Newsy catch up

Let me dive right in.

1. It's Edinburgh Festival time (though almost over) and we had family up for the weekend from Yorkshire so have been doing some Festival-y things. Mainly of the free variety, such as catching free shows on the Royal Mile and drinking Bulmers cider while watching Bulmers' own band, the Sun Lovin' Criminals outside the Speigeltent in Princes Street Gardens. But we caught a couple of shows too: a fun kids thing with snuffly pigs and Out of the Blue, an a capella singing group. And then last night Mr T and I went to see Stravinsky's Firebird at the Usher Hall which was wonderful.

2. I've been having a Mills&Boon splurge, which I do perhaps once or twice a year. It's the reading equivalent of eating an entire box of chocolates. I'm now down to the last few chocolates in the second layer of the box and I don't even like coffee-cremes (aka Valentino's Love Child by Lucy Monroe). But I'm going to keep gorging until I'm filled with self-loathing.

3. One of the reasons I know I'm at the end of my category reading jag is that I picked up another book from my TBR pile two nights ago - one that has been sitting there for months and months: Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris, the first Sookie Stackhouse book. I've resisted reading this series, partly because it's so loved by others; partly because it doesn't seem to have a resolved love story in it (is it going to reach one?). Anyway, now I'm reading it and enjoying it greatly. So much to admire in it. Deceptive simplicity for one thing. There's great restraint in the writing. It feels quite pared down, even at really dramatic moments but it doesn't seem to rob the moment. I'm almost at the end and already feeling quite torn about all Sookie's prospects: Bill and Eric and Sam. Eric is a small part of this book but I know from others' blogs that he assumes much greater significance in later books. If I hadn't known, would I have guessed? There are so many things to enjoy here. I love the scene with Dean the Dog and the Bubba thing is wonderful - a funny yet strangely poignant detail. I love that to Sookie, Bubba's a sort of royalty. Do you advise me to keep reading? There are so many of these books! Also, what about the HBO series? How does it compare? I'm unlikely to watch it, as I watch very little TV but I'm intrigued to know.

4. Being a parent is hard. It makes me wish and wish I was better person. This morning, I couldn't find the boys' shoes and it was late and we had to get the bus and I just shouted at them. It made the little one cry and the big one go all quiet. Sigh. I wish I was one of those calm, even-tempered parents. Later, I came home (not at work today) and searched and searched for their missing shoes. They'd left them in the garden yesterday, having taken them off when they went on the trampoline. I've found three of the shoes in different corners of the garden, hidden in shrubbery. The foxes (we've seen two in our garden) must have found them. One of the straps is a bit chewed. I'll go and have a look for the other one again later.

5. Are you WEIRD? No, not weird, WEIRD. It can give you a very skewered view of the world.

Read this and think on

I mentioned recently my intention to read the first (online, free access) issue of IASPR's Romance Journal. I have now done so and would heartily recommend that anyone who reads this blog takes a look at at least two of the articles:

There are six bodies in this relationship: an anthropological approach to the romance genre by Laura Vivanco and Kyra Kramer; and

Getting a good man to love: popular romance fiction and the problem of patriarchy by Catherine Roach

Both are well worth a read and provoke much thought.

Laura and Kyra's article looks at the various bodies represented by the protagonists' in the novel: the individual body (the literal physical character represented), the social body (representations of cultural identities) and the political body (the character in a particular political context) and how these all inter-relate so as to produce the fully-integrated HEA outcome the reader desires. If you're wondering about the image above, this is a reference to the heroine's socio-political body, or 'prism' through which the hero's socio political body or 'phallus' attains completion. I've wittered in various posts over the years about little crumbs of what's in this article - this is more satisying, infinitely more erudite and entertaining to boot.

