Love stories February 15, 2007

In Books & magazines, Meme | 2 comments

  1. Love stories? Yes or No? Not really, no.
  2. If yes, “romances” as a genre? Or just, well, stories that have love stories? (Nobody’s going to call “Pride & Prejudice” a “romance,” right?) I used to. Maybe that’s why. When I was in high school, for a while I read nothing but romances. You know the type: there’s a pirate, a girl, a ship, a lot of sword play and swooning, they bicker, fall in love in the end, sail off into the sunset together, and live happily every after. I read a number of different authors, but the plots were all nearly identical. Oh, sometimes the guy was a financier or a brooding count or something instead of a pirate, but they were all the same. Finally one day I decided I needed to read something truly different, and never went back. Gave all my romances to a library near where I lived a number of years later, and that was that.
     
    Now don’t get me wrong. A good romance can be a wonderful thing… Books like Pride and Prejudice, Rebecca, Wuthering Heights, the list goes on. As a normal rule, I don’t read them much—pretty rarely, actually. I did read Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier a number of years ago, and loved it. Sometimes romance pops up in mysteries, fantasy, science fiction stories, but it usually isn’t the main plotline, just a branch, an offshoot. I like it that way. Adds depth to the story. That’s normally good enough for me.


2 comments

  1. meeyauw February 15

    I’m going to put Rebecca on my list of TBR books. Thank you for reminding me!

  2. –Deb February 15

    See, for me, when I think of a “romance book,” I immediately thing of Harlequin and its close relatives . . . the cheesy kind with Fabio on the cover. Classics that happen to have a love story are NOT the same thing!