After browsing this great newsletter on romance literature, I had a hankering for reading a pure romance novel for the first time since I was in my teens. The articles I read convinced me that maybe there was more to romance than the Barbara Cartland and Victoria Holt romances I read as a child and teenager.
One of the things that made me give up on reading romances were the formulas: both of the abovementioned writers always wrote about very young, virginal heroines who married much older men and were then flung into danger, often by a jealous mother or ex-lover of the husband. The genuinely good and often funny and interesting Scandinavian romance authors I also liked to read fell by the wayside as well. I had simply had enough romance.
I took longer to stop reading Phyllis A. Whitney and Mary Stewart, perhaps because their romances are not as sappy as Cartland and Holt's and often read more like thrillers than romances.
Anyway, I made my way to the library after work and searched through the stacks to find something interesting, preferably a Regency romance so I could use my new reference book on Regency and Victorian era culture to look up things.
Nothing. I couldn't find a single romance I wanted to read. Nothing. Nada.
I love reading blurbs on books I know I will never read, for example formula literature like Mills & Boon romances. People do not buy these books because they are dying to know who the heroine will end up with - it is therefore OK for the blurb to give a hint, even an assurance, as to the identity and basic personality of Mr. Right. The blurbs on these books are really like little condensations of the story, minus all the little twists, and you are never in doubt as to how the book will end. In the case of romances, giving away the identity of the hero is essential because people buy romances for two things: they like to experience the satisfaction of falling and being in love, even if it's only for as long as it takes to read the story, and they what to see the twists that finally bring the lovers together. They also want to be sure they will like the hero and heroine. What they don't want is to be kept wondering throughout half the book which character is Mr. Right.
blurb noun [C] a short description of a book or film, etc., written by the people who have produced it, and intended to make people want to buy it or see it: The blurb on the back of the book says that it 'will touch your heart'.
(from Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary)
In an earlier entry I mentioned the importance of good blurbs on books. By that I meant the teasers that are designed to entice a potential reader into buying the book. The good ones do just that without giving away the plot. The bad ones, the ones that give away important plot elements, are just plain horrible. When I sit down to a whodunit, I want to be kept guessing, and not get told in a blurb just who did what.
The other blurbs, the ones I like to call "gushers" - the overwrought praise by reviewers and famous authors - can be funny or just plain horrible. The funny ones are those which have obviously been edited to leave out unfavourable wording and also the ones that are very carefully worded to sound like praise but are really saying: "I hated this book, but I'm too polite to say so."
Two pages of gusher blurbs are not going to make me any more interested in a book than a well-crafted teaser on the back cover. I mean, so what if Stephen King thought a book was good? I don't know what kind of taste he has in literature.
Book cover art is one of the hurdles readers need to get past in order to choose a book to read. Why do I call it a hurdle? Because there is so much BAD cover art out there, repelling readers from what are often quite good books.
Why is so much cover art so amazingly bad? This art form is a form of advertising that is meant to draw in readers and you would think that publishers would choose the designs carefully, but often the covers seem to be a kind of afterthought: Advertising department guy: Hey man, what do we do about a cover for this romance? Editor: Just get the colour-blind guy who works in the cafeteria to whip something up.
So much popular literature cover art is misleading. You look at a fantasy novel and think it must be torrid and porn-riddled, only to discover that inside the horrible cover is a pleasant and funny book with no more sex that the average Disney movie. A romance cover with a dashingly handsome half-naked young man who is embracing a voluptuous near-naked redhead, turns out to contain a sensitive love story about a chaste blonde in love with a middle-aged man.
In addition to being misleading, the covers of many popular literature books are eye-wateringly garish and often decorated with scowling, dramatically posed and very tan men with no chest hair and so many muscles that they look like an overstuffed armchair, and/or very pink, skimpily dressed reclining women so buxom they look like they would fall over if they tried to stand up. This especially applies to bodice-ripper romances, and some action and fantasy novels. Thrillers are often decorated with something symbolic that drips blood, like a gun, a rose or a coil of barbed wire. Silver and gold often feature heavily in the design.
Some publishers of course do care about packaging and consistently produce books with good or at least inoffensive cover art. I just whish there were more of them.
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About me
What this blog is about:
Reading and books.
If you’re wondering about the name 52 books, it stems from a book-a-week reading challenge I set myself. The challenge is over, but I'm still reading, and will continue to blog about the books I read and my reading experiences, and other stuff connected with books and reading.
I rate the books (if I feel like it), giving them stars ranging from zero to 5.
Books I have already read (sporadically updated):Cover gallery
Note: Some of the entries are linked to the months the reviews appeared in, because I made several entries for each book. I have marked those reviews with an asterix (*). If you want to read the whole review from beginning to end, you must scroll down and read from the bottom up (but you probably already knew that ;-) >
