In lieu of SBD, I bring you

AMANDA'S FIVE QUESTIONS!

[trumpet flourish]

(be prepared to fall asleep halfway through for lo! I am not exactly concise.)

1. Can you tell us who your favorite heroine is & why?

This is really, really hard. Really. First I thought Romance, in which case I was hard-pressed to choose between Leda (The Shadow and the Star) and Zenia (Dream Hunter, and yes - everyone hates that heroine, but I adore her). Leda for her unshakable confidence and Zenia because she's just so scared and fucked-up and tough.

But then I realized that I enjoy/admire those characters but "favorite" isn't the right word. So then I thought of Melony, from Irving's Cider House Rules, and I have to say: holy crapness, what an amazing character. It's almost painful to read her, she's so brutally honest and mean-n-ugly and pitiable. And funny. She's like Zenia to me - fabulously unpleasant and gloriously real. However, I don't think Melony can really be called a heroine.

So then, here's my favorite, after only a little thought: the unicorn, from the Last Unicorn. Because she's the only heroine I ever wished I could be, to the point that my heart aches.

2. What is your least favorite plot device? Any thoughts on plot driven vs. character driven novels?

I suppose I especially dislike rape or any variety of sexual assault when it's utterly gratuitous. Not that it can't be used, of course (my finished ms is about a rape victim, after all), but I keep finding it used as a kind of throwaway thing. Witness Gaelen Foley's Lord of Ice, where it's revealed that the heroine and many other girls at her boarding school had been regularly molested by some Guy In Charge Of Things. The heroine tells the hero, who goes and beats up Molester Guy (I think he maybe gets put in jail too), and about 3 paragraphs are spent on the heroine's quote-unquote recovery. It's like "Oh that bad man hurt me, thank you for nabbing him, I'm okay now." And never is it ever mentioned again. Ever. Not once. Not a single. Fucking. Word. In a few more pages, she's happily boffing the hero and all is well with the world. It was only put there as a way for the hero to rescue her, to show off how wonderful he is. Peee-yuke. (See also: Snow and Ashes, A Breath of, where rape isn't just for breakfast anymore.)

As for plot-driven vs. character-driven, I always say that I'm All About The Story, but the truth is that character trumps story ever time, for me. If a character is well-drawn and acts believably, consistently? Then story will always follow. Because story is about people doing stuff and dealing with stuff. It only goes wrong when you always give the priority to the stuff instead of to the people. That's what I think, anyhow.

3. What is the best way to resurrect the indie bookseller, if there are any left at all?

Ya know, this is a good question. Honestly? I don't like bookstores. Any bookstores. Indie bookstores are, in my experience, the most dislikable of the lot - bunch of pretentious snobs, most of whom wouldn't know good prose if it curled itself into their ears and purred there for weeks. At least if I go to a Borders, they aren't irredeemable assholes to me.

I pretty much buy online and I'm hardly alone in that, so I really think that would be the direction for booksellers to look: integrating the online experience with the in-store experience. The best of both worlds. So I could go into the bookstore and browse for new and interesting books, with the lil Staff Recommends cards on them - I love those things, handwritten reasons why so-and-so loved this book. Or didn't love it, for that matter. I'd love if I got a stack of the little cards myself, so I could write what *I* thought of the book, and add that to it - kinda like how the comments at amazon.com work, except I think the pool of commentators would be a little less of the Least Common Denominator. And then, I'd love a computer where I can punch in any keyword or author or title and pull up a whole selection - show me what's in stock now and what is not, but that I can order with the click of a button, and will be shipped right to the store for me, for little or no fee, there within a week for me to peruse.

Notice how important MY part in it all is - I want to have MY say, and I want to find the books MYSELF. Not that the staff shouldn't be friendly and available, but I want to be able to navigate without them. Take all that and put it with well-stocked shelves (a sadly missing feature of most bookstores, and almost all indies), and I'll be there every damn weekend spending money that I really don't have oh but who cares yay books!

4. Do you read the last chapter first?

I am an absolute nazi about reading ahead. Seriously. I feel incredibly sorry for the peek-aheaders of the world.

5. Name several favorite Chicago things to do/places to see that are off the tourist trail & yet vital to seeing the 'real Chicago.'

