A Study in Genre: The Romance Novel

A precursor to a few upcoming reviews: they are NOT Young Adult, nor are they books I would normally be caught dead reading. However, I was recently “up north” at a cabin, and while unable to fall asleep, I decided to grab one of the books lying around. My options were at least a dozen mysteries or some trashy romances.

I have a long history with the trashy romance genre. My grandmother and mother have always loved them. When I was about 10 I still thought romances were boring, because everyone knew that boys were gross and kissing was nasty. If I was at a cottage or my grandparents house and I ran out of my own books to read, then I’d pick up my Grandpa’s copies of The Toledo Blade or Newsweek and read those instead. I’d also flip through every copy of Sports Illustrated around, searching for any mention of figure skating. Within a year or two, however, I’d decided that boys were vaguely intriguing after all, and maybe there was something to be said for these romances. Since most of my grandma’s stash is from the ‘60s (she and my mother both claim that romances were nice and wholesome back in their day, and now they’re just all about sex), the first few I stumbled upon were rather tame. One was even a Young Adult book (White House Autumn) that’s still one of my favorites (it’s possible I stole that for my collection…). However, my grandma often goes to Savers or Goodwill, clears out their entire romance novel collection, and then stores them in her basement, and it just so happens that not all of the ones she brought home were the nice, tame Harlequins of my mother’s youth.

Enlightening, I suppose, would be the best word for some of the racier books, and my poor innocent 12-year old self was shocked to pieces more than once. Talk about sex ed!

That said, once I stopped blushing (approximately four years later, I’d guess, as I was a naïve middle schooler), I decided that while these certainly weren’t real literature, they were awfully fun to read. Just on vacation, you know. To pass the time. If there wasn’t any Dostoevsky or Dickens hanging around.

The point of this history is that, when I found myself in need of a book, I selected the trashy romances over the mysteries. Besides, dealing with mysteries when in a forest in the middle of nowhere scares the hell out of me. I’ve seen enough episodes of Criminal Minds to know that all the creepy serial killers live out in the boonies. Plus there’s no light ANYWHERE out there (aside from the stars, and being a city girl, I don’t count those. I want some streetlights! And not the wimpy Evanston-variety streetlights, hardcore downtown streetlights!), and it would not be hard for someone to sneak up on me. At least in the city I’d see them coming.

So, yeah. It was all the crazy serial killers living in cabins up north that forced me to spend my time reading trashy romances. And no, we aren’t going to talk about why I never got around to reading my real literature that I’d brought with me.

The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things, by Carolyn Mackler OR How It's Done

I’m sure there were some of you who were disappointed that my review of Things You Either Hate or Love wasn't exactly overwhelmingly positive. Never fear! Those of you who wanted to read a book about an overweight girl named after a state that seceded from the union with family issues who likes to make lists whose best friend has geographically departed for a period of time, I have found another option for you! (Oh, and it’s the girl who has family issues, not the state that seceded from the union. This is an excellent example of ambiguity in language. Please take notes.)

This time our protagonist is Virginia, not Georgia. Virginia comes from a more or less perfect family, wherein she sees herself as the only blemish. Her older sister, Anaïs, is smart and athletic, and currently is off with the Peace Corps in Africa. Her brother, Byron, goes to Columbia and is handsome, popular, a star debater, and a straight-A student. Their mom, who is from Arkansas, has a Ph.D. in adolescent psychology. She used to be overweight, but now just works out obsessively and eats lettuce at every meal. Their dad is a software executive who “is the first to admit that he likes women skinny” (18). Oh, and the whole family can speak French fluently and they love artsy things. Virginia is pretty sure that she was a mistake. And probably was switched at birth, too.

Virginia is overweight, loves to read magazines and spend time online, obsessively follows pop culture, hates working out, and is not good at French. And, to top it all off, her best friend has moved to Seattle for the year for her parents’ work. She has a weekly makeout session (for more on the oddness of that term, see Karisa Tells All) with a boy named Froggy, but she doesn’t even consider him a friend. After all, according to the Fat Girl Code of Conduct (written by her), no fat girl should ever push a relationship with a guy, and she should overcompensate for her looks by going further than skinny girls. Virginia’s so convinced of her own inferiority that she’s sure everyone else sees it the same way. She doesn’t give people the chance to get to know her because she assumes they don’t want to.

Things start to fall apart when her old brother gets in some serious trouble, gets suspended from Columbia, and moves back home. Virginia struggles with readjusting her view of Byron, and she withdraws even further from her life. She deals with her emotions by eating, whether it's refusing to eat anything or eating everything she can find. She’s on the verge of self-harm, burning her finger on purpose and breaking her toe when she kicks a wall. But when her parents refuse to let her spend Thanksgiving with her best friend in Seattle, Virginia finally starts to take things into her own hands. She uses her own money to buy the plane tickets out there, and she finally starts to feel again.

She gets an eyebrow ring, and the most popular girl in school (who pukes her guts out between every meal) admires it, which is a bit of a wakeup call to Virginia. Her doctor, instead of telling her to worry about her weight, says that she might want to start kickboxing to get out her anger. She buys a dress she likes, and when her mom says it’s the wrong color for her hair, she dyes her hair the same color as the dress—purple. She starts a webzine at her school where students can vent about their lives, and invites Froggy (who had stopped speaking to her because she kept ignoring him) to join. She even faces the person whose life should’ve been ruined by Byron, and learns a thing or two about moving on. She writes a letter to her older sister telling her everything that’s gone wrong, even though her mother wants her to keep it all quiet. And finally, she tells her dad that her weight is none of his business.

