6 posts tagged “books”
I am so over Harry Potter. I never saw the Goblet of Fire, I'm not planning to see Order of the Phoenix, and I'm going to wait until I can get Deathly Hollows at the library. Prisoner of Azkaban was the pinnacle anyway.
Instead, I've been reading romance: Julia Quinn, Suzanne Enoch, and Mary Balogh.
Sins of a Duke, by Suzanne Enoch
Julia Quinn is one of my favorite authors, and I was sad when the Bridgerton series (close to my heart because the first Quinn I read was The Viscount Who Loved Me) came to an end. Grabbed this as soon as I realized it was available, and though there isn't a Bridgerton in sight, it may be one of my new favorites. Miranda Cheever is up there with Penelope Featherington as one of my favorite heroines now, and Turner is an ass without being so much of one that I want to stab him. It's a hard line to straddle.
London's Perfect Scoundrel, by Suzanne Enoch
Currently I'm doing a lot of rereading - have re-read several of Sherrilyn Kenyon's Dark Hunter books lately, and several of the Bridgerton books - Romancing Mr. Bridgerton, The Duke and I, When He Was Wicked and The Viscount Who Loved Me - and at the moment I'm reading To Catch An Heiress. Caroline is another of my favorite Quinn heroines.
And Neil Gaiman is, as usual, awesome. I've had some trouble getting into his recent books - I spent the three days I read American Gods in a state of confusion, and I didn't even finish Anansi Boys - but his short fiction is still a favorite. I've skipped around a bit, and so far my favorites are "The Problem of Susan" (I didn't read all the Narnia books, and now I'm kind of glad, because that would have annoyed the hell out of me) and "October In The Chair," which is delightfully creepy in a really subtle sort of way.
Note to Elizabeth Merrick and the other denizens of This Is Not Chick Lit: You might want to consider, after promoting your anthology by deriding chick lit as being all about the shoes and the handbags and the fluff magazines NOT choosing for your sponsors a handbag brand and a fluffy magazine. Just a thought.
Elements of Style looks like chick lit. It even reads like a chick lit story for a lot of it, with a professional-woman-in-New-York story, with a dash of romance thrown in. There are society women, there's some shopping, there's a trip to Palm Beach.
But somehow, I have trouble labelling this book as chick lit. Francesca, the main character, is the number one pediatrician on the Upper East Side. Her father, a former nylon manufacturer, is suffering from Alzheimer's and her stepmother, Helen, refuses to hire help. Francesca has the pedigree of a rich Manhatten girl - the exclusive private school, the Ivy League education - but prefers to stay on the fringes on New York society. In the end, she doesn't live happily ever after with the man of her choice; he goes back to his wife.
Add in a post-9/11 New York that makes the paranoia of the citizens as much a character as the actual citizens themselves, the reality that happily ever after rarely happens, and a plethora of clearly screwed up society girls, and it starts to not feel like Chick Lit at all.
But what is chick lit, anyway? I'm beginning to think that it's time to retire the label, because the discussion has become more about what is and isn't chick lit, and less about the books themselves.
In any case, I really did enjoy Elements of Style. Wendy Wasserstein brought us, in Francesca, a character as nuanced as her first, Heidi (The Heidi Chronicles). When we meet Francesca, she's a pretty well put together professional woman in her thirties. When we leave her, she's a pretty well put together professional woman in her thirties - albeit with a few extra emotional bruises and scrapes. It's a fast read, and comes across as more true to life; there's no obvious fantasy here. The comic and the tragic, the mundane and the rarefied, manage to blend together extremely well here. Recommended.
Sherrilyn Kenyon was the first paranormal/vampire romance writer I found myself addicted to, but I barrelled through all of her Dark-Hunter books this spring, and was left bereft until I picked up Dark Celebration a couple weeks ago while languishing in the Atlanta airport. Since then, I've been working through the rest of them.
Currently, I'm re-reading Dark Magic, number four in the series, about Gregori, a 1,000 year old immortal, and his lifemate, Savannah, the daughter of his best friend, Prince Mikhael. Next I plan to pick up Dark Legend and Dark Guardian, about immortal twin brothers. Something to amuse me while I'm at the stylist tomorrow getting my masses of curls tamed.
I'll be honest. I'm about fifteen pages into this book and frankly, I have no desire to go further. I already know what's going to happen: Marley, currently an adorable puppy with a well-behaved mother and insane absentee father, will turn out to be, as the book subtitle tells us upfront, "the world's worst dog." Nonetheless, the author and his wife, who wanted the dog as a training exercise for future motherhood, will grow to love their troublemaking brat of a dog, and when Marley eventually dies, they'll be brokenhearted.
In other words, this is the book that anyone who has ever had a less than well-behaved pet - meaning pretty much any dog or cat in my experience - could have written.
I think that perhaps the memoir genre and myself don't get along. I never had any desire to read James Frey, even before the whole fiasco. I napped through the Paul McCartney memoir, enough that I can't even remember the title. My mother once pushed a memoir about women living in the Islamic world that I read about twenty pages of before switching to something more my style - meaning fiction, or more impassive biography.
In theory, memoir should be right up my alley. I love reading, and I love history because of the stories it tells. But when it comes down to it, memoir is just too self-centered for me, and I really just don't care.