Ahhhh, this is hard! But we here at Sum Of Me are dedicated to making Rosina feel homesick, so here we go:

1. You gotta go to at least one neighborhood fest. Every neighborhood has em. Mine has a couple and I recommend the one next weekend, the Mayfest (weirdly being held in June this year). Some are free, some are a coupla bucks. All are in the streets, with an expanse of road shut down and people everywhere and plastic cups of beer. You're supposed to be drinking out on the streets and dancing to loud (usually local) music. Stick with anything that has a church or neighborhood name in it (Ukranian Village Fest or St. Mike's, etc.), and stay away from the big events (like Venetian Night and such). Check out metromix.com to know when and where they are.

2. Maybe not off the tourist path, but instead of going to the top of the Sears tower and hanging out on the observation deck trying to look interested, I always recommend heading to the John Hancock on a clear evening. Go up to the Signature Room restaurant (top floor) and order a chocolate martini at the bar. For your $6, the whole city is laid out before you and you get a cocktail.

3. You have to ride the red line El. It smell faintly of urine and there's usually a crazy and smelly person preaching his/her own gospel and asking for money and it's that scary-sad city experience, but if you turn to any single person and ask anything - a good place to get dinner, where to go once you get off at your stop, where can you get a dozen roses at 2 am? - you'll be genially answered and maybe even taken under the protective wing of a complete stranger. It's just how this place works. I've been offered the use of total strangers' cell phones, many times. This doesn't generally happen in major U.S. cities.

4. Take the brown line to the Rockwell stop (not right now, they're doing construction, so it'd have to be the Western stop and then you'll walk a few blocks) and visit Lake Claremont Press. They do non-fiction Chicago books - guides and histories and stuff like dat - and though that's the actual offices of the publishing house, it's also a storefront where you can buy their (exclusively Chicago-oriented) books. How cool is that? They even have a Free Books box out every once in a while, and you can help yourself.

5. Just a 3 minute walk from there is my place. Which is way off the tourist trail. Little-known major attraction of Chicago: Thunderpussy chewing on a plastic Christmas tree in June. (shuddup) And then I'll take you to eat!

6. You have to get deep dish, of course, and I swear by Malnati's - accept no others. Also breakfast at Ann Sather's where you must have cinnamon rolls, and I recommend the one on Broadway in Wrigleyville because you can walk around the neighborhood (which is a great example of everyday Chicago architecture) and check out the fun shops. Tapas at Iberico, ice cream at Sweet Occasions, a pepper and egg sammich (at about any diner, I guess), piles of German food and an oompah band at the Brauhaus, margaritas at Garcia's, a trip up to Devon for kick-ass Indian food, and of course the Spoon Thai. And that's just to start. There is just so much good food in this city.

7. Fly into Midway if you can and then rent a car and drive in on I-55. Yes, the drive on Lake Shore is mandatory, but what most people forget is that the skyline really is gorgeous from so many angles. Approaching from the south-west, especially if you do it at night with the city lit up, is a really breathtaking sight. Plus, you should just really drive around Chicago some. It's a driving kinda city, even though it also has terrific public trans. And no quest for a "real" Chicago experience would be complete without getting a migraine over whether or not you're allowed to park in this totally empty spot which looks harmless but my GOD, the rules that are posted might as well be written in Sanskrit.

8. See a play. I know people usually think of that as a requirement of New York travel, but Chicago is SO TERRIFIC for good, intimate, experimental theatre. Sure you can go see Wicked downtown, or any other number of big productions, but just don't bother. Go to Steppenwolf. Or the Goodman. Or to some theatre you never heard of that's located above a pizza place and costs $10/seat and comes with free beer. Good, small theatre is all over the city and just this really wonderful tradition. Go here to search for what's showing, and go here for brief reviews.


Yes, that list is pretty heavily centered on my corner of the city. It's the only one I know, sorry. There's all kindsa great food (and non-food things, too) on the south side, but I dunno the south side at all. And I'd recommend a blues bar, but I really haven't been able to find one I feel at home in - which is my fault for not looking harder.

Thanks, Amanda! That was fun! And long-winded! Hurrah!

And here's an apple-custard tart recipe.

Apple Custard Tart

I have absolutely no idea where I got this recipe. I forget.

Start by thinly slicing some apples. I generally use granny smith, but there's no rule - just something crisp and tart. It takes like two apples.

