For the first time in nearly a month, I am between tasks so I thought I would take a super quick moment to write a blog post. Earlier this year I accidentally agreed to take on more teaching and staff training than I should have. The past semester has resulted in my own studies being left far behind (I was already behind the point that I wanted to be) and my own reading for pleasure is barely happening. But, as experience has shown me, if I don’t read for pleasure, I lose my drive for both working and studying so I juggle my time around and between late nights and commuting to work I have managed to read a couple of novels and a handful of picture books.
Sarah MacLean’s No Good Duke Goes Unpunished
“He is the Killer Duke, accused of murdering Mara Lowe on the eve of her wedding. With no memory of that fateful night, Temple has reigned over the darkest of London’s corners for twelve years, wealthy and powerful, but beyond redemption. Until one night, Mara resurfaces, offering the one thing he’s dreamed of . . . absolution.”
I liked the premise of this book. The prologue is quite thrilling, starting out joyfully and then having Temple wake up covered in what he thought was Mara’s blood with a household of people staring at him. This feeling occasionally returns throughout the book but, though the plot was mostly sound, the writing style drove me batty. It constantly used the 3 repeats device eg “She felt it. She knew it. She mourned it” (made up example: not in the book). I actually like this device when it is used sparingly but unfortunately it wasn’t. Continue reading →
A quick warning: my April TBR challenge review is a tad spoilery. I read my April TBR Contemporary Romance a few weeks ago. Melanie Scott’s Devil in Denim was a fun, (damn!) sexy read. Set in New York city, heroine Maggie Jameson’s father has sold the family baseball league team to Alex Winters. Maggie has trouble reconciling herself to her dad’s actions as she had always planned to work and live and breathe the family team life.
I don’t mind the occasional sports romance. It is the ultimate suspension of disbelief in contemporaries for me. Forget Montana cowboys or millionaire Greeks, it is the gentleman sportsman that I cannot actually believe exists. I enjoyed reading Susan Elisabeth Phillips’s Chicago Bears – Match Me if You Can is an all time fave – and Rachel Gibson’s Chinooks Hockey Team – I loved See Jane Score. I didn’t hesitate to buy The Devil in Denim when Adele Walsh recommended it to me and she pointed out it is by an Australian author.
Tiffany Davis takes her first delicious step into the exclusive masquerade ball hosted by the secretive Q Virtus gentleman’s club. Here, behind the mask, Tiffany can hide her scars and reveal her true self—a powerful businesswoman with an offer for the president of Bregnovia, Ryzard Vrbancic. Astounded by her audacity, only the fire in Tiffany’s eyes makes Ryzard look twice. He has no interest in her business deal, but the promise of a woman who can match his ruthless determination makes him eager to seduce from her the one thing she’s not offering….
There is something disappointing in Mills & Boon blurbs of late. With so many publications to choose from I depend on blurbs to lead my reading choices. Had I not blind borrowed a stash of Mills & Boon in haste from my workplace, I would have read the back of this one and rejected it. It had sat on my shelves for a few months when I saw a tweet from Bookthingo’s Kat about Dani Collins which amused me and decided to give the book a go. And I am so glad. Continue reading →
As part of SuperWendy’s TBR Reading Challenge I picked up this Charlotte Lamb novel that has been waiting on my shelf for several months. I am totally obsessed with Ms Lamb and she has once again delivered a strikingly dark story. Here is my (rambly) review:
The back story is that Caroline had escaped her cruel and violent husband Peter. He was an alcoholic that used to beat her up but Caroline and his mother, Helen who lived with them, would make excuses for his behaviour and would cover up Caroline’s injuries so to protect him. But when Peter started hitting their daughter, Caroline leaves Yorkshire for the anonymity of London. Three years later, Caroline finds out that Peter has died and her former mother-in-law wants to see her granddaughter again. Caroline and Helen have a deep love and respect for each other. It is Helen’s nephew (and the hero of this story), Nick that finds Caroline and coerces her to return to the Yorkshire village. Nick is a menacing and mean. For a hero, I found him too rough and a tad violent in his first scene with Caroline. Though he does not hurt her, he certainly does his best to intimidate Caroline. He is convinced that his cousin’s alcoholism and subsequent death was due to his wife having left him.
