books
The Secret History of the Pink Carnation by Lauren Willig. Set in a world where the Scarlet Pimpernel is real history, using a chicklit style framing device of someone reading letters for their thesis to tell the story of Amy Balcourt, an overexcitedly imaginative character in the mould of Georgette Heyer's younger sister characters, and her attempts to find the Purple Gentian and help him. Regency romance with some bells and whistles. I felt Amy got too childish as it went on, but this would have pleased me much more as a nice fun read if it wasn't for various romance genre conventions like "She cried out her pleasure as a thousand diamond sparkles exploded across the back of her eyes and bathed her body in effervescent splendour" (There's so rarely much point in looking forward to the sex scenes in books generally) and
"What in the hell was Amy thinking, arranging assignations with strange men in the middle of the night? Had no one ever shouted sense into her? Did she think she was invincible? When he found her, he'd shake her til she couldn't stand. And then he'd lock her into a room with a dozen locks - make that two dozen locks - so she couldn't send any more ridiculous notes to ridiculous men setting up ridiculous hours of the night".
It's just that it's de rigeur for the heroine to be feisty and have the right opinions on laws about married women's property and read Greek stuff, but when it comes to actually building the relationship, the only way almost every light, romantic book for women can indicate that the man is getting interested in the woman is for the women to narrowly excape being raped so we can go, aw, he's so protective of her he wants to shake her and lock her up, isn't that cute. I DO NOT LIKE THE MOODY AGGRESSIVE MACHO HERO, and if they don't start out as one they have to turn into one to show how much he loves the heroine, and the author doesn't bother to tell us how clever or kind or funny or otherwise interesting the hero is, it's just this stuff, like they're writing a werewolf story about primal mating for life without the werewolves. Ah, it annoys me, end of tired old rant.
The Waves by Virginia Woolf. Written as stream of consciousness-type monologues from six friends as they get older. I started this and thought mostly "Not as good as To the Lighthouse" before leaving it for a while. Then I had to read Mrs Dalloway for university and got into a Woolf mood and went back to it. I didn't find the writing itself not as good as To the Lighthouse after that, with the things that make me feel: I know just what that feels like, though I don't think I've seen it put into words before. But it did annoy me that the characters didn't get equal coverage. I could see why Bernard, the character who got the lion's share, was there; he mixed being sociable and bon homie and inside life in that way with being observational and always trying to "make phrases" out of life (I liked the stuff about telling a story to yourself about yourself), but I felt the others weren't much better than thumbnails. I did have a sense of who they were, but I still wasn't clear enough why they were all there, and in a book together. And the writing was kind of vaporous, it made sense, and quite a good kind of sense while I was reading it, but then it would blow away out of my memory by the time I'd moved on to the next bit.
The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall. Starts out with a man with amnesia following a series of clues to find out his previous life and identity; turns out a conceptual shark ate his memories and while running away/figuring out how to save himself more permanently he gets into a stiff cardboardy sort of romance with someone who may or may not be his dead girlfriend. The problem with books that want to play around with concepts and imagine what it would be like if ideas had a tangible reality is that the writing and characterisation always seems to be mediocre, where it would need to be especially good to pull it off. So many people who think "I've got a cool idea" never seem to think about making the most of that idea. By the end it felt like I was reading about a particularly involved children's game, pretending an upturned table was a boat. This book also does another thing I dislike with regard to romances, ie apparently has them because it feels it ought.
Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby. Annie is in a stagnant relationship with a man obsessed with has-been musician Tucker Crowe, and ends up corresponding via email with said musician. I liked how this wasn't as neat as it could have been; in fact in some ways it's less a story than talking about how easy it is to waste time and never do anything great and how it's okay for art to not be "authentic". I quite liked how the internet and hero-worship was brought into it, and how you should never ask why someone on the internet would bother to do something or the whole thing would collapse. Annie isn't just purely connecting with Tucker, she's realistically conscious of how it would affect her ex and her exaggerated sense of him as a big deal through his eyes, which helps make it less cliched than it could have been.