Catherine Roach's article is excellent too. She begins by drawing parallels between the romance novel and the Christian story. This passage in particular resonated with me:

The true significance of this HEA, I submit, lies not in its presence at the end of every romance novel but in its presence in the larger culture. The Christian mythic narrative and the romance narrative both highlight eschatology. Both are narrative concerned with the eschaton, the end of the world or the ultimate destiny of the characters involved (from the Greek eschatos for 'last' or 'farthest'). A romance, from the very beginning of the story, promises its HEA; the end of the story is inherent from the very beginning, as part of its very narrative structure. The romance novel is narrative eschatology.......... The romance ending, like the Christian eschaton, is the end of all endings, the ending beyond endings.

Roach then goes on to talk about the 'deep work' that the romance novel is doing for women, reconciling women to the patriarchal society in which we live. Fascinating stuff.

So a good first issue from the Romance Journal. These were the two items that resonated with me but I also enjoyed an article about EM Hull's The Sheikh (which I've never read - but can now pretend otherwise) as well as Pam Rosenthl's review of a book by Cristina Nehring.

Nineties memories of student life, prompted by one of those radio moments

I heard this song on the fantastic Radio 6 Music recently. Hearing this made me think of going to Potterrow Student Union on Wednesday nights in the early 1990s.

It was a funny place to go dancing. The dancefloor and bar were, like any other club, forgivingly dark but then there a huge area you could go and sit in beyond that. It was blessedly cool, but fully-lit to the standard of broad daylight. It had huge concrete steps and jungly plants and was peopled with drunken students lounging sweatily after their dancing antics. Weirdly there was a wee shop that stayed open till quite late and you could in and buy a snack to satisfy any alcohol-induced hunger pangs. We usually waited till after closing. There was a really good chippy across the road and you could get a poke of chips (salt 'n' sauce of course) for a pound which had the added benefit of giving you something to keep your hands warm during the miserably cold and windy walk across the Siberian car park that was the shortest route to the mouse-infested flat I shared with my pals.

It's funny how music can so easily evoke these rich little knots of memories.

The disappointing Mr Cavendish and the delights of anticipation

"Well," said Pooh, "what I like best," and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn't know what it was called.

The House at Pooh Corner

A.A. Milne

As discussed last week, I recently read Julia Quinn's The Lost Duke of Wyndham with not a little pleasure, in large part due to my anticipation of reading the same events in Mr Cavendish, I Presume from the (more interesting it seemed, as I read Grace and Jack's story) perspectives of Thomas and Amelia.

Anticipation is a great part of reading pleasure. It's a skill to build it, and a crime to fail to deliver.

I'm afraid that MCIP did not live up to my hopes. I looked on Quinn's website and it seems she originally intended to write this as a single book and then split it into two. It seems from the various reviews I read when the book came out, as well as from comments on my last post, that some readers felt shortchanged in reviewing the same events again through different characters' eyes. I found this difficult to understand before I actually read MCIP. I was looking forward to getting the new POV on these scenes. What I didn't realise was that these revisited scenes were going to read identically to the same scenes from TLDOW. As though Quinn literally took the scene and just cut and pasted parts of it.

I was so disappointed.

I expected to see Amelia with her family. I expected to get to know and understand her relationship with her parents and siblings. Similarly, I expected to get the inside track on Thomas' relationship with his grandmother and Grace. But there was nothing of this. Instead, we got literally the same scenes (complete with the precisely identical dialogue) as in TLDOW along with a few extra scenes between Thomas and Amelia - which rather failed to smoulder, I regret to report.

This really did just read as if Quinn had tried and failed to write this as one book and then decided a solution would be to split her one effort into two books, rather than her having come up with this as a genuinely interesting and novel way to write two love stories with a single plot.

I kept wondering, why didn't she try to make MCIP more of its own book? Really write the scenes again. Yes, use some of the same dialogue but not all. We all know different people will have different recollections of conversations. I wanted it to be subtler and better and more interesting than it was.

