Guilty Pleasures on POV

Oh My God, I've never laughed so much in my life. This is hilarious! I'll admit, I've started to like romance novels...but these aren't them! These are my mother's romances with the awkwardly named hero's (Dash?!?!) who are too perfectly muscled (okay...can't really hate that part) and who love the girl who doesn't have half a brain to stand on (yeah...I'm going to go with that mis-mash of sayings), and the naked couple on the cover. GAHH!!! Seriously, that English old man narrating at the beginning as he writes down the story (probably under some woman's name) is hilarious.

 

It's no wonder I'm reading the Dark Hunters series--when Ash is asked what he does while Artemis leaves him for hours on end in her bedroom he quips that he writes romance novels. Hmm...21 year old looking, 11,000 year old sex god (well...I'll leave you to think what you like about that one to not spoil the series for you) GOTH writing romance novels...yeah...not happening. Our real hero plays video games and referees for 8 year old basketball players while wrangling a bunch of whiny immortals all while not being able to get close to anyone. Where the girls stake vampires (and their husbands) and/or throw hammers at them.

 

Actually...it's the girls that mostly turns me off--the ones who HAVE to have the guy rescue them from their own depressing lives...really?!? If the premise of the story revolves around the girls inability to save herself it's really not worth the paper it's written on (situations where the girl is tied up by the badguy and therefore isn't physically able to rescue herself not included...unless it was her own ineptitude that got her into the situation in the first place).

 

 

Watch Guilty Pleasures - Trailer on PBS. See more from POV.

Taming the Scotsman by Kinley MacGregor

This series is pretty good (Brotherhood/MacAlister), though it's pretty clear what kind of man Kinley MacGregor, also known as Sherilyn Kenyon, likes--tall, generally dark, and brooding. She's just as good as Jim Butcher when it comes to beating down the cutie. My only problem is that I'm worried that her brooding guys will lose some of their personality when they're tamed by the lady--will they be just as fierce 5 years later? But anyway.

I'm sitting here laughing my butt off because the big, bad, and sexy hero just handed his sword off to the chatterbox heroine who it turns out is quite the swordswoman so that she can fight the girl who helped kidnap them--while he's just standing there watching the fight with the 4 men who round out the kidnappers instead of beating them up easily while the only 2 swords available are occupied by the women.

For the most part I've been enjoying the books by this author and her real name (series is "Dark-Hunter"). They're fun romances where there's actually an enemy besides poor communication skills (which just annoys me and is why I've avoided romances like the plague before) which is right up my alley. The problem is that you can tell when an author writes romances and when they write epics that just happen to have romance in them--Kenyon's fight scenes are greatly lacking. It was very smart of her to invent a conviently blind character for one of the books. 'Course, I'm the first to say that a fight scene goes into too much detail--we really don't need to have 3 pages of battle for a great book. Butcher's background in martial arts means that he knows exactly what he's talking about when he describes, for instance how one man can take on 12 men singlehandedly. I did a year of Aikido with a friend teaching and I picked up enough to know how beautiful this fighting style is--using the weight of your opponent to throw them across the room. Kenyon glances over these fights, letting other characters talk while the fighting "just happens." I mean, if these women are as good with a sword as she claims, then why don't her hero and heroine ever practice against each other? I'm reading The Warrior now and I think that Cat and Lochlan should have an epic sword fight that ends up with them rolling on the ground kissing for the first time. They have such an antagonistic relationship the fireworks should be quite entertaining.

She also has the problem of the seriously anti-climatic resolution. I mean sure, sometimes the long, overly complicated conclusion is unncessary--sometimes you just need to push the big baddie into the convient fiery pit or shoot the missle into the 2 meter wide hole in the otherwise indestructible Death Star. But sometimes you want more than "I'm a goddess, see me just will you to death, even though I decided not to, and or for some other reason couldn't, for the past 300 pages" though granted, I'm now thinking that she has some overarching plan in mind...or at least I hope. I mean, Butcher is very good at leaving lose ends that come to bite Dresden on the ass three books later.

But all in all Kenyon is a very smart writer. I read the first two books and decided that even though the climaxes were dull, I had to find out more about the bad-ass leader "Acheron", so I decided that I'd read the series until his story got told. Well, one trip to goodreads.com told me that that would not be the 4th or 5th book, as I thought, but rather the 15th--I probably will read all the series because I found some really intreguing spoilers (I've found that sometimes spoilers make for better reading because I know what to look for and forward to).

Romantic Weekend

This weekend has been full of Romantic Movies. I've really enjoyed all of them. Here's the list:

P.S. I do not even try to understand why the videos in this post look so wonkey. But I give up trying to fix it.

Another Film Dump

Here's another mass posting of the movies I've been watching. More romance and I really enjoyed them all.

The Time Traveler's Wife

Yeah, I didn't cry. I guess it is a sad story, but not very tragic. I mean, they had plenty of time to deal with what happens, so no shock factor. Still, good story: different.

A Walk to Remember

Still makes me cry. Sweet Story.

The Notebook

Made me cry--like tears not stopping cry. I know the reason for it--my great-grandmother had alzheimers and my grandma told me what it was like to go visit her and not be recognized. It must be 1000X worse when it's your spouse. I also include my whole track record with guys where, well, I haven't been noticed like that. So maybe I'm also afraid that I'll never have someone to grow old with--and I'm only 22. Please feel free to make jokes about a Jane Austen book where 20 is "nearly an old maid". Anywho...yeah. Great film if you're okay with crying and stuff like that.

P.S. If you didn't know, both James Gardner and Gena Rowlands (they play the older versions of the main characters)are/were married only once and for life. Gardner married his sweetheart after only knowing her 2 weeks. Wow.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

I honestly thought I was going to hate this book. My 12th grade English Lit teacher introduced it as the book most likely do be disliked by the guys in the class. Now, as you've probably read my "review" of the Twilight "saga" you know that chick books aren't really my thing. Yes, I like a bit of romance, but I want it to be secondary--to complement the plot and to explain some of the inter-character relations, but NOT to drive the story as Twilight does. So, when I heard that this would be a chick book I was a little leery.

But I was pleasantly surprised. This book definitely deserves "classic" status. It's again one of those books that everyone should read, especially if they themselves wonder why they can't relate to the people around them. There is definitely a character for everyone in this book and I'm curious as to who readers best relate with.

I personally thought this book to be a pretty easy read, but I have a friend who found it difficult (i.e. boring--I've found the two go hand in hand). To this I will say that there is no way on Earth for me to know whether someone will like or dislike a particular book. I mean, I hated Heart of Darkness the first time I had to read it and quite enjoyed it the second time. My general rule of thumb for any book is to pick it up every 5 years or so--the change in perspective you get from age will change the way the book will read, possibly even making a book that you hated in high school interesting.



I just watched Becoming Jane (2007). I thought it was extremely good and, at least in the context of Pride and Prejudice, it makes sense, whether or not it's historically accurate. It's so sweet and sad...I highly recommend it, especially if your complaint about the ending of Pride and Prejudice was that it was too good to be true.