After all of this, things with Froggy finally work out, but he insists on having a public relationship.

This, my friends. This is how it is done. You do not give your main character mono so that she can lose weight. You have her face her feelings, you have her face her problems, you have her start to work through things. Then, once she’s done that, she gets a boy. That’s fine. But her problems don’t magically go away, as they did for Georgia in Things You Either Hate Or Love. Instead, Virginia has to work through them. She has to tell people what’s bothering her. She has to stand up for herself. She has to do things on her own, break a few rules, break out of the box that she put herself into.

Oh, and if she references Ani DiFranco lyrics a few times along the way, that works, too.

The first 60 books of the year

I made a goal this year to read at least 120 books. That was about 20 more than I read last year (yes, I keep track of these things because yes, I am a nerd), and it came out to 10 books a month, which seemed reasonable.

Much to my surprise, I’m about two months ahead of schedule, since I passed the halfway point this week—guess that’s what happens when one doesn’t have homework taking up 24 hours a day and then some. Since I’ll be leaving the country in September, it’s a good thing that I’m moving along so well—I’m not sure what my access to books in English is going to be after that point, but I suspect I’ll have limited choices. I’m also leaving behind my favorite public library in just a month, which is going to kill the number of new books I get each week. I don’t have the funds to buy ten new books every week, especially if they could turn out to be awful. I also definitely don’t have the space to keep them somewhere. One of these days I’ll take a picture of my bookshelf as proof.

Anyway, I figured I’d do a quick recap of books 1-60, all of were given scores from 0-5, 5 being the highest and indicating that said book is generally awesome.

First book: The Red Leather Diary, by Lily Koppel, 3.

30^th book: 10 Things I Hate About Me, by Randa Abdel-Fattah, 3.

60^th book: Beautiful, by Amy Reed, 1.

Books receiving the full 5 points: The Last Time I Was Me, by Cathy Lamb and Paper Wings, by Marly Swick.

Books receiving 0 points: Winter Love, Winter Wishes, by Jane Claypool Minter (this book was an example of the perilous dangers of picking up any book that has figure skating on its cover) and My Name is Sus5an Smitth. The 5 is Silent, by Louise Plummer.

Average score for the first 60 books: 2.25.

On Poetry: In which I am a bad English major

As a child, I was quite the poet. Or so I thought, anyway. I enjoyed poetry for several well-thought out reasons:

1) Poems were shorter than books, meaning I could have my parents read several of them to me before bed.
2) Poems frequently rhymed, making them easier to memorize than books (I was a late reader and preferred to memorize rather than to read).
3) Anne of Green Gables liked poetry. I was raised on Anne of Green Gables.

I had a copy of A. A. Milne's When We Were Very Young, and I took it upon myself to memorize poems from it on a regular basis (I was particularly fond of Halfway Down). Starting in first grade, I saw talent shows as the perfect opportunity to display my ability to memorize poems. After all, Anne Shirley had given poetry recitations to thunderous applause at the White Sands Hotel in the 1985 Kevin Sullivan production of Anne of Green Gables, so why shouldn't I try to receive the same recognition?

Turns out elementary school children of the '90s just don't appreciate poetry the way everyone did in the movies.

Nevertheless, I maintained my loyalty to poetry and through the end of eighth grade, I was still memorizing poems for fun (as much fun as one can have, that is, mastering Emily Dickinson's Because I Could Not Stop for Death) and writing poems to get out all of my middle school angst. I think that every middle school student should be required to write several poems whenever they are feeling particularly emotional, if only so that they will have something to laugh at in ten years.

Unfortunately, poetry and I had a bit of a falling out when I started high school. Though I would still write some (terrible) poetry, I didn't like the whole concept of thwacking poems with a wet noodle in hopes of finding some meaning (I did like Introduction to Poetry as the poem itself seemed to discourage that type of analysis). I had a brief fling with The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and I was always happy to flirt with The Highwayman and Lady of Shalott (mostly because, you guessed it, they were featured in Anne of Green Gables), but alas, it was not enough to repair my fraying relationship with poetry. Our split was tragically finalized in the latter half of high school, when I lost all patience with love sonnets that found it necessary to rhyme "love" with "prove." I exaggerate not: From the Passionate Shepherd to His Love.

Had I been a practical soul and decided to to study nursing, like my mother, or political science and economics, like my father, I could've gone on to live a perfectly happy existence without any further attention paid to poetry. Instead I decided to study English. I was able to avoid poetry-centric classes for the most part. I was not, however, able to avoid my guilt at being a bad English major. I was supposed to like poetry! If an English major couldn't appreciate it, then really, who could? Was there any hope for me?

It appeared, last fall, that there was. My philosophy professor introduced me to a fabulous poem by Mary Oliver, The Summer Day. The last two lines (where the speaker asks "What is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?") give me goosebumps. A breakthrough! I had found a poem not mentioned in Anne of Green Gables that I was fond of! Finally I could embrace poetry and be the outstanding English major I'd always known was hiding inside me somewhere.

This was the plan until last week. Last week I decided to read an entire book of Mary Oliver's poetry in order to boost my ego about how I read poetry for fun. This failed miserably. There was one poem, ONE, in the whole book that I did not find entirely useless. Plus all the poems were about gardens and woodland animals and clouds, and I'm a city girl. The keys to my heart are concrete and public transportation and sirens and skyscrapers.

It appears that poetry and I are not yet reconciled. Is there hope for me yet? Any poems I should be reading that will lead to my breakthrough? Any poems you particularly love or hate?