All human beings are a tangled web of contradictions and confusions
Every day and throughout the year, I spend a substantial amount of my time reading about reading. From scholarly articles to academic books to chronicles of reading and reading memoirs. I am going to post a series of short observations on the books (and the occasional articles) that I have been reading particularly reflecting on the presence (or lack thereof) of romance fiction, and on how I feel my perceptions of reading aline with the authors.
Reinier Gerritsen’s The Last Book
The Last Book by Reinier Gerritsen (photographer); introductory essay by Boris Kachka. Published in 2014.
Boris Kachka, in the introduction of The Last Book discusses futurist Negroponte’s prediction that the printed book will disappear by 2015. Though this prediction has not been realised, ebooks have indeed impacted the way we read. On transport, we get fewer glimpses at a stranger’s individual taste. Where print books were a window to a person’s self, tablets and ereaders, Kachka says, now act as a mirror. Phototgrapher Reinier Gerritsen observed that the incidence of people reading on trains was diminishing so he wanted to document the reading that was still being undertaken on transport.
Gerritsen’s photographs of commuters with their print reading choices depict commuters whose reading choices are broad. There are classics, bestsellers, eclectic and translated titles, children’s books, fiction and nonfiction. There are more male than female authors and more male than female commuters represented in this book. Continue reading →
I haven’t been able to get to my blog in a long time. I am in the midst of my ethics application at the moment, I am teaching Information and Media students at my uni as well as going out to my super sekrit public library casual job where I get to work on a public desk for a day a week. And that doesn’t even start on home life! Continue reading →
I’m rubbish at reading while on holiday. Where other people relax at the beach with a book, I reject all reading materials as I am either in the water swimming or racing around looking at every museum, shop, historical building that is close by. To add to this, my latest trip was a combination of work and play (I marked student assignments, along with PhD related conference paper writing and archive visiting), which even further lessened my reading time.
However, I did manage to read 5 novels while I was away (I won’t count the numerous picture books I read to my cousin’s kids). So for this blog only I will write about the place I read each book in as well as the book.
Alexander the Great statue in Thessaloniki
Before I discuss these other books I need to point out that I am both impressed and horrified that I have reverted in my reading habits. 4 years ago, I bought myself a SONY ereader and during an 8 week holiday I did not enter a single book shop and I did not buy a single book. All my reads were downloaded from my local library and Project Gutenberg. My luggage was liberated. Hallelujiah to more space for more shoes. But my latest trip has shocked me. Not only did I not use my tablet for reading but I found myself carting print books across the globe. Thoughthey are much more cumbersome, I love them soooo much more than ebooks. I can write in the margins (I don’t but I could if I chose to), I can dog ear pages (I do), I can litter my book with post it notes, bookmarks made of receipts, ticket stubs, serviettes and beer coasters. Each item becoming in itself a souvenir of the moment that I was reading. I am enjoying my reversion. I want a badge that says “Tried ebooks, didn’t work, print is my swag”. I also want to point out that I always forget to take photos when I am on holiday. I guess I am too busy being on holiday to document it. Continue reading →
There aren’t enough moustaches in romance fiction.
I’m not talking about beards here – there aren’t many of them either but they certainly turn up in romance novels more than mos.
I’m not talking about the scruff either. That five o’clock shadow is a mainstay on romance covers as well as in the books themselves.
I’m talking about the hairy splendour on an upper lip.
It should not come as a surprise to any of you that I am a fan of hirsute men. I have previously blogged about my love for chest hair in romance novels. So you will understand my need for more facial hair on male heroes (heck – on female heroines too). So here we are in the last week of Movember and the moustachioed hero is nowhere to be seen in current romance fiction. This disappoints me somewhat. In a time where the mo is seeing a resurgence and during a month of raising awareness for men’s health, while our friends, husbands, sons, boyfriends, colleagues subject us to a month of flinching in order to raise money for prostate cancer and mental health for their brethren, our romance heroes are walking around bare lipped or just plain scruffy.
My thought is that if our menfolk can don the pink polos for cricket, football and any number of events to raise money for breast cancer and other women’s issues then the romance industry should step up to the plate and put those ticklers on their protags and their book covers by November 2014. Come on romance fiction industry!
