Topic: Seize the Limelight / Soft Focus

Exciting News!

One of my favourite historical romance authors has The Duke and I available for free for a limited tome only. It’s fun, it’s serious, it’s witty and wonderful… read it. Then take advantage of Avon’s other free books.

Avon Books is launching Love Gives Back, a program where they will offer monthly Sneak Peeks into upcoming releases and invite you to read Avon books for free online. The more you read the more you give —they’ll be donating a mass of books to charity organizations each month based on how much you read.

Topic: Seize the Limelight / Soft Focus

Hi Reiana,
Isn’t it weird that the Heyers are reliably reissued but only 2 films have ever been made and those weren’t serious? A spoof of Reluctant Widow and a German version of Arabella . The Grand Sophy would be fantastic … there are so many scandals mentioned in the first 5 pages and Sophy herself is a cool heroine, always planning in the nicest possible way.

Speaking of Shades though … a LEGO interpretation!

Topic: Seize the Limelight / Soft Focus

I loved these old shades too. I also have a soft spot for ’ Ajax ’ though but have read nearly all Georgette Heyer.( some years ago now)
I can see lots of parallels in many books, the innocent who captures the older more experienced male.

Topic: Seize the Limelight / Soft Focus

Anne, can you recall the figures quoted in the Sizzle, Seduce, Simmer launch speech? I was distracted by the food but it was something along the lines of nine authors in the country making a living off writing … and twelve of them are in this room.
Shocking. Absolutely.

Topic: Seize the Limelight / Soft Focus

Morning, my doves

Alex! That’s cheating. Deathstalker runs to eight fat books. Good choice with The Changeover and what was the other one with the astronomer? I’d have Freedom and Necessity, The Masqueraders, can’t remember my third, 4th is whatever book i want/need next and I can’t decide a fifth at the moment.

My definition of literature tends to require a high gloom factor, some Issues with an all important capital I and avoidance of on my part. It’s very clear cut in my mind but as soon as i start to think about it, vagueness descends.

One of my favourite comments on literature vs pop fiction is in Barbara Hambly’s Time of the Dark… they’re fleeing the city and have a limited amount of space, the queen is trying to decide over packing the classics or the lighter fare and one of the heroes points out they’re going to need to the fun stuff more … and someone else will bring the classics anyway.

Did I see a snarky aside to Chick Lit somewhere in the posts? I did. Well, historical documents in the making! Their extreme currency and devotion to detailing lifestyles is going to provide anthroplogists and honours students in the future with so much cultural information. That will be interesting for all the shoe fetishists.

Topic: Seize the Limelight / Soft Focus

Can’t stand Martin.

Best example of pop stuff becoming High Lit is, of course, Our Friend Will.

I think to some extent the romance genre has done itself a disservice in the way it advertises itself, but I’m not sure if that’s a chicken and egg problem… As long as The Fabio Effect is in place, it will be easy for people to poke fun.

Topic: Seize the Limelight / Soft Focus

Yeah, I’ve thrown more than my fair share of lit books against the wall. I’m just now getting into fantasy with George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. Has some of the most thrilling adventures and best characters I’ve met.
It’s great that you’re not confined by genre. Pick what you want! Someday soon it will be literature!

Topic: Seize the Limelight / Soft Focus

Haha, excellent! I agree, and love your examples. Certainly be interesting to hear other opinions too.

I read across a lot of areas, including what sits on the bookshop shelf labelled ‘literature’, but there are books there that I think are poor, and books in the popular, sci-fi, fantasy or horror areas that are masterfully done.

Topic: Seize the Limelight / Soft Focus

I think that’s the biggest can of worms there is!
There is no definition of literature. There is whatever I think is art, and there is whatever you think is art. This is the source of conflict here: I think romance is often literature. Others disagree, and strenuously. Charles Dickens didn’t write Literary Novels, he wrote serialized pop which became novels. The Anglo Saxon Beowulf poet (if indeed there was a single guy) didn’t write an Epic, he told a great story which people loved so much they wrote it down.
Does anyone else care to weigh in?

Topic: Seize the Limelight / Soft Focus

LOL, the circle is now complete Anne! Everything is connected :)

And well done to your mum. That’s a shame she’s been hassled by literary types.

I come from science, so forgive a stupid question, but is literature defined by the quality of the writing or the topic of the writing? Or is that a can of worms?

Topic: Seize the Limelight / Soft Focus

Anne: I think I enjoyed the moodiness. And it was so delightfully convoluted. And perhaps part of me loved hating the characters, too.

Kate: can I have all the Deathstalker books? And Hawk and Fisher. And… was it The Changeover? Margaret Mahy anyway; loved it as a kid. And… I can’t think of others specifically. I’m sure I will at some point. A grand love story generally improves things for me, anyway.

