I really meant to update this much sooner but a combination of depression issues and pure laziness has kept me from blogging. I’ll try to update more often going forward but I’m not making any promises.
Now…on to the books!
I took a break in the middle of reading Royal Assassin by Robin Hobb (this is the second book in the Farseer Trilogy) to dig in to some regency romances. That might seem like an odd choice, but my friend came over with a huge bag of books for me and I was in the mood for some light and fluff-filled entertainment. There was a time, years ago, when I considered myself too good to read romance novels. I don’t know why, but I thought of myself as more intellectual than people that read ‘those type of trashy books with half nekkid dudes on the covers’. Then I read a book by Julie Garwood (I was visiting my cousin for the weekend and couldn’t sleep and it was laying around begging to be read) and I quickly told myself I’d been a pretentious asshole and dove head first into the genre and never looked back.
Like any genre fiction, Romance can be extremely formulaic. (And while I would include Fantasy in that, I tend to think that Fantasy has much more range–there are more formulas and tropes that are pulled from then, say, Mystery or Romance which are more narrow in scope in my opinion.) But that doesn’t mean it can’t be enjoyable. And yes, even books with strong female characters tend to have the woman swooning at the men at some point (I’ve never swooned…am I missing something from my life?). So, on a critical level, I do still find some parts of romance novels problematic in a lot of ways. But, damn they can be fun to read. And sometimes that’s all we’re looking for–to be entertained.
Right now I’m reading a series by Julia Quinn that is about an aristocratic family in Regency England consisting of eight siblings; each book is about one of them finding their happily ever after. A quote on one of the covers compared the author to a ‘modern day Jane Austen’ so I had to eye-roll a bit at that. I don’t think of Jane Austen as primarily a romance writer (although she did, certainly, do that) but as a satirist. And a damned good one at that. So…yeah… But perhaps that’s just my own personal hang-up.
Anyway. I’m quite enjoying these books and have practically flown through them since I started reading them two weeks ago. I’m on the seventh book today and hope to finish that up by the end of the day. Each one has enough unique elements to set it apart from others in the series and some of the characters are not as typical as others in the genre, which I find refreshing.
Below are the ones I’ve read so far. I’ve linked the pics to the author’s site about the books if you want more information about each title.
So far this year I’ve seven books (and am in the middle of two others). I feel almost like I’m cheating by using so many romance novels on my bingo card because they’re so easy for me to breeze through, but I read them so they count. And my overall personal goal is much more than this card so I shouldn’t feel guilty and yet…. Oh well. My book bingo card currently looks like:
The Unicorn Blues 