they are writing from an autobiographical lens? And there was of course the question on writing happiness – perhaps even for The New Yorker, it is too scandalous to ask literary authors about writing Happily Ever Afters.
This event was good but not great. Its promotion was very romance fiction-ish with all those red and black hearts and lips flowing out of an open book but that was just cosmetic. The panel could have benefitted from the richness of ideas that, say Beverly Jenkins or Jennifer Crusie or so many other erudite romance writers could have contributed. Unfortunately, this lack of at least one romance fiction panelist diminished the contribution of this event.
PS: I deeply appreciate that I can now attend so many wonderful events all over the world. A major shout out to my son who bought me my subscription to The New Yorker and is happy to keep giving me the same gift every year.
Shallowreader 