Topic: Seize the Limelight / Soft Focus

Damian: we’re more fatphobic than we ever been. The scholarly logic is that we weren’t fatphobic in ages when fat was hard to get. But the more I read, the more I think we’re just building on the past. I’m still nutting that out.
Kate: I always, always thought Mum’s work was cool. Actually, she’s more sensitive about it than I ever have been. She’s been in some uncomfortable conversations with insecure people who bignote themselves at her expense. I’m ashamed to say that many of these people are ‘literary’ people, who aren’t well known and/or don’t earn enough to live on from writing and so act as if there’s shame in popularity.
I wonder why they think I agree with them, just because I also write about more ‘highbrow’ lit? The barriers between popular and literary are so artificial, and so new.
Footnote: Early modern men often equated fat with being female, and with pleasure reading of the kind women were thought to like. Everything’s connected!

Topic: Seize the Limelight / Soft Focus

Haha! That’s a unique description, the silly bint with the staircase :)

Anne, fatphobia in literature – do you mean that the writing does not feature overweight characters in positive or lead roles?

Would English lit and the English language have been more fatphobic in the past? I’d imagine so, but was it intentional, or reflecting the population of the time? Now the developed world has such things as lifestyle diseases, is an empathy towards obesity a modern reflection of society in language?

Topic: Seize the Limelight / Soft Focus

fatphobic: whatshername… the silly bint with the staircase… scarlet o’hara! she springs to mind. Except she’s the character and I’m not sure the authour (Mitchell?) is making a point.

Alex, I am so proud. If we played Desert Island Romantic Books which 5 would you pick?

Anne, skipping back a bit: was there a time when it wasn’t cool your mum was a writer and what was the turning point?

Topic: Seize the Limelight / Soft Focus

My thesis grew out of a project on Ben Jonson, who was a pretty awesome poet and a very fat man. He liked to talk about his fat and try to change the way people thought about it, and him. I’m trying to write a cultural history of fat which picks up on fat people’s “speaking back”. It’s really a reply to all this hysteria over a supposed “epidemic” of fat. An epidemic is a strange concept for fat, when you think about it. I want to show that English lit and the English language are, and have long been, fatphobic.
Sound complicated?
Alex, what is it you love about WH?

Topic: Seize the Limelight / Soft Focus

I love Wuthering Heights and detest every single character. Go figure.

I most definitely characterise myself as a non romance reader, as Anne and Kate can attest. However, I love a good romance… when it’s wrapped in other trappings, preferably lots of technobabble! Pretty funny, really, when I realised that about myself.

Topic: Seize the Limelight / Soft Focus

Anne, away from romance, your thesis topic sounds interesting, The idea of fat, and its position in language in the early modern world. What’s your aim in this topic?

Topic: Seize the Limelight / Soft Focus

And they don’t even have the decency to stay dead, instead of being “unquiet sleepers”.
URK. How insidious are the english lit classes? I thought i rebelled against them? Must need champagne instead of hot chocolate.

Darren, that sounds almost Shakespearean.

Be back after Spicks & Specks… dammit, there was just an ad for Emma !

Topic: Seize the Limelight / Soft Focus

No, haven’t seen that one before Darren. An anthology is a good idea to sample a cross section.

Topic: Seize the Limelight / Soft Focus

BTW…has anyone read an excellent love story anthology called My Misstress’s Sparrow Is Dead ? I can’t recommend it highly enough!

Topic: Seize the Limelight / Soft Focus

I’ve seen a stage production of Jane Eyre, and am probably too familiar with the BBC and co adaptions of Jane Austen’s writings. BUT, I’m yet to read one! :)

Topic: Seize the Limelight / Soft Focus

You remind me of Monty Python’s Wuthering Heights in Semaphore. Catherine! Heathcliff! Catherine!
Champagne comedy.

Topic: Seize the Limelight / Soft Focus

All that “catherine!” “heathcliffe!” nonsense… the Kate Bush song is the highlight.

Much better clothes in the Heyers.
It was an extremely startling moment when someone pointed out Mrs Bennett is the most sensible character in Pride . Annoying and vulgar she may be but she’s the only one concerned about her daughters’s futures. if they’re not married when their father dies, they are doomed.

Topic: Seize the Limelight / Soft Focus

Hmmm, a Bronte might be a good idea, though Wuthering Heights would not be. Romance that book is not. The characters irritate me. Gloomy, but for no reason. There’s no reason why they can’t just lighten up and live happy lives. Grrr.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, though, maybe.
My favourite lit crossover is Jane Austen’s Persuasion. I’ve been trying to interest my partner in the genre. He’s already a fan of the BBC Pride and Prejudice, so Persuasion was an easy hit. Next mission is to get him to read Heyer.

Topic: Seize the Limelight / Soft Focus

LOL, gloomy you say? Now it’s sounding interesting!