Meanwhile, I did a really scientific survey of my own bookshelves. Now I have a large, and I mean LARGE collection of romance novels and, of all the books that I own, only 3 had moustachioed men on the covers. I pulled them out and scanned them for their mo descriptions:
“Ross’s mouth would have smothered it before it was half-uttered. She inhaled sharply as she felt his mouth close over hers, the silky tendrils of his mustache providing a shield for both their mouths and giving a shuddering intimacy to his kiss that Ellen would have sworn was impossible”.
A Time to Love by Jackie Black
This guy is pretty special. He is a rarity amongst romance heroes. He is blond. A blond hero with a blond mo. But this mo has tendrils. Tendrils make me think of curls and lengthy mo curls, even if they are blond, just makes me think of the heightened possibility of cereal caught in a mo. I’m not a fan of this description.
Next up:
“He turned her face, and she could feel the soft, silky brush of his mustache, then his mouth, against her cheek. It was more than she would bear”.
Passion’s Song by Johanna Phillips.
Nope. It’s more than I can bear. Silky brush just screams length. Length = more cereal. This is the only description of Lute’s mo in the whole book. I didn’t feel the author’s commitment to his facial hair the way I would have liked.
But then we have Margaret Way’s House of Memories
“You always loved power,” she said, her throat pulled tight.
“Agreed.” The curvy mouth twisted beneath the black, rakish moustache. “Once I even loved you. But that was another lifetime.”
YES! I love that description! I want more!
“Nick stood up and shouldered out of his half opened shirt, his powerful body superbly fit and hard. With the black tangle of hair on his chest and the buccanneer’s moustache, he looked enourmously virile, looking down at Dana from his commanding male height.”
I’m swooning!
Sure, I get it. Few mos look good, particularly when they are in the phasing in stage. I know. My husband tortured me through this process several years ago. Even fewer mos look great. But when they are done well, Oh Sweet Jesus!
Look at these men:
Eagles of Death Metal hot biker mo is hawt!
Tom Selleck’s Magnum mo is smokin’!
The Village People rock us all with a hat trick of Cowboy mo, Biker mo and hubba bubba Construction Worker mo.
Or you can just feast your eyes on Sean Connery mo, Johnny Depp mo or Jude Law mo – bring it on!
A Mo can look awesome. A mo can be sexy.
However, the George Clooney is always only one awkward trim away from a George Roper.
Amended a day later to add a photo of A Paul Rudd mo:
I’ve never understood the squeeeeing or heart-fluttering fangirling over Pride and Prejudice. This is not to say that I didn’t like the novel. I really enjoyed it. I love Jane Austen. I have sat at her grave at Winchester Cathedral. I have visited the Jane Austen Centre in Bath. I have read her books. I haz done the Jane Austen pilgrimage as a bookish nerd is wont to do. However, I have never understood the obsessive collectors and viewers of all things Pride and Prejudice.
In fact, I didn’t considered Pride and Prejudice to be a romance. To me it was a snarky novel about social classes, relationships, women’s status, their lack of autonomy and the requirement to make a good marital match. Oh, I know that it is romantic but its subtle romance was lost on me as a 17 year old who had already spent the previous 5 years reading intense and focused romance in the form of category series romances. As an adult, I have read the many epistles and scholarly criticisms and journals dedicated to Pride and Prejudice and all that other cerebral stuff but deep down inside – there was nuthin.
I tried to understand the hero status that Mr Darcy inspires. Colin Firth, in the BBC series, looked like he had swallowed a bad oyster throughout every episode until that last scene when he deems it worthy a moment to crack a smile. He’s all muttering and mumbling. Jennifer Ehle’s portrayal of Lizzie Bennet is good but I never feel the connection between her and Mr Darcy – even in the wet shirt scene (and really?! What is the whole kerfuffle about that wet shirt? It isn’t that impressive. All I could think of was the squelching of wet socks in boots and the chafing of wet trousers when walking).
