Cooking with words

[karen_w_newton]

I am currently reading Outlander by Diana Gabaldon. I got it free from the Kindle store because it's being offered as a promotion. The book came out in 1991 and is the first of a series, so in that way it's typical of a lot of promotional (i.e., free or temporarily free) ebooks

Comments

[bogwitch64]

First--I couldn't get through The Outlander. I thought it would be SO ME!!! But what irked me was that Claire had too many instances of living out a fantasy through no choice of her own. Poor darling, she's trying to rekindle a life with her husband after six years apart, but things aren't exactly as she hoped they'd be. While thinking deep thoughts about where her life is going, she is thrust into another world where she meets a handsome scoundrel of a man she is instantly attracted to, then has NO CHOICE but to marry him, has NO CHOICE but to have amazing sex with him. She lives out all these fantasies for women to sigh over, because they might want the same sort of, "I want this so much but I can't do it but if I were in a position of "I HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO GET EXACTLY WHAT I WANT," everything would be fine. Bleh--that was my take, anyway.

Second--that being said, a few women in my book club ended up forming a mini-book club just to read the Gabaldon books. I've been told the second one isn't great, but the third and forth are more like the first.

[karen_w_newton]

I think a lot of authors suffer from second book syndrome. You get years to write the first book and six months to write the second!

I get you on the convenience thing. There is a fair amount of that. Claire is also a little dim in places. If I figured out the laird's heir wasn't his biological son, I think I'd have sense enough to keep that to myself. I really like Gabaldon's depiction of 17th century Scotts, though-- the women as well as the men. And I like the fact that they're not at all apologetic about being so brutal. Like was brutal.

I'm just not sure how much I want to stick with it. I guess I'll see when I finish the book.

[paulwoodlin]

I think that objection condemns a great deal of romance literature in general. They twist themselves into all sorts of knots to maintain steamy tension between the hot, lustful couple who in real life would be having sex by the end of the first chapter, but the writer has to stretch it out for hundreds of pages. Being forced into doing exactly what she wants is one of those knots.

[bogwitch64]

I think this is one of the reasons I'm generally not a romance reader. I love a book with romance in it, I write books heavily shaded with romance! I think you'd be hard pressed to find a book WITHOUT romance in it. It's the suspension of belief necessary to believe otherwise intelligent people can so fool themselves, even lie to themselves in this intimate way that gets me. How convenient that every fantasy she has comes true against her will. That's just squicky to me.

There are TONS of people who love that sort of thing. I have no stats, but I believe that romance is the best-selling genre with the most loyal fans in all readerdom. As I said, a sizeable part of my book club had their own mini-book club because they loved it so much. It's not condemning the genre to say I'm not a huge fan of it as a genre in general. It's just my preference.

That being said, my two "guilty pleasures" are Sarah Addison Allen and Nicholas Evans. :)

[karen_w_newton]

Terri-Lynne, I think you are right that romance is the biggest selling genre; I think part of that is that each romance reader buys a huge number of books. They are, as you say, loyal. But I think the main reason they love the genre so much is one reason non-romance folks don't read in it-- the Happily Ever After formula (aka HEA), and other rules that seem to be imposed. I think romance readers are looking for escape and they want a reliable ride to get there.

I heard a story at Pikes Peak about a romance writer who broke what an agent called "the implied contract with the reader: hero and heroine both survive and end up together. This writer wrote a book where the hero was kind of a bad guy; the heroine reformed him, they get married and live HEA. Then she wrote a second book about their daughter; she ends up with her own guy, but at the end of the book, her dad's past catches up with him, and he is killed. The writer was signing books in a bookstore when a fan came up to her and said, "I can't believe you killed Jake (or Fred or whatever)" and then she launched herself across the table and attacked the writer!

That's a fan with serious Get A Life issues.

[bogwitch64]

Holy WOW!! That's a serious fan--of the character, not the writer.

[karen_w_newton]

I think she took the whole implied contract thing waaay too seriously.

[paulwoodlin]

Oh, romance is huge, statistically speaking. Even if you don't consider outliers like "Twilight," the romance industry is 40% of the market.

[karen_w_newton]

That might account for a good part of this book's popularity. Well, I've finished the book now, and I have to say, the two things I did not like were the "too muches"-- too much explicit sex and too much center-stage-and described-in detail-violence-- not the sword fights but the sadistic torture. Ugh! For one thing, it made the book too long; I want every scene--every line, really, to either advance the plot or reveal something about the character. Throwing in scene after scene with explicit body parts either being stroking or being flayed did not do either.

That said Gabaldon does a fabulous job of setting the scene and creating the culture of 18th century Scotland. She had some good plot twists, too.