There were some nice bits and pieces. I rather liked some of the parts where Thomas deals with his feelings about losing a dukedom and becoming Mr Cavendish and what that meant/ who he really was. The epilogue that (SPOILER HERE) gave him a new windfall peerage disappointed and irritated me. Thomas had reconciled himself rather beautifully to his new status as Mr Cavendish - why take that achievement away from him?

So, all in all, the anticipation was better.

Can you think of any books in which the anticipation has been great but not satisfactorily actualised?

Time, my enemy

Time is my enemy just now. It's been a mad work week (again - is it ever otherwise?) and there's a whole heap of stuff I want to spend time reading and haven't yet had a chance to. In particular, the first issue of IASPR is out (see link on Teach Me Tonight). I've still to read the articles that actually most interest me, including Laura's own, since they're quite long. I've been saving them to read with all my attention. This weekend, definitely.

I've managed to catch up with Jill Sorenson and JessicaRRR's articles on RRR though. Jill's talking about f/f romance and the language we use for female genitals. Jessica's post is about the depiction of a good life in romance and she starts the post with a mini philosophy essay. Both great with interesting comments.

I've also been trying to make progress with writing. I finished my WIP a couple of months ago but the ending, well, stunk. So I had to re-write it. Painfully. Plus I have a huge number of handwritten revisions to convert (really, huge - there is not a page unchanged, extra scenes written on scraps of paper, the whole thing a great three-inch-thick papery monster). I feel like this week I've turned the corner though. The trouble, of course, is, that after all this (writing-reading-CP-comments-revising-rewriting-rerevising-rewriting-again-dumping-writing more-reading-rewriting) I can't judge its merit anymore. Most of all, I just want it to go away. Which means I have to finish it. The bastard.

So time: my enemy. The thing I need more of.

I can't believe this song is almost 20 years old. I had just started university when this came out. Kylie has always been a great favourite with Mr Tumperkin, for reasons this video makes obvious.

Revisiting an author I'd taken agin, a great scene and thoughts on a hybrid cover

I read my first Julia Quinn novel in the early days of my second phase of romance reading that began several years ago. It was When He Was Wicked, the fourth Bridgerton book, the one about Francesca and the chap who thought he was dying who was her first husband's cousin. I LOVED IT. I really enjoyed it. I thought, Yes, here is an author I am going to love. And she has a backlist. And I set about reading that backlist. Except, none of the books I read after that lived up to the promise of that first one (no, Quinn-fans, not even Romancing Mr Bridgerton or The Viscount Who Loved Me. Nor any of the early pre-Bridgerton ones. To me, they were *meh*). I gave up on her fairly early on and turned my attention to other authors.

I picked up The Lost Duke of Wyndham the other day in a charity shop. I'm not sure why. A whim.

It came out a couple of years ago and I was aware of it at the time. I remember reading about it on other blogs. It was memorable because of the fact that it has a 'matching pair' book in the form of Mr Cavendish, I Presume, which revisits many of the same events from the perspective of a different H/H. The impression I gained from the few reviews I read was that this was either not successful or at least no better than ok, and I was untroubled by curiosity.

Well, I've now read TLDOW, and I enjoyed it more than any other Quinn since WHWW! Not only did I enjoy it, I found myself constantly titillated and charmed and desperately curious about the other story that was NOT being told in this book, the book about Thomas and Amelia. I want their story. Now. Actually, I wanted their story then, as I was reading Jack and Grace's story. So was my pleasure in this book really predicated on the anticipation about Thomas and Amelia rather than the here-and-now pleasure of Jack and Grace? Yes, I rather think it was.

There is a superlative scene quite near the end of the book that is so beautifully plotted and cleverly written that I was squirming as I read it. And I had to blog about it, hence this post.