I tried again to watch Bridget Jones’ Diary but once again I was left cold. A ridiculous heroine misjudges Mark Darcy. Once again, Colin Firth has had a plate full of bad oysters until, once again, the last scene where, I will concede, he is a tad sexy with his “Nice boys don’t kiss that way” retort of “Oh yes they fucking do”. I came around a bit with the Knightley/McFadyen version of Pride and Prejudice which seems to be anathema to most fans and I’ve also watched the Laurence Olivier/Greer Garson version which was also ho hum. So you get it. Not a fan.
It took until the 200th anniversary to finally get it, to finally see how wonderfully romantic the book actually is. And not only do I get it but I also am surprised at my score long obtuseness.
How did I not see that Mr Darcy is one of my all time favourite romance hero types – the suited up, billionaire CEO sitting on his high horse, lording it over his minions just to be brought to his knees by an unassuming, often much poorer and plainer but ever so sharp heroine that he initially barely deigns worthy of his time. Elizabeth Bennet, too, is my favourite romance heroine. She is not glitzy, glamorous, ditzy or quirky. She is smart, observant, quick to take offense at perceived slights and really funny. These two are fabulous together and I have finally seen the beauty and the romance of Pride and Prejudice due to The Lizzie Bennet Diaries.
To many of you who also follow me on Twitter this is not a surprise revelation. I have already blogged about The LBD elsewhere. I decided to wait until the last episode before posting my total adoration for this series but I couldn’t bear to post straight away – it has taken me a whole month to deal with my loss. Yes dammit. I have turned into one of those viewers who is grieving the loss of a favourite show. Go ahead. Judge me. Then judge me some more when I tell you that I have struggled writing this post for this month as it is difficult to pull together the many different ways this show has left an impression on me which is why the rest of this post will be a list of why I think this series is teh awesomesauce:
Secondary Characters
Where in every other adaptation the secondary characters remained unexplained, their motivations left unknown or unrealised this adaptation fleshed out previously disliked characters giving them depth and humanity. From compliant Bing Lee, beautiful calm Jane, practical and insightful Charlotte, conniving Caroline, sweet Gigi, Fitz (my sons’ favourite character “Fitzie”) to the shallow, selfish party girl with hidden depths Lydia! Just a few quick words on Lydia – I honestly don’t think that there can be any subsequent production of Pride and Prejudice that doesn’t take into consideration this brilliant interpretation of a previously two-dimensional grating character. She very nearly stole the whole show. She finally made us understand the appeal of the fun, thoughtless sister. I’m possibly the only person who would have liked to see Lydia end up with George Wickham. I get that the moral to the story is that you don’t need to settle and in this day and age you certainly don’t need to stay in a dysfunctional relationship but – well, call me warped but Lydia became too subdued for my liking and the moralising of the consequences of sleeping around seemed stronger than Austen’s own writing expressed 200 years earlier.
Lizzie Bennet/Ashley Clements
I have a girl crush on Ashley Clements. I don’t know where to start in praising her interpretation of Lizzie Bennet. She is the Lizzie Bennet that I wish all the other adaptations delivered. Her Lizzie just hands down trumps every other wimpy, soft-spoken, pursed lipped, ditzy dumbass version that I have seen. Clements slams you with snark and lampoons from Episode 1. She delivers a character that is observant and funny and sharp and someone you want as your friend. Her face is beautifully expressive whether she is recounting an event, taking the piss, yearning, crying or happy.
Lizzie’s depictions of family, friends and acquaintances are as caricatures. For the sake of a great story she overdraws the people she comes across in her life. She knows that she is not being truthful to her viewers about the people she is depicting. She admits to being 80% truthful…no make that 50% truthful. As a viewer you know that Lizzie is not an accurate narrator but as a narrator even she knows that she is not an accurate narrator. Hyperbole is her ruler but, just like her sister Lydia, she has a vulnerable side that you get a glimpse of in Episode 7 when she is retelling “The Most Awkward Dance Ever”. It takes 3 episodes for Lizzie to even bring up this event – a whole 10 days after the Gibson wedding. As a viewer you see that Lizzie Bennet was embarrassed and slighted publicly by William Darcy. A public that is a tangible one. One in the physical world of family, friends, neighbours and the whole community watching her being rejected. Lizzie Bennet then goes on to publicly embarrass and slight William Darcy in a virtual space – a space which she doesn’t perceive has the impact that reality does until Episode 61 where we see her hesitance to even meet William Darcy’s eyes.
