Adult Romance Genre Fiction

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does anyone else ever read adult romance genre fiction?

sometimes i really like it. ive read a bit of it, maybe about 15 novels, both gay and straight romance. havent read any lesbian romance though.

i like being able to consume a book really quickly and easily. if im on holidays sometimes i just want to stay in bed for a day or two and read a novel without scrutinizing every word the way i tend to do with literary classics. i just want to consume something. i like reading something that i know its going to have a happy ending, i like knowing what im going to get. i usually like knowing that im going to laugh a lot and also its probably going to be a bit of a tear jerker, so its emotionally cathartic. i also like thinking about the ideas about relationships expressed through the characters, the ways that they negotiate intimacy, and the things that intervene in their connection, to do with their circumstances or culture or relationships with others. sometimes the other details can also be very interesting. often the author is dealing with the fact that they are writing in a climate in which their genre is scorned and so they are smuggling negotiations for the validity of their genre into the writing, or sometimes they are smuggling anti-artistic bitterness into the writing. sometimes they go way beyond all of that and they utilise the frameworks of the genre in a way that is very aware and literary.

i definitely think people treat the genre unfairly. most people who talk about how terrible it is havent actually read an example of it. it isnt for everyone, but theres nothing inherently bad about it, in the same way that theres nothing inherently bad about other genre fictions, like scifi and crime. some of it is poorly written, but in my opinion so is some (OK... my opinion is A LOT) of what positions itself as being more "literary" fiction. i get angry when people think that because someone reads romance genre fiction, that there is something about the personality of that individual that is deficient. who are those people to be so above others that they can judge them on the basis of the media that they prefer to consume? its none of their business.

anyway has anyone got any recommendations or want to chat about romance titles? i really like the contemporary stuff. i liked the Lisa Kleypas contemporary ones. does anyone read any of the RITA award winners or nominees? i read a Barbara Freethy novel called "The Way Back Home", it was pretty entertaining, i could understand why it won, because the plot was fairly complex but all the elements were really well integrated, and because traditionally popular american ideologies were expressed in a way that was more progressive and enlightened than some others ive read.

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I remember sometime two years ago, started to read "chick lit" and I enjoyed it. It was fun, quick read, light, entertaining. I grew up reading romance novels so it wasn't a big deal. Unfortunately, there's sometimes a bias which says everything read needs to be serious and deep. My favorite chick lit book so far was Juliet Sobanet, Sleeping with Paris.
 
I'm not sure if you like "dark"/"horror" novels, but Laurel K. Hamilton writes some pretty awesome stuff that's extremely hot!! She has a series on faeries and a series about a vampire hunter (Anita Blake) -I've read both and they're pretty good!!
 
I've read the Merrie Gentry novels by Laura K. Hamiliton and preferred them to her Anita Blake novels (sorry but her Blake series just too something, preachy...I dunno).

I really like historical novels and am willing to read historical romance when I find it. A classic that I loved is called Forever Amber which follows a young girl who lives during the plague. Although not strictly romance, The Walking Drum by Louis Lamour was also a great historical fiction book I read. I also love My Enemy, the Queen which is a novel about the rivalry between Queen Elizabeth and a woman who married her favorite courtier. These contain romance elements but no really overt sexual passages. I think Forever Amber was written in like 1940 or something.

I have read a current author named Mooning (Karen?) who did a series on Highland/Scottish themes--they were strictly what you would call romance novels. I found them light and enjoyable.

I have read a lot of books and like you said, turned my nose up at romance novels for a long time. However, I have found some good writers that I don't mind perusing their works.
 
Nixie said:
I've read the Merrie Gentry novels by Laura K. Hamiliton and preferred them to her Anita Blake novels (sorry but her Blake series just too something, preachy...I dunno).

I really like historical novels and am willing to read historical romance when I find it. A classic that I loved is called Forever Amber which follows a young girl who lives during the plague. Although not strictly romance, The Walking Drum by Louis Lamour was also a great historical fiction book I read. I also love My Enemy, the Queen which is a novel about the rivalry between Queen Elizabeth and a woman who married her favorite courtier. These contain romance elements but no really overt sexual passages. I think Forever Amber was written in like 1940 or something.

I have read a current author named Mooning (Karen?) who did a series on Highland/Scottish themes--they were strictly what you would call romance novels. I found them light and enjoyable.

I have read a lot of books and like you said, turned my nose up at romance novels for a long time. However, I have found some good writers that I don't mind perusing their works.
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Interesting! I'm actually the other way around! Except I stopped reading after Blood Noir- just lost my interest...but use to be addicted to the series!