The custard:
1 cup milk
3 egg yolks
2 Tbs corn starch
4 Tbs sugar
2 Tbs vanilla

Heat the milk and 2 Tbs of sugar in a medium saucepan.
In a bowl, mix the yolks, vanilla, and 2 Tbs of sugar. Add the corn starch a little at a time. Add the warmed milk (it should be hot but NOT boiling) slowly and continuously until it's all blended.

Keep stirring! Don't stop stirring!

While stirring, pour it all into a saucepan on medium heat. Keep stirring. You're stirring really fast. With a whisk. It'll turn into custard. Well, eventually. You'll start wondering how long it's going to take. You'll continuously doubt your ability to identify custard. "It must be custardy enough by now," you'll say to yourself. "Okay, so not it's not," you'll amend, "but absolutely NOTHING is happening here, not a damn thing, I'm just stirring milk here, so I must've messed something up. My arm is tired. Maybe I should just stop. It'll never become custard, gaaaaah." But no! You shall keep stirring! And then alla sudden with absolutely no warning whatsoever, it will go from liquid to custard in exactly 2 seconds. Poof! Custard! And it always, always, always happens when you're a millisecond away from giving up.

Now let the custard rest for like 10 minutes. It's had a hard day.

Crust:
You know that recipe - here. Cook the crust first, until it's golden brown and yummy. Don't forget to weigh it down (with dried beans scattered on aluminum foil).

Assembly:
Pour the custard into the cooked pie shell. The spread the apple slices on top in concentric (I will take any excuse to legitimately use that word) circles, covering the whole thing in a layer of appley goodness. Sprinkle with some sugar and cinnamon. Then pop it in a preheated broiler fo a few minutes, until it's all nice and golden.

I have a note here that you can brush it with heated apple jelly if desired, but I never have.

Family

Yesterday morning, just as I was going to pour my cup of freshly-finished-brewing coffee, the phone rang. I let the machine pick up as I pulled down a coffee cup and heard a woman's muffled voice, obviously crying, barely intelligible.

I immediately figured it was my mother in a bout of depression, calling me (as she's done a few times over the years) to sob out an apology [for being a bad mother, anything she might've done to ever hurt me, her very existence, the list goes on] which inevitably turns out to be a result of something Oprah or Dr Phil told her to feel bad about and which she doesn't really believe, but a little near-suicidal drama is, to her mind, an excellent way to get people to dote on her in the manner to which she thinks she is entitled. And to do it so as to catch me on my way to work - dirty trick, thought I. Then I decided to actually listen to the message and see if maybe there was something in there that was actually important.

When I played it back, I could still barely understand it. And it was the eye-talian, saying my brother (Bro #4) was in the hospital, and can I call her back because it's an emergency.

I dialed the house and no answer. I went to my bag to find my address book so I could dial her cell, sifted through the umbrella, wallet, some mail, a novel, started to lose my mind and frantically dumped it all on the floor until there it was. I opened it and flipped through pages in this panicked way, hearing myself muttering he's okay, he's okay, I know he's okay, he has to be okay, please be okay where's the number where's the fucking number he's okay he's okay he's okay please jesus please please please be okay until I forced myself to stop and breathe and dial.

I'll break the suspense for you now and tell you that he's fine. When he found himself in horrible gut-pain, he took himself off to the ER. It's turned out to be a stone that is stubborn about passing. Very stubborn about moving, even, but he'll be fine. Fine enough for me to joke earlier today when
Neff: "Daddy, why'd you make that face like that?"
Bro4: "Because it hurts SO BAD. I took it like a man, though, didja see?"
Neff: "Yeah, took it like a man!"
Me: "Yes, like a whining, crying man."
Bro: "Stop making me laugh, dammit."

But when I called my sis-in-law and she sounded so unlike herself, and they weren't sure of anything except they wanted to keep him at the hospital because of how bad the pain was and the hee-yuge amount of blood in his urine, and the sound of her asking "Can you please come now? I'm sorry, I don't know what to do" was the sound of complete emotional defeat - well, I took the world's fastest shower, turned off the coffee pot, poured enough cat food to hold Thunder for at least 24 hours, and threw a thousand toiletries into the bag. I was on the road in 10 minutes, cursing at rush-hour traffic all the way.