For a while I have been exploring this idea of the spaces we consider our reality. My interpretation of Lizzie Bennet at the beginning of the series is that Lizzie is detached from this virtual space. Particularly as a communications student her understanding of this medium as a virtual space unlike real life seems to make it OK to speak freely about family and friends once you have altered them, fictionalised them and you the viewer need to work out what aspects of the other characters are truthful. It is after Darcy’s first love declaration and subsequent argument about real events that Lizzie realises that Darcy is a man she has wronged. (And I love the strained look on her face when his objections to her mother and Lydia are also her objections to them). Thankfully for Lizzie, (and perhaps because he is a media communication CEO) he seems to have a similar understanding to her of the reality of the web as an unreal virtual space with somewhat unreal depictions and is able to dismiss her online comments about him. From Episode 60 Ashley Clements slowly turns Lizzie Bennet around from a seemingly oversharing, laughing storyteller to a more reserved person selective in her choice of words for the screen.
William Darcy/Daniel Vincent Gordh
As you have read above, I have never been a fan of grumble bum Darcy. But for the first time ever, here was a Darcy that appealed. He is a snob. He is realistic that there are class differences in our world. Just as Lizzie portrays her worse self in Episode 60, Darcy too shows us his absolute worse. The beauty is that neither of them are reticent in their exchange. These two are equals who leave their exchange rethinking their approach to each other. From that episode onwards we get to see a softer, more considerate Darcy. One that starts thinking through his attitudes to people outside his usual sphere until the penultimate episode where he is a relaxed, happy man (well – he had spent a week getting it on). For what it is worth, I am not a subscriber to the Darcy has Aspergers theory. I do not like the need to medicinalise behaviour that society has decided is not the norm. Darcy starts the story as a total snob but he is also shy and this combination is the fab reason why it takes nearly a year and 3 minutes to get the girl. And can I say, Daniel V Gordh has the most beautiful sprinkling of silver in his hair. Be still my beating heart! Just what all distinguished, billionaire CEOs should have. And 16 year old me would be pulling apart my Tiger Beat mag and putting up posters of DVG.
To add to this, I loved all the Darcy and Lizzie episodes. There are minor niggling lines that I wish could have been refined. Lizzie is fine calling Darcy a “prick” but shies away from saying that she doesn’t want to be the girl that is sleeping with the boss (c’mon already – who says “dating”?) and Lizzie not acknowledging Darcy in the last episode (a phrase would have sufficed). This doesn’t detract from the fact that these two sparked off each other. They had tension, those deep gazes gave me flutters and it was wonderful to watch the online squeeeeeing from all the other fans and viewers.
The Writers
How could I even think of writing such a love letter to this wonderful show without acknowledging the wonderful writers who adapted this 200 year old story. These writers went well beyond any movie or any TV series has previously managed. They wrote flawed, real characters. They understood Austen’s characters and that people change due to the people they know and meet in their life. The writers show us all the necessity for forgiveness and that it is possible to overcome our prejudices and change our perception of others. The transmedia fiction, the use of Twitter and Tumblr and Pinterest gave us a deeper understanding of the main characters and allowed us to view them off-screen but still online partaking in a life that is the norm for all of us in this internet connected world. Understandably, production quality – great for a low budget series – did have its own challenges. There are sound quality fluctuations, Mr Microphone peaks at us in a later episode, beltless Bing, Darcy is not that crash hot a dresser for someone who is supposed to be in the 1% (seriously – a buttoned down shirt that isn’t buttoned down). These points though are inconsequential because the storytelling ruled.
The last episode was subdued and though at first I was disappointed with it, I now see it as the quiet farewell it needed to be. This was a journey for Lizzie and Charlotte. Two women finding their professional way in this modern world, each of them with different values and needs yet dedicated to their friendship. Thankfully, the writers were not constrained to only the videos and the transmedia fiction element delivered a wonderful epilogue on Twitter, at once funny, romantic and hopeful for the future. I truly hope we get to see the tweets in the DVD edition as I really feel they were key to the whole story. The writing, and the writers, are the absolute champions of this wonderful web series.
