(no subject)

[shadowkat]

Thank you to the two people who gave me virtual gifts! Mucho appreciated.

Not a fan of Valentine's Day. Bad things happen to me on Valentine's Day.


*Sprained my ankle, got beaten up by the side-walk, and broke up with best friend of 25 years
*Got Robbed - someone broke into my apartment while I was sleeping and stole my lap-top, after I'd done my taxes on it.

Just to name a few.

Also can't do the chocolates - for some reason they put wheat-gluten in the boxed chocolates, I've no idea why. So bought home-made dark coconut raw chocolate instead.

This morning they named the top three favorite Valentine's Day movies. I can't remember the third one. But one and two were: The Notebook (which I've never seen)
and Pretty Woman (which I *cough*like*cough* but everyone else I know outside of the Momster despises because well, we've already had this conversation, I'm not in the mood for a repeat.).

What I'd like? A list of favorite romantic novels, preferably written after the 19th Century and Early 20th. I ask people online for a list and I get clobbered with the Brontes, Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, and Henry James. Bleargh. Outside of Austen, most of these are just depressing or like watching The Way We Were fifty times.

Modern Romantic Novels - post 1950. Got any???

Ponders. I'm drawing a blank. Lots of romance novels...but nothing of a literary vibe.
I know I've read a few. So why is my mind a blank?

* Bridget Jones Diary (Pride and Prejudice satire)
* Sunshine by Robin McKinely...okay maybe not a romantic novel, felt romantic to me
* Time Traveler's Wife - which I admittedly have yet to read
* Night Train to Memphis by Elizabeth Peters - more lame mystery/adventure with romance
* Checkmate by Dorothy Dunnet...romance by way of Alexander Dumas

I don't know you got any? No Edith Wharton allowed! Also nothing by Nicholas Sparks or the guy who wrote Bridges of Madison County ( I did read the later book). And no, Stephanie Meyer! Other than that...

Comments

[embers-log.livejournal.com]

When I was driving today I heard the theme from The Goodbye Girl, which was a wonderful, funny and romantic movie... (I know you are looking for books and not movies, but I thought I would mention it).

Have you read Mary Stewart's 'This Rough Magic'? It has a lovely Shakespearian theme set in Greece, and is very romantic.... I also loved her 'Moon Spinners' (also set in Greece). Those are the books of hers I own because they are romantic in ever sense of the word.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Good choices.

I've seen the Goodbye Girl five times. (Should tell you that.) Considered seeing the Broadway musical.

And read all of Mary Stewart and Victoria Holt. My favorite Mary Stewart is Touch Not the Cat - about a woman who is a telepath and falls in love with a man who speaks to her telepathically. I think she did that one.
Also loved Helen McKininis. (Relatives - mother, grandmother, and aunts had all these books...so they were free.)

[ponygirl2000.livejournal.com]

The Passion by Jeanette Winterson is so romantic and sad. I haven't re-read it in years but I remember when I first did it was one of those books that complete strangers in yoga class would come over to tell me how much they loved it when I was talking about it with my friend.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

I should try that one. The only Winterson I've tried is Oranges Aren't the Only Fruit - which is so painfully grim in places that I can't get myself to finish it. It may be a mood thing. I've held on to it, with the view that I may read it again. I've heard that The Passion is actually better.

[rebcake.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I'm kinda iffy on the whole "literary" genre. Does that just mean "no spaceships"? (No, don't tell me, I prefer to pretend to be above it all.) Anyway, I like books that have a light romantic tone. "The Thin Woman" by Dorothy Cannell is a fun, spoofy mystery with a Bridget Jonse-y feel, although it came out years earlier.

You might try "Their Eyes Were Watching God" by Zora Neale Hurston, "Memoirs of a Geisha" by whatsisname, or "Like Water For Chocolate" by Laura Esquivel to break out of the all-white ghetto, though they are none of them light. They were popular, any road.

"The Virginian" by Owen Wister is pretty romantic, as are the later "Horatio Hornblower" books by C.S. Forrester. Both were written in the 20th century about earlier times. I've never read "The African Queen", also by Forrester, but his other stuff is good, so that's promising.

Uh, I just realized that some of those are from the 20s or 30s-40s. Do as you will.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

No, literary means no "bodice ripper romance novels" by Kathleen Woodwiss. LOL! Because read a ton.

I've actually read everything you listed but The Virginian and Horatio Hornblower novels. And The African Queen.

Their Eyes Were Watching God is frigging hard to read. Basically a poem in dialect. But well-written. Memoirs of a Geisha wasn't bad, but I don't think I'd call it romantic, so much as tragic - reminds of The Way We Were. Did I see the movie? I can't remember the movie. I remember the book very well. Read it for a book club back in the 1990s. Like Water for Chocolat was wonderful. As was the movie. There's another one called Chocolate - that takes place in France...with Johnny Depp. Both were made into films. Read the books and saw the films. (also book club related).

Haven't read The Thin Woman. That's new. May look it up. Prefer light romantic tone. Melodramatic gets on my nerves.

[Sigh, I got to listen I'll Always Love You twice this week - first Jennifer Hudson, now Mercedes on Glee.)