Oh! Diana Gabaldon Outlander series is pretty good! It's the only real romance series I've actually read!
 
say what said:
Interesting! I'm actually the other way around! Except I stopped reading after Blood Noir- just lost my interest...but use to be addicted to the series!
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Perhaps I just have more of a thing for elves than vampires ;)
 
i read the first Merry Gentry novel. it was pretty good. there wasnt a lot of seriously laugh out loud funny bits, and i didnt cry in it. but it was seriously entertaining, compulsive reading. faerie was a little bit disappointing, i expected a lot more sparklies. it was cool reading about the different types of fairies though. i prefer the contemporary stuff i guess cause for some reason a story about a normal couple finding some solace in a shitty world really appeals to me. but i will definitely be reading more Merry Gentry, it was stacks of fun.
 
If you like dystopian novels- you should try some of the young adult fiction...it's not as gritty and kind of one dimensional- but it's super entertaining!! I love the Razorland series!
 
I forgot about the Dark Hunter series by Sherilyn Kenyon. It is based on greek myths and combine supernatural elements with romance. It has vampires of a kind in it.
 
this Merry Gentry stuff is so insanely entertaining. i cant remember being this entertained by a book since reading "Assassin's Apprentice" as a teenager. its just ridiculously entertaining, must have more. i dont think most straight men would enjoy it, and i feel sorry for them, because its the most fun thing to read ever. i love the elements of political thriller. my fav character is Queen Niceven, they should just get rid of Merry and make her be the main character.
 
thanks for putting me onto Laurell K Hamilton. just read the 3rd Merry Gentry, im so hopelessly addicted im flipping through them like magazines. i have no life, everyone needs a bit of fun
 
Merry keeps crapping on with these distorted arguments about how its not ok to wear fur because you dont eat the animal but its ok to wear leather because you eat the animal. wtf, what is the purpose of repeating this poorly developed anti fur argument across books? why is it more ok to kill and eat animals than it is to kill and wear them when both are arguably totally unnecessary? like as if wearing it doesnt support the untrue notion that its cool to eat it just because you "use" all of it, as if you dont throw away the many other "useless" parts, or as if you wouldnt want to wear the leather if it wasnt "useful"? and then she starts up with this stuff about how eating nonhuman bodies that are closer to human than other animal bodies is more wrong than eating animal bodies? is this some kind of confused pro vegetarian message happening here? can we return to the plot please? these opinions subject to future revision.
 
this series is awesome, im up to "A Lick of Frost". its fun to think about what hands of power i would have as a sidhe. of course theyd have to be way too powerful.
 
i finished "A Lick of Frost". it was pretty good. especially the "moment of creation" part, that was completely awesome. i am so eager to finish my current assignment work so i can persist with reading this series. i have to find out what happens in the next 2 books. and theres another one coming out in june or july or something. which is going to be just in time for my school break.

i also read another romance book by Jill Shalvis called "Simply Irresistible". it was pretty good reading, in the sense that it was entertaining and wholesome and not unconvincing. but if it was convincing, the characters were still a bit unrealistic. the hero especially. he was a tall dark muscular handsome exhotshot lawyer who moved back to his small hometown and was so good with investments that he could afford to prop up the town with his earnings????? and became mayor???? and he was a carpenter so good with his hands that he could build entire houses????? and plus he was extremely honest and caring?? like OK, seriously, from a pure fantasy perspective, i would settle for good with hands, stable bank balance, and honest and caring? i think adding legal and financial wonderkid to the mix is unrealistic. it was filled with these bits like "Love your smile... and your hair." and "Yes, God yes." i read it because apparently it won a RITA or something but i admit it was disappointing. i read a different RITA award winning book previously and that one was really good. this one was good, entertaining reading, but hardly flash in terms of narrative or character construction.

when i finished this one i thought. "the reason why i read romance is because nobody has ever taken care of me properly". i liked the way that the hero really wanted to take care of the lead character and support her to achieve what she wanted to. i cant completely tell whether this is a characteristic of the book, or to do with where i am at in my life right now. i think that its possible that it is to do with the book, because having been a very dedicated and persistent reader in the past i have noticed that i have contracted certain "messages" from books that actually have nothing to do with me personally. if so then maybe this is why it won an award, because it has a very strong message of "everyone deserves to be taken care of properly." but it seems like a wishy washy sort of way to make critical judgments of a work of art, of the way you felt about it after consuming it. and i dont think that i have read enough romance to say either way.
 