In the end, I invested countless hours in these wonderful characters. Gee they were fabulous! I have invested in the Kickstarter and I am so happy they have brought me to a new love and appreciation for Jane Austen’s wonderful Pride and Prejudice.
What!? You want more! Should my overly long letter not be enough here are a couple of links to read:
Goodby Lizzie Bennet, it has been… so good to see you
On Valentine’s Day, Kat Mayo and I spent a good part of our day travelling to 2SER studios for an interview on Love and Passion. Anyone that knows both Kat and me would know that we can talk about romance fiction for hours. Put us in front of a microphone and we will amp it up just that tad bit more. I recommend you get yourself a cup of tea, coffee, icecream, cakey and sit back and enjoy.
The show was aired on a Saturday and unbeknownst to me, one of my sisters went to my mum’s place and translated the interview to mum as it was being aired. During the break in the interview, I received a phone call from my mum.
Mum: When did you start reading romances?
Me: 32 years ago.
Mum: Really? So you just went on the radio to tell everyone?
Me: Yes mum.
Mum: Thank you for letting them know that I don’t read them. But you didn’t tell them I read religious books and biographies of saints.
Me: Sorry mum. I did consider it.
Mum: So what do you know about romance?
Me: Ummm…you know how I went back to uni last year?
Mum: Yes.
Me: That is what I am studying. I told you about it. And you know I read romances. You would always ask me to help you cook and clean and to put down “those romances”.
Mum: I didn’t think you were actually reading romances. I was being ironic.
There you have it. My mum, the original hipster.
Unlike a lot of romance readers I have met, I did not discover romances by finding my mum or grandmum’s stash. If anything, reading is not a shared activity for my mum and I as our interests are quite different. Not now and not when I was a younger either.
For many people, the thought of a parent not knowing what their children are reading seems to be anathema. It is equated as “not caring” or “how can you trust what they have chosen”.
I can tell you that both my parents cared that I was reading. Their main aim was to provide my sisters and I with ample opportunities to read and do homework. That is, ensuring that we didn’t have too many distractions – 1 doll, no video player, 1 TV, regular visits to the library and food at the ready. Both my parents were Greek migrants so Greek was the main conversational language in our home. My mum’s English reading skills were minimal (she worked a day job in a factory, a night shift as a cleaner, a weekend job as a cleaner, ran a boarding house AND raised 4 daughters) and though she was literate in Greek, due to her mindblowing superwoman working life, her rare chance to relax involved her knitting, tatting, gardening and reading the newspaper and the Bible. For mum, food and care was her bonding experience – as well as teaching me how to embroider which I still do on occasion. The only reading I remember sharing with my mum was when I would translate Paris Match from French to Greek for her when they had spreads on the Greek ex-royal family or an article on Cristina and/or Athena Onassis.
As my dad was highly literate in English, mum was quite happy to let him take charge of the homework and reading tasks. Though she did not know the content of the books I was reading, my dad did. Luckily, he was of the mindset that censorship of reading was wrong and never objected to the books I was reading that other friends’ parents were voicing concerns over. Thankfully, he trusted my choices.
My reading path was mine to choose. Influenced by my sisters, my teachers, friends, the books available at the library and my local newsagency, there was a joy in discovering my interests unfettered by close examination of the content of my books by my parents. This is something I try hard to emulate with my sons though it is difficult when you are a librarian to not be involved in their reading lives. Making opportunities for them to read is a much harder task. Gaming and computing distractions abound in our home and are much more addictive than the written word. To be fair, they have both hooked me onto Football Manager and I am crap at it. Its complex rules and processes make me weep for the simplicity of a linear narrative text. I no longer choose books for them. I stopped doing so when they were 8. Unless they ask I won’t read their choices. It is their private party, their little secret. Funnily, both of them at 11 years old have sneakily challenged me with “Mum, there’s lots of snogging and drug taking in the book I’m reading”. My reply has been “That’s good. Would you like something to eat?”.
I never thought of my romance reading as ever being secret. I never felt that they were my private party. I honestly thought I read romances openly for most of my life. That is until last week when I realised that it only took 32 years for my mum to come to the realisation that when she was shouting at me to put away those romances, her daughter was really, truly reading romances.
Sarah MacLean’s No Good Duke Goes Unpunished
Shallowreader 