Normally, I wouldn't say so much about it all, especially since it's turned out okay. The eye-talian had had surgery herself on Wednesday, see - removing polyps from her sinuses and she bled too much and was on some pretty serious painkillers. She really couldn't take care of the kids (who had the day off school for some damn reason or another), and she was supposed to go to her post-op follow-up but she couldn't drive because of the narcotics. Much like Obi-Wan, I was their only hope. Not as desperate an emergency as originally thought, but certainly they very much needed me.

The reason I bother to talk about it is: before I knew it'd turn out okay, as I was driving so fast and yet with the unnatural precision that absolute panic gives me, as I kept telling myself don't think, just get there, just get there safe first and then you can think, one thing at a time, it felt like I was reliving the night my father died. And it scared the living shit out of me. Naturally.

I have four brothers. The one who lives closest is the one closest to me in age. We were mistaken very often for twins when we were children. When my mother cut all my hair off above my ears in a horrid cut, I'd be mistaken for him all the time. Our eyes are the same color and shape and size. We both have the long, dark, lush eyelashes and the profusion of dark eyebrow. Same coloring, same shape face. Only a year and a half older than me.

He's a very good brother, and I love him very much. To lose a day of work yesterday was unbelievably poorly timed, but I don't begrudge a minute of it. If all my family were like them, I'd never complain about getting together with my family.

We went to see him in the ER yesterday, just a few minutes before they moved him out in preparation for taking him upstairs to his own room. They admitted him. They wheeled his bed out into the hall and said we could stay with him - but it would be a few hours, and we were very clearly underfoot. So he said we should go, he'd call us when he got up to his room. Yeah, I said. You get the room and go get settled in, make the place your own, then let us know if we can bring you anything. Lava lamps, tikki statues, whatever. He laughed and so did his wife, and what a sorry sight they were - him clutching his abdomen, her cupping her hands around her nose and eyes, both looking horrified and saying You have to stop making us laugh, you're gonna kill us.

I called them pitiful specimens, and then was completely at a loss for how to act without using humor in a stressful situation. Or in any situation involving my brother, for that matter. His sons hugged him, and I remembered how he used to be a chubby kid, how by today's standard his early 80's little belly and round face would hardly be considered "fat". His wife kissed him, and I had a flash of memory - his first real girlfriend, Cindy, and her big pink prom dress.

I just kind of patted his arm as I walked by, sliding my palm down his forearm as I walked away. But he caught my hand and I paused just for a second, us squeezing each other's fingers but not looking at each other. Just this very scant two seconds, and I thought of the hospital where we rushed to learn our father was dead. Of how this brother was out on a Navy ship, and didn't have the same hospital memory, but the look of his face at the house, in the night, when he arrived after a long flight - how tired he was. Of how we played in this mudhole once when we were maybe 7 or 8 years old, and got in trouble, and being hosed down in cold water before we were let into the house, the both of us cold, miserable, resentful, and united against the persecution of the mud-covered.

I'm so used to disliking my family. In that second of holding his hand, arm extended behind me, I finally understood what Snookie says about why she wanted at least two kids. She always says that no matter what, they always have each other now. They're not alone in the world. Even if they don't get along when they grow up, they still have each other. I never cared much for that theory, since my own family has been so often an unpleasant burden, and my self-made family - my friends - have been so much more a part of me.

I always thought, growing up, that I could choose who to share myself with, that I could cut off my family if I wanted. Move away and don't tell them anything I don't want to. They can't come into my room if I don't want them to and there will be locks on all my doors when I grow up, and all of my things will be mine, ownership will not be subject to dispute and there will be no enforced sharing. You grow up and have friends and a spouse and your OWN family, and that's who shares your life. I'd grow up and choose who got to know what, who got to have parts of me, and I'd be Me Without Them, and that's how it's supposed to be.

And I am all that, I've gotten all that. But I didn't know, growing up, that I can't make my growing-up years go away. I thought, in that adolescent way, that your One True Love and your Very Best Friend were the only ones who really know you. I thought of that when I watched his kids and wife say goodbye. I thought I was just the helper bee, a kind of witness to this moment of his life. But then he caught my hand for a second and I heard Snookie saying they'll always have each other and realized for the first time that it applies to me and my siblings, whether I want it to or not. They know parts of me that no one else can, no matter how descriptive I am. And they lived those parts with me. The same houses show up in their dreams, the same rooms, the same muddy creek in Kentucky.

