You know it’s one of those days when you start heading for the shower in the morning, and start seriously considering the fact that you have to get clean about forty-five minutes before you’re due at friend’s for dinner. And still, you can’t find the energy to stand and do what needs to be done. Oh no, you’d rather beat a dead horse (or beat a dead horse after spending an afternoon catching up on RSS feeds…oh, the feed reader built into Thunderbird is beyond wonderful!).
Ron of Beatrice picks up the Mary Bly story, and makes an interesting comment. Yeah, we’re secure enough to admit we wish we’d thought of it:
Here, here–I’ve long maintained that the best romances, the ones that push against generic convention to indulge in genuinely imaginative storytelling, are social comedies as insightful as those produced by more upscale authors like (as Bly suggests) Elinor Lipman. As it happens, I just finished Bly’s latest, Much Ado About You, and it’s one of the funnier novels I’ve read in recent months. This is the thing a lot of people don’t get about romance; the best writers in the field know how to have fun with it. As for why I’m reading Bly, well, you’ll just have to continue reading the blog over the next few weeks to find out…but I’ll say this for now: she’s not the only romance novelist with a Ph.D. in literature…
As for his last comment, we’d say he’s right. Very right. Of course that makes sense for a genre that boasts an astrophysicist, 747 pilot, more lawyers than you can count, medical doctors, accountants (no, not us — we maintain that to be considered as such, one must be able to add), librarians, teachers, hmm, possibly one or more for every known profession (the list, as we consider it, seems endless).