The conceit of the book is that Thomas, the son of the dowager duchess's youngest son, has grown up, believing himself to be the Duke of Wyndham. One night, the dowager is accosted by a highwayman who is the spitting image of her middle son. He proves indeed to be the middle son's son, and hence - if his birth is legitimate - the true Duke. The first two thirds of the book deal with the dowager and her companion Grace (the heroine) meeting Jack, bringing him to the house and introducing him to - amongst others - Thomas and his betrothed, Amelia. The last third of the book deals with everyone travelling to Ireland to discover if he is legitimate and hence the true duke.

We learn early on the book that Thomas and Amelia have been betrothed since they were in the cradle and she has been waiting for a few years for him to step up to the mark and do his duty in marrying her. She is now 21 and the waiting is getting embarrassing. There are a couple of early scenes where we see her hanging around the house with Grace, basically hoping to have some interaction with Thomas and not succeeding.

The scene that I loved is a scene in which Amelia's father, tired of waiting, has brought Amelia up to the ducal house to demand to know when the wedding will take place. However, he has chosen the worst possible time to do it - it is just when the household is setting off to Ireland. Thomas takes the bull by the horns and tells Amelia's father that he may not be the duke. Her father responds by indicating that she can't marry him as plain Mr Cavendish.

"...If you do not prove to be the right and lawful Duke of Wyndham, you may consider the betrothal null and void."

"As you wish," Thomas said curtly. He made no argument, gave no indication that he might wish to fight for his betrothed.

Oh no! Poor Amelia!

Amelia's father then gets into an excruciating argument with Jack whereby he tries to make him agree to marry her, saying that the contract did not name Thomas, only 'the seventh Duke of Wyndham'. By this stage, Jack wants Grace and refuses point blank to marry Amelia. Several times. At this point, Thomas steps in again.

"Sir," (Jack) said, "I will not marry your daughter."

"Oh, you will."

But this was not said by Crowland. It was Thomas, stalking across the room, his eyes burning with barely contained rage.

Thomas insists that Jack must marry Amelia; that she has spent her life preparing for the position of Duchess of Wyndham and that Jack has a moral duty to marry her. He doesn't fight for her for himself, but he does fight for her here. It's such a great scene and so ripe with misunderstanding and hurt. And I'm really looking forward to revisiting it in Mr Cavendish, I Presume.

Other than that, there was the usual Julia Quinn problem with the language. She has a number of anachronistic modern American usages that keep wrong-footing me. I think it's almost more noticeable because 90% of what she writes sounds so very spot on.

And what do you think of the cover? This is the British version. I think it's quite clever. Romance isn't sold in very many British high street bookshops (the tiny section in my nearest Waterstones seems to have recently been ditched) but a few authors make it into the mainstream fiction shelves, and Julia Quinn is one of them. This cover rather cleverly apes a 'chick-lit' or 'yummy-mummy' cover (two genres I am not at all fond of but that are both very popular in the UK, much more than historical single-title romance - at least if you judge that by what you can find in bookshops). Annoyingly, the cover shows the hero as fair-haired when apparently he is supposed to be dark and I couldn't get a blond man out of my head. The power of suggestion took root and wasn't contradicted til too late.

Has anyone else read this matching pair? What did you think?

Friday music, and is Miffy happy?

Is Miffy happy, or pensive?

Does it depend on your frame of mind?

When you look at Miffy, do you wonder how Miffy feels? Or do you just think, Miffy is holding a balloon. A yellow one.

I wonder. I wonder every time I see Miffy.

And sometimes I think I know.

Today, I have been a wee bit sad. And actually that makes me think that Miffy isn't sad. Which is strangely counter-intuitive, as well as making the picture above feel out of place. I'll counteract that with a melancholy song.

The End part 2

My last post was about the degree of satisfaction a particular ending gives - its HEA score, if you will. Today's post is about the actual final words the author uses and the feeling they leave you with.

I have recently mentioned this topic in relation to The Tunnel of Doom so perhaps I was predisposed to notice and ponder the closing words of Skin Game by Ava Gray:

"You're my beating heart," he said simply. "Where you go, I go."