It's not that they know me better than anyone; it's that they knew me before anyone else did. Even the ones I don't like. Even the ones I can't really depend on. Even the ones I can't ever have a real conversation with because they will never really see me, who and what I am. Even if we never see or speak to each other again for the rest of our lives, we still have each other.

I'm tempted to call it sick and twisted. Or wondrous or comforting. Or torturous or regrettable. Or just plain beautiful.

But it's none of that and it's all of that, of course. It's family.

Celebrate Smart Bitches Day with
Lyvvie!
and
Fiona!
and
Kate!
and
jmc!
and
Bookseller Chick!


Oh No He Di'n't

Okay, this might start out seeming very un-SBDish but stick with me, okay?

So I went to the dermatologist today, okay, and he sucked. SUCKED, I say, because he scheduled four (4!!!) patients for the same 8:30 slot, that bastard, and then when he finally strolled in at 9:10, he spent exactly 4 minutes with me, firing off questions and instructions ratatatatatat ratatatattat and I'm all retin-a wha? Did you just say hot compress? Wait, come back! Basically, this is what I got out of it:

1. Wear SPF 30. Not 15. Even if you spend every second of your life in a windowless basement wearing long sleeves and a broad-brimmed hat, for the love of all that is holy, WEAR SPF 30.
2. Something about ovulation causes breakouts. Sometimes. Unless it doesn't. Mostly.
3. I don't have Cancer Of The Birthmark. Yay. (It has something to do with an inflamed follicle yadda yadda I don't remember, he went too fast.)

But okay, so this stupid doctor - whose name is Barry and I HATE you Barry, you SUCK - comes in the room and asks why I'm there and I point at my now-raised mole-like protuberance and he puts on those magnifying glasses and he's not even like within eight inches of my face and he says: "Wow. You have a lot of blackheads."

SCREW YOU, BARRY.

Sure, in retrospect, it's easy to think I coulda shot back a quick "And you got a lotta wrinkles, old man." My instinctive reaction was to recoil in horror while simultaneously hissing ohhh, BITCH! But the truth of the matter is, unexpected criticism of the physical self just tends to wilt a girl. I mean I do know that I am especially sensitive about this because I'm so totally oblivious of the most obvious physical stuff sometimes, and it's this real issue with me, so that when someone points out something that seems like I should have noticed it (You never noticed her goiter? You didn't realize he lost 60 pounds? she's seven months pregnant, are you completely BLIND??), then I feel unbelievably stupid. Actually, worse than just stupid, but anyway. Not the point.

Point: I was made to feel stupid. And on top of it, I felt hideously ugly.

You know that episode of Seinfeld when Kramer has been smoking cigars non-stop for like a couple of weeks? Then Jerry tells him his face looks like an old mitt - all brown and leathery and wrinkled? And Kramer says "Don't look at me… I'm… I'm hideous!" and he cowers in shame and shields his face as he retreats? Hi, that was me circa 9:12am today. I mean I have this really fair skin and all and it always seemed just fine to me and and and and apparently I am just a seething mass of blackheads and unbeknownst to me I have been subjecting people to this grotesquerie for YEARS and no one ever said anything, probably because it's so damn obvious and I'm the only one who didn't even notice.

Fortunately, I have a friend like Snookie, who I can call at 10am on a weekday from work and tell her, in a rather fragile voice, "No, I don't have skin cancer. But listen to what that fucking Barry shithead said to me." And her immediate response upon hearig what he said was to gasp in that satisfyingly appalled way. And I'm here to tell you that an honest, forthright, compassionate girlfriend is worth her weight in gold. Especially when I declare my intention to go sit in a dark corner and eat paste while the other kids mock me and the blackheads I rode in on, and her response is a very matter-of-fact, "What? Just get yourself a burka. Full coverage. It'll clear that right up. Comes with eyeholes and everything."

So yes, stupid jackass comment followed by stupid disproportional reaction, but the point is that my whole day was sucked into this vortex of self-hate. Because my skin is imperfect. When you magnify it. And show it to a trained professional.

But still!

So, obsessed as I was with this comment all day, and knowing as I did that I would be SBDing tonight, the two things sorted merged and this afternoon I thought "Even if he was young and cute and rich and a Duke and his grounds were like better than Pemberley and he was dashing and gallant and tortured and the scourge of the high seas and turned my knees to jelly when he smiled and whatever else, I would still NEVER EVER want ANYONE who said that to me." (Note: it was really how he said it that was so unforgivable. It was the "wow" that just made me sorry for, like, existing. Fine, tell me I have backheads but GAH, can't you find a NICER way to broach the subject? I repeat: GAH.)