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Ones that stick out in my memory (for various reasons as they are distinctly different types of books) none of which are 'literary' at all but straight romances.
Flowers from the Storm by Laura Kinsale
A Woman Scorned, by Liz Carlyle
Sweet Revenge, by Nora Roberts
The Lady's Companion, by Carla Kelly

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Okay you found four that I haven't heard of. I may try those. I like the Revenge bit.

[As I told rebcake - I meant the non-boddice ripper sex filled books aka Rosemary Rodgers. Which are...well a bit on the smutty side but fun all the same.]

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Okay, I read a description of Sweet Revenge and the first three paragraphs...that's doable. Light and fun. Also reminds me a little of Revenge, plus hits my kinks - two jewel thieves.

What are the other one's about?

I need light...hence my no Edith Wharton or for that matter Zora Neal Hurston. No work. But also no overt sentimentality. And I need a little subversiveness...I've read far too many manly man/womanly woman smutty novels...or manly man/skinny girl chicklits...there has to be something a bit more innovative out there, right? I'm trying your other suggestion the Other Guy's Bride again, along with The Night Circus. The Other Guy's Bride is interesting, but may be too satirical for my taste right now. Not sure yet. Am admittedly curious, since I sort of like the hero.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Flowers from the Storm is somewhat dark (and not entirely likable... just rather interesting in that I don't think I've ever seen -- or ever would see -- that particular scenario again. (18th Century man has a stroke, loses the ability to speak, is locked up in an insane asylum run by Quakers and eventually falls for the Quaker girl who is his caretaker. I remember it primarily as genre busting because... who the hell would have thought up that plot?)

A Woman Scorned was somewhat fun (as I vaguely remember) as it reversed the trope. The heroine is suspected of having murdered her asshole first husband. The hero is her husband's relative sent to 'investigate', and it's sort of a reverse in that the hero is the ingenue in the story.

Sweet Revenge I remember because I have a kink about jewel theives. (I also remember "Priceless" by Mandelyn Kaye for that same reason. That one was also fun.) In "Sweet Revenge", the woman is the jewel thief.

The Lady's Companion is a soft, gentle little Regency where the impoverished heroine takes a job as a lady's companion... and ends up falling in love with one of the servants. And it's not some "Lord in disguise" story. He really is just a servant.

I tend to have thing for how and whether romances play with the genre rather than strictly conform. I prefer authors who break a few rules and yet still make it work as a romance, so the ones that stick in my memory often have a tendency to be the ones that are slightly atypical (or feed a kink).

A fun 'bodice ripper' was, I thought, Brenda Hiatt's "Scandalous Virtue" as it was something of a "merry widow" tale of a heroine actively wanting to become scandalous. Quite fun (as I vaguely remember).


I wasn't happy with the ending of "The Other Guy's Bride." Though I have fond memories of "As You Desire" which is the book "The Other Guy's Bride" is a sequel to (although it starts out immensely satirical of the format.)


And if you're looking for relatively light, I did enjoy the geek romance in "Ready Player One", though that one is very much an adventure story with just a side of romance (and no sex at all).

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

And reading these descriptions I'm teased by memories of two books that I cannot actually remember the names of. One being dueling con-artists in the old West. Wish I could remember what that one was. And I seem to remember (I think) that the author of "A Woman Scorned" also wrote another novel where the hero was a Pinkerton agent sent to investigate a crime falling for a lady who was above his station... I think. Boy, a lot of these books have faded from my memory.

While at it, I'll also add one of the oddest romances that I've ever read... the story of Persephone and Hades (yeah, the Greek myth) as retold and interpreted into romance form in the "Dazzling Brightness" by Roberta Gellis. (I said I had a thing about romances that toy with the genre. :)

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

I'll ask the Momster..she read one that took place in the Old West with two dueling con artists in New Orleans recently. The guy won and the woman had to give him her house, but she
worked to make it unlivable for him.

Have you ever read Anne McCaffrey's Restoree?
In that tale, a earth woman is skinned by alien B, alien A save her but don't know she's from another planet, a doctor on Alien A planet has a new skin process and revives her. She's had a makeover. Went from plain and ugly on earth, to quite lovely on alien A planet. While being a nurse...she rescues and falls in love with an allegedly brain dead guy, only to discover he's not brain dead - just doped up. She gets him off the drugs, and rescues him from the hospital, then she finds out he's the alien A planet leader. The other McCaffrey novel that was weirdly subversive was Ship Who Sang - the heroine is a deformed child who is saved by becoming the soul of a space-ship, she falls for her Captain, and they get to "join" in a weird way on an alien planet.

Piers Anthony did a Hades/Persephone tale..as well as a love story about Death (Behold a Pale Horse.)

Genre tends to flip them more. My biggest kink and it is very hard to find is when the woman is the hero and the guy the damsel. (Think Aeryn Sun and John Crichton - S2 - Liars, Guns, and Money. Or Buffy and Spike - Intervention and Showtime.) But that's hard as hell to find in novels. Easier, oddly, to find on tv. (Starbuck in the new BSG and Apollo.) Love that gender flip. But again difficult to find in novels. Suzanne Collins has come closest with Katniss and the Hunger Games triology.