i read "Swallowing Darkness", it was awesome!!!!!!! loved it! reading genre fiction is very different from reading english literary classics. i think its a matter of what it has to offer and what you expect to get out of it. ive known people to read literary classics and to feel dissatisfied because they were not guaranteed a happy ending to the book, what they really wanted was to be guaranteed a happy ending, they should have just read genre fiction. i think that theres nothing wrong with wanting to read a happy ending.

i think there is a conception with literary as opposed to genre fiction that in some way literary fiction is more realist. of course anyone who is thinking clearly about literature knows that this distinction is fundamentally false. but i was just thinking with regards to the sex in romance genre fiction. i think there is a conception that sex in romance genre is very much the defining dominant motif of the genre, that examples of the genre must contain sex. when i started to read it this conception interested me because i noticed that vast portions of the books are not sex, but are dense plot, and actually the sex scenes are sometimes a little bit boring and i skip through them. not that they are necessarily boring, sometimes (maybe rarely) they are interesting. but just that i thought that the main reason why people read the genre is not for the sex, but for the unrepentant attention to plot. but getting back to what i was saying about realism. theres a realism, or naturalism to the sex in genre fiction that is not always in sex in literary fiction. because sometimes i think that literary fiction either treats sex as something that is you know, disgusting in art, it is snobby about portrayal of sex in art, it looks down on portrayal of sex as being bad taste, art is too pure for portrayal of sex. or on the other hand it treats sex as something that is "statement art", shock value, Ballard or Palahniuk or Ellis, its there because its "saying something", its not there because its just a normal part of what people do with each other, or its there precisely for the ways in which it can be an "abnormal" part of what people do with each other. but the body of romance genre fiction actually has a more naturalistic approach to this. it deals with sex as something that people simply do with each other, a fact of life. people have sex with each other all the time and that is a fact. im not saying that this is literary, but just that the conception of the genre as non-realist is distorted and misguided and probably usually just pretty snobby and pretentious.

also i was thinking, in relation to other things that i have read, part of what makes a work of genre fiction good is its awareness of the conventions of the genre and its willingness to play with them. the more you read of it the more you become familiar with these particular stock figures that are in it. eg "the kindly, experienced older lady" peripheral figure. but i think that a good genre writer will see the potential of the stereotype nature of this figure, say for delighting or surprising a reading audience, rather than the limitations of the stereotype. anyway, i just think its interesting.
 
On the subject, how do you feel about porn and getting off on it? I've noticed this trend where women see nothing wrong with adult romance literature, but are disgusted at men who like porn. Your stances?
 
vandyke said:
On the subject, how do you feel about porn and getting off on it? I've noticed this trend where women see nothing wrong with adult romance literature, but are disgusted at men who like porn. Your stances?
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porn poses a different set of ethical dilemmas to romance genre fiction because it uses real people as actors. acting in porn is not comparable to a regular "job" because the occupational hazards are so high, kind of like being a workman without being allowed to wear a hard hat. apart from that there are also a lot of issues related to women specifically who act in porn and how they are treated in the films, both as individuals, and as representations of women. im not making any judgments on pornography and its consumers - actually i think its a necessary evil, and it makes functioning properly in society a great deal easier and even just more fundamentally possible for a great many of us. but because of the ethical concerns that are necessarily involved in its production, i dont think it is a meaningful analogue to romance genre fiction. because of the way that women are routinely treated in porn, i find it easy to understand how women could feel anger about porn production and consumption.
 
and actually i would say that romance genre fiction poses no inherent ethical dilemmas. it is a tradition that has arisen as part of a very long history probably beginning with french representations of courtly love but probably more particularly developed by 17th and 18th century writers in english especially Jane Austen. i dont think we can assume that these writers are naive; they have read and studied in their medium in a deep and meaningful way that pornographic producers almost certainly have not. i think it is a common misconception that consuming romance genre fiction is just about getting off. sure it is escapist in this sense, and im sure many readers dont know what the hell they are thinking about when they are consuming it. but as part of this long tradition of writing on this subject, it is easily just as much about what it means to have a fair and equal relationship, how to negotiate intimacies with a romantic partner, what makes people compatible with each other, in terms of their habits, personalities, culture, societal or economic positioning, and so on, as it is about seeking release. it deals with abstract content to do with the reality of peoples daily lives on a level that pornography doesnt.
 
do other readers of Merry Gentry have favourites of Merry's men? mine are Frost and Rhys. i thought Adair sounded pretty good but he was only in it for about 5 pages. dont know what her obsession with Doyle is all about, at first he was exciting, but as the books went on he got so boring and annoying. his character kind of goes nowhere except that he keeps getting more excellent powers and he starts losing his cool all the time, breaking down and weeping in despair, interrupting the criminal investigation, etc.
 
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