Writers - especially Romance writers, I notice - are always wondering where the line is. With the hero. How bad can you make him, what can a reader not forgive, etc. In a genre where the readers will forgive the hero SO MUCH, how far is too far? And the answers are always things like how he can't be a pedophile or mean to animals or a cannibal. Like that. (Note that he can be a cold-blooded murderer, but only if Kinsale writes him.) Pretty obvious stuff, and I think anyone who knows enough about the genre to write in it already knows that stuff. Not that it keeps the writers from worrying about their heroes and the readers from tossing out the question like some neverending game of Scruples.

What's far, far more difficult to figure out are the less-obvious things. Like how sometimes, somehow, instead of coming off as a sexy-aggressive-take-charge kinda guy, the hero crosses over into Asshole Territory.

So I think I came up with a rule of thumb that might work: he should never say anything to the heroine that her good girlfriend wouldn't. Because ya know, girls can say things like "Sounds like you have an awkwardly tilted cervix, maybe, like deformed or something" to each other, no prob, but they'd never say "Wow, you have a lot of blackheads." I mean, a friend would wait to be asked her opinion and then would just say, "Hm, looks like you could maybe use a new exfoliant?"

Which , yes - makes it hard for the guys to understand where the line is, but makes it easy for girls who write guys, and who don't want to cross that line. Your hero shouldn't be a cruel bitch. At least that's my theory.

Celebrate Smart Bitches Day with
Kate!
and
Doug!
and
jmc!
and
Bookseller Chick!

An introductory aside: Our love of happy endings? Look where it's gotten us, people. What fresh bastardization is this? I mean really, even back when I was like 14, I frikken CHEERED when those two died at the end, okay? And their friend who saves the day is Kissy the freaking kissing fish?

Behold the face of our cultural downfall:



I think I need to vomit now.


MOVING ON.

I said, "I dunno what to sbd waah wahh maybe I just won't this time waah waah I mean it's not like I get like paid or anything out of it waah waah waaah some more."

Paul said, "Write about Hair and Romance."

I thought to myself Well if that isn't just the dumbest-ass idea ever.

And then I thought - hey, I really resent that like ALL romance heroines have flowing tresses. So maybe it's NOT a dumbass idea at all (props to Paul, y'all), because all of em have long hair. Granted, I generally only read historical fiction. But I'll bet about anything that even the heroines in contemporaries have flowing tresses, at least down to about shoulder-length. It's just a given.

I, as the captainesse of the SS Sassy, she whose cropped hair was dubbed by the gone-but-ne'er-forgotten Mailroom J as like unto "a bucket of sass", the bearer of The Short-n-Sweet Styles That Make Grown Women Weep With Jealousy? I NEED A FREAKING HAIRCUT. It's just so long. And you gotta understand - I have really sickeningly healthy shiny fulla-body crowning glory yadida yadida just like you'd read about in some Jude Deveraux novel, okay, but I have no desire to have long hair because (a) it's just so much work and (b) it's not nearly as fun as a bucket of sass.

RELATED BUT NOT RELEVANT TANGENT: There were these books by I think it actually WAS Jude Deveraux, I dunno, but I read em as a teenager and I completely and I mean compleeeeeetely loved them. It was a series, four brothers (of course), and

• the first was married to headstrong fiery redheaded woman who didn't want to be married and she was all set to be the head of a nunnery (seriously) but then this arranged marriage came along.
• The second brother - and you have to understand how much I LOVE this one in retrospect, because we're talking comedy GOLD here, people - married a girl with long black hair and she was Scottish and a tomboy, wore nothing but a tartan and ran wild in the Hielands with her clan. And she'd run about in the heather which would tickle the backs of her knees hahahhahaahaaa and it turned out that that was one of her erogenous zones: the backs of her knees. Can't. Stop. Laughing.
• The third brother married some creampuff of a girl with golden blond hair and she looked like an angel and stung like a bee and I don't remember much about them.
• The fourth brother fell in love with this chick who was disguised as a boy (potentially my favorite Romance plot device, as you may recall) and she was a minstrel and was set up to be his servant-boy while he was out on some military campaign, and guess what color hair she had? Every color. Every strand was a different color, resulting in a light-brownish and unimpressive mop, but was glorious when the sun hit it. Or something.
  

