I find it weirdly difficult to talk about reading romance novels...

[edenfalling]

I have ambivalent feelings about genre romance. On the one hand, a lot of it is... um... gender essentialist, sexist to various degrees, and frankly badly written. On the other hand, it gives me guaranteed happy endings, reasonably written porn, and an automatic focus on female protagonists. Of course the female protagonists are usually focusing on men, but I try to stick to books where there's another plot running alongside the romance, so both the heroine and the hero have something else to think about besides having (or not having) sex with each other.

Which is by way of leading to up to talking about Nalini Singh. Whose Psy-Changeling paranormal romance series (psychics and were-creatures in the same world, because why settle for just one when you can have both!) is one of my guilty pleasures.

I am pretty sure if I'd started reading with book one (Slave to Sensation) or book two (Visions of Heat), I would have finished the volume in question and not bothered with the rest. But my introduction was book three (Caressed by Ice), and I have to admit, I have a Thing for Judd Lauren, the hero of that book. I also really like Brenna Kincaid, the heroine -- I mean, she's working on inventing a technology to duplicate and improve on Psy teleportation! She has a degree in advanced computer programming! She can build remote-controlled bombs! Brenna's awesome. :-)

So after reading book three, I went back and read books one and two and inadvertently got hooked on Singh's overarching series plot threads. I need to know how the whole mess with Silence, the Psy-Net, the Council, and the shifting balance of power between the Psy, the changelings, and the humans is going to play out. To that end, I read each new book as it's published, whether I give a damn about the personal problems of the new heroine and hero or not. (Usually Singh is good enough that I care for the duration of the book, whether I remember much about the protagonists afterwards or not.)

Which is by way of leading up to saying the latest book (Kiss of Snow) arrived in the smoke shop this week, and I have a copy and am in the middle of reading it.

Sometimes I just want brain candy, deeper analysis be damned. *wry*

Comments

[lady_songsmith]

A friend of mine loaned me Nora Robert's Circle trilogy. It has quickly become my guilty pleasure. Romance, vampires, time-travel... I'm sort of embarassed just thinking about it. And yet... it's a perfect rain&tea read.

[edenfalling]

I like Nora Roberts, actually moreso when she's doing genre romance series than when she's writing standalone thrillers-with-romance. She's usually good at creating a sense that her heroine and hero are members of a living community, instead of the only two real people set against a painted paper backdrop. Quite often they even have families! She has a thing for doing series wherein she marries off a set of siblings, one book after another. I confess I am very fond of some of those series, like the one about three adopted brothers set around the Chessapeake Bay. :-)

[willowgreen.livejournal.com]

From what little I know about Nora Roberts, I think I'd probably enjoy a lot of her books. The problem is that she's written so damn many of them, I don't know where to start!

I haven't read romance as a genre since I was in high school, and a lot of what I read back then was crap. But that was back in the heyday of the mass-produced Harlequin. I've recently rediscovered my love for Regency romance, a genre that rarely disappoints. These psi romances of which you speak also sound like a lot of fun. I assume one of the benefits of working at the smoke shop is easy access to each month's new crop of paperbacks. I hope you get an employee discount!

[edenfalling]

Cat and I read a lot of genre romance in high school and our first couple years of college -- we swapped books back and forth and constantly cherry-picked them off our local library's take-one/leave-one paperback rack. After a while we could just tell (without checking copyright dates) if something had been written in the 90s or if it was republished from the 80s, because while 90s romances could be iffy on gender stuff, 80s romances were flat-out terrifying in their "and the little woman stays home happily to be a wife and mother and forgets all about her dreams of a career and a life of her own" conclusions. Which is NOT my idea of a happy ending.