(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

[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.