Please oh please my faithful readers: if you know the titles of these books, the series? Please tell me. NOW. I know I could really hunt around and figure it out, but I'm just way too lazy for that. I hold some very fond memories of sitting on the train ride with Snooks and me talking quietish about Romance novels and somehow these books came up as ones I really strongly remember. Then she said "oh my gawd is that the Scottish lass with the extremely sensitive knees? I read that!" And we got louder, laughing so hard and loud and long over these damn books that the entire train car was rolling with us by the end of it.

And I really, really, really want to read them again.

Anyhoo, back to my point. (See how I pretend like I ever had one? HAH.) Being the sister of four brothers, I was always aware of how really much long hair on a girl means to guys. The menfolk love the long hair. Most of them HATE the very idea of short hair on their womens. I personally know many women who don't get their hair cut because their husbands wouldn't like it. And these are educated, self-respecting, free-thinking, modern women. And I guess my thinking here is that the long hair, in both writing the genre (and in life, frankly), can be quite a crutch. It's nice and safe. It's shorthand for "sensuous" and "feminine."

And for me, it's shorthand for "ho hum" because few things in the genre are more overplayed. Oooooh, Hero Unmanned At Sight Of Shining Long Flowing Tresses Down Heroine's Back. Stop the presses, already. Literally.

But seriously, if you know those books with the Hairy Heroines, please comment and let me know, 'kay? And if you're ever in Chicago, gimme a call and I'll have the eye-talian cut your hair above your ears and you'll look so magnificent you won't even believe it.

Celebrate the bitchiness of being smart!

I mean. The smartness of. That is. Well. Um.

With
jmc!
Suisan!
Doug!
Fiona!
and eventually arp!

Whoooooooooooo!!!


Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Somebodyorother

I finished it and this is the totally cheap-ass version of my thoughts because a lil while ago I finished Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell which is a really really great book and everyone go read it now but anyway I read P&P like more than a WEEK ago, you don't expect me to remember it, do you? I've got raven wings and shining lines drawn on water and thistle-down hair bobsing about in my head, so there's little room for a bunch of silly rich people in silly outfits.

Here's what I think about P&P, when I bother to think of it:

• YAWN.
• Right at the scene where Darcy proposes that first time is where it stops being such a yawnfest. It gets way fun then and the rest I just ate up in record rime.
  
• It's totally not a Romance.
  
• Why is it not? Hm. Well, I guess first of all, if it WERE a Romance, Lydia's running off with Whatshiswickham would have been portrayed in at least a bit of a romantic way. But it's a freaking horror show. It's appalling and ruinous and just The Worst Thing Ever and, in short, devoid of romance. It's not even a romance with the little r, for heavensakes. Romance The Genre (and in the classical sense) is, in general, way way way less judgey of lovers running away together.
• Also, and even more to the point: when they wind up together in the end? That whole scene(s)? Major fizzle, romance-wise. Talk about anticlimactic. If their getting-together were really the whole conflict/climax of the piece, Austen woulda delivered. Because girlfriend can write, yo, and she totally wouldna blown something that important, and certainly not the whole Point of her novel. Ergo, that wasn't what it was all about.
  
• Just as Darcy is the model for the dark and brooding haughty Romance novel hero, Elizabeth is the most tiresome and shallow scrap of human and a forerunner of all the TSTL heroines in Romance. I'm convinced the younger Bennett girls were so unbearable only in order to make Elizabeth look good by comparison. Oh, Liza is so clever and quite the best of the young ladies! Yeah, so clever that she couldn't see right the hell through the unbelievably transparent Wickham, and so good that she only falls desperately in love with Darcy after checking out his property. Lord, how I'd love to run into her at a public ball and bitchslap the hell out of her.
• There is an awful lotta moralizing going on in this book. Factoid on Beth: Moralizing is one of her top turnoffs. Right up there with liver-n-onions breath.
• I keep wondering why this is the one Austen that people just looooooove so much. It's never been my favorite, though I do recall being more fond of it in the past. I like her others a lot lot more, and I won't ever be gushing about this one the way I can with some of her others. In short, not a pick to click. Because did I mention YAWN.
  

And yes, that's what I really think.