And that was everything. They raised the sails and slid away from the dock out onto the vast blue sea.

I love that; the sort of arrested moment quality it has. That anticipation. That going-into-a-future-where-things-will-happen-together. It's different from what I think of as the typical 'settled' ending a romance novel has, which leaves you with a feeling more of a static happy state for the protaganists. See for example, these five endings:

1. Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen

With the Gardiners they were always on the most intimate terms. Darcy, as well as Elizabeth, really loved them; and they were both ever sensible of the warmest gratitude towards the persons who, by bringing her into Derbyshire, had been the means of uniting them.

2. Lord of Scoundrels by Loretta Chase

"...Fortunately for you I am the most patient of tutors. I shall prove it to you."

"Your patience?" she asked.

"And my virility. Both. Repeatedly." His black eyes glinted. "I will teach you a lesson you'll never forget."

She tangled her fingers in his hair and brought his mouth to hers. "My wicked darling," she whispered. "I should like to see you try."


3. Slightly Dangerous by Mary Balogh


The Marquess of Lindsay would have felt the backs of two fingers rub gently against his cheek if he had not been too far sunk in sleep.

"I hope so, Wulfric," his mama said, even more foolishly than she had spoken before. "Oh I do hope so. And I hope he has brothers and sisters to fill our hands even fuller."

"Well," the Duke of Bewcastle said, sounding haughty and even slightly bored, "if there is anything I can do to assist you in bringing your wish to fulfillment, my love, do let me know."

The Duchess of Bewcastle laughed softly.

The marquess did not even know what brothers and sisters were.

But he would...

4. Welcome to Temptation by Jennifer Cruisie

"Why do I have a bad feeling about this?" Phin said, and she said, "Because your life's just changed but it's okay. You can trust me."

She pulled him close, and over his shoulder, she could see Dillie on the edge of the porch, holding the stick of her Dove Bar for Lassie to lick. Behind them, maple trees waved cheerfully in the breeze, cotton clouds bounced across the blue, blue sky, and the early September sun glowed on everything in sight.

"Nothing but good times ahead," Sophie said, and kissed him.

5. And Then He Kissed Her by Laura Lee Ghurke

He laughed. "I'll explain it to you later. Right now, I have something more important to do." He lifted her face and bent his head.

And then he kissed her.

Emma tightened her arms round his neck and returned his kiss with passionate enthusiasm. After all, it was quite proper for a man to kiss a woman once they were engaged. Everybody knew that. Even Harry."

Interesting that three of these five end in a kiss.

Skin Game is not alone with its less settled closing words. Unfortunately, I don't have my copy of All Through The Night by Connie Brockway anymore but the closing sentences really stayed with me - the H/H vanish together into the London fog *shivers*.

I found a few other examples of these sorts of endings on my bookshelf without success. A few series books have this feel about them, but really it's because we are to be interested in the books to come. In my efforts to find another example, I've come up with The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler (ok, not a romance, but a love story I'd say and I count this a happy ending):

And there on the curb stood Muriel surrounded by suitcases and string-handled shopping bags and cardboard cartons overflowing with red velvet. She was frantically waving down taxis - first one ahead - then Macon's own. "Arretez!" Macon cried to the driver The taxi lurched to a halt. A sudden flash of sunlight hit the windshield, and spangles flew across the glass. The spangles were old water spots, or maybe the markings of leaves, but for a moment, Macon thought they were something else. They were so bright and festive, for a moment he thought they were confetti.

These endings leave me with a different feeling than the other examples above. These endings leave me feeling not just happy but slightly excited, anticipatory. They are present and happening; they contain promise and momentum. Maybe it is the fact that the characters seem about to do something that makes it seem they still live somehow? So that it feels as though, when I close the book, they go forward instead of into some sort of glassy-eyed happy retirement?

What about you? Do you prefer these taking-off moments? Or the settled ones?