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sartorias's possibly foolhardy wish that I would post such a thing.
Libby at Lessons from the Tortoise had a great post which had me thinking all day, about old (literary) loves and how they strike you years later. I said there that Mr. Rochester was one who had seriously lost standing in my eyes, but Mr. Darcy hadn't. This was the showering, washing dishes, walking down to the shop for groceries pondering topic for the day, and I'll definitely return to it. But if I don't get the long related ramble out, it may cause damage to the parts of the brain it's been bouncing around, and besides, I really want to see what Sherwood has to say on the subject. Posting this might help prompt her to post hers.
I wondered about trying Shannon Hale's Austenland for a while, after hearing many, many raves, but suspecting I might be a lot pricklier about it than most, given past prickilyness about Jane Austen-based fiction. And I made a very rash decision to use my Audible credit for the first month of membership on it when I was feeling really rotten due to the headache nastiness of last month. It didn't take much to make me cranky then, and boy, was I ever cranky about it. (Not liking an audiobook is not necessarily to be equated with not liking the book, I know.) Then, just as I was hitting rather hard against Austenland, Maureen Johnson wrote a long, thoughtful and funny post on her blog about being said to write chick-lit. It was, of course, very intelligent, and I admire her for it, believe she's probably right that classifications are generally useless and it's especially daft to worry about a classification that nobody can seem to make even semi-decisively - and (you've guessed this was coming, no doubt) I really don't agree that she does write chick lit.
Okay - very serious preliminary comment before I completely offend anyone here - I KNOW I am not the boss of any literary classifications, much less of chick-lit (about which I'm even more unqualified to proclaim than on many other matters), and I am not the boss of Jane Austen love, no matter how much I love her. And I KNOW it doesn't matter if someone says The Bermudez Triangle or 13 Little Blue Envelopes is chick lit (see? I can't even decide whether to put in the hyphen or not. So not the boss...) and I think it isn't, or if eleventy million people say Austenland is what Jane Austen would be writing if she were alive today and I disagree. I do think it's worth discussing what some books do for some readers, even if - or rather, especially as - it won't define the books neatly, let alone their readers. And I am talking about what books do, rather than about what they're worth. However, no matter how sincere the last statement is, it would be disingenuous of me to pretend that I personally value chick lit (or what I'm roughly calling chick lit) as highly as I value Jane Austen, or to set the bar a bit lower, as highly as I value Maureen Johnson or Laurie Halse Anderson or Sarah Dessen or Catherine Gilbert Murdock. And it would show that I don't anyway, so I won't try to pretend that. I have enjoyed many straight romances (my favourite brew, perhaps unsurprisingly, is the regency) and have perhaps just been unlucky in not encountering chick lit that I found equally enjoyable.
( The ramble )
sartorias's possibly foolhardy wish that I would post such a thing. Libby at Lessons from the Tortoise had a great post which had me thinking all day, about old (literary) loves and how they strike you years later. I said there that Mr. Rochester was one who had seriously lost standing in my eyes, but Mr. Darcy hadn't. This was the showering, washing dishes, walking down to the shop for groceries pondering topic for the day, and I'll definitely return to it. But if I don't get the long related ramble out, it may cause damage to the parts of the brain it's been bouncing around, and besides, I really want to see what Sherwood has to say on the subject. Posting this might help prompt her to post hers.
I wondered about trying Shannon Hale's Austenland for a while, after hearing many, many raves, but suspecting I might be a lot pricklier about it than most, given past prickilyness about Jane Austen-based fiction. And I made a very rash decision to use my Audible credit for the first month of membership on it when I was feeling really rotten due to the headache nastiness of last month. It didn't take much to make me cranky then, and boy, was I ever cranky about it. (Not liking an audiobook is not necessarily to be equated with not liking the book, I know.) Then, just as I was hitting rather hard against Austenland, Maureen Johnson wrote a long, thoughtful and funny post on her blog about being said to write chick-lit. It was, of course, very intelligent, and I admire her for it, believe she's probably right that classifications are generally useless and it's especially daft to worry about a classification that nobody can seem to make even semi-decisively - and (you've guessed this was coming, no doubt) I really don't agree that she does write chick lit.
Okay - very serious preliminary comment before I completely offend anyone here - I KNOW I am not the boss of any literary classifications, much less of chick-lit (about which I'm even more unqualified to proclaim than on many other matters), and I am not the boss of Jane Austen love, no matter how much I love her. And I KNOW it doesn't matter if someone says The Bermudez Triangle or 13 Little Blue Envelopes is chick lit (see? I can't even decide whether to put in the hyphen or not. So not the boss...) and I think it isn't, or if eleventy million people say Austenland is what Jane Austen would be writing if she were alive today and I disagree. I do think it's worth discussing what some books do for some readers, even if - or rather, especially as - it won't define the books neatly, let alone their readers. And I am talking about what books do, rather than about what they're worth. However, no matter how sincere the last statement is, it would be disingenuous of me to pretend that I personally value chick lit (or what I'm roughly calling chick lit) as highly as I value Jane Austen, or to set the bar a bit lower, as highly as I value Maureen Johnson or Laurie Halse Anderson or Sarah Dessen or Catherine Gilbert Murdock. And it would show that I don't anyway, so I won't try to pretend that. I have enjoyed many straight romances (my favourite brew, perhaps unsurprisingly, is the regency) and have perhaps just been unlucky in not encountering chick lit that I found equally enjoyable.
( The ramble )
