Between the covers, without pain

It's surprising who has read the Fifty Shades books, or at least the first one. Me, for instance. And other people I know whom I think of as No Dummies. I remain torn on this issue, kind of liking the out-of-nowhere fan-fiction origins -- the literary equivalent of winning the lottery only with a tad more initiative involved. On the other hand, the fan fiction aspect is slightly annoying; more so is the Old Skool romance, virginal-heroine-must-redeem-the-tortured-dominant-hero theme whose problems are explicated to a far smarter degree than i could ever do in this post from the Rumpus. Not to mention the general annoyingness of the heroine, along with the not-very-inspired writing (many have suggested drinking games based on how many times Anastasia chews her lip -- an action that just makes world-traveling sophisticated billionaire Christian Grey INSANE WITH LUST). But my primary issue with the success of these books, really, is that there is so much out there in the broad area of the romance genre that is so much better written. I know this is true of many, many bestsellers. Why does Dan Brown sell so much better than writers who are so much better? And I won't even go into the James Patterson Fictional Industrial Complex.

So as alternatives for people who are curious about books written primarily for women and that include differing amounts of nookie -- and because at the Library we are embarking on a Summer Reading program for adults with the theme Between the Covers (with four weekly prize drawings! Prizes from Key West Island Books, the Tropic and Bad Boy Burrito!) -- I am hereby offering my suggested alternatives for books you can read on your ereader ... and not be cringing at the writing. Or the stupidity of the heroine, for that matter.

Most of my trashy romance reading is historical. However if Fifty Shades has you curious about contemporary romances, I can recommend Jennifer Crusie (my favorite of hers is called Bet Me, but they're all pretty good). I like Lisa Kleypas, too; the one that got me hooked is called Smooth Talking Stranger. Kristan Higgins is also very well regarded; I have to admit I haven't actually read her but I saw her at the ALA conference last year and she was charming.

If you're not averse to the vampire thing, many library patrons and some staffers like Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse books (the basis for the HBO series True Blood though they differ significantly) and Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake Vampire Hunter series (which I haven't read but understand are pretty high on the smut-ometer and pretty gory, too). For supernatural and romance, but not much smut at all, check out Deborah Harkness's All Souls Trilogy, at least the first two installments. The first is called A Discovery of Witches, the second is Shadow of Night. I liked them so much after reading the second that I went and bought the first and wrote a whole blog post just about them.

On historical romances:

Joanna Bourne's spymaster series. The covers are appalling, the books are a lot of fun.

Eloisa James -- in real life she is Mary Bly, a Fordham literature professor ... and daughter of Robert Bly, of Iron John fame. She's also married to an Italian cavaliere (some kind of knight).

Lisa Kleypas again -- I prefer her historicals to her contemporary novels, especially the series about the Hathaway family. Bonus facts: She is a Wellesley grad -- and a former Miss Massachusetts!

Loretta Chase -- many people who read a lot of romance consider Lord of Scoundrels to be the greatest recent historical romance. I like another of hers better. It's called Mr. Impossible -- and it's in that same old Regency time period but set in Egypt.

Julia Quinn -- They're fun, especially the Bridgerton series. I'm still warming up to her latest, about the Smith-Smythes. (Fun fact: Quinn once went on the TV game show The Weakest Link -- and took home $79,000.)

Madeline Hunter -- Another academic -- I saw her at ALA and she said then she was still in the closet as a romance writer and won't tell anyone her real name.

Elizabeth Hoyt -- Another one I saw at ALA who was funny and charming. Her current series is set in the slums of Victorian London. Fairly high on the smut-ometer.

For anyone at all interested in romance as reading, or as a phenomenon or just looking for an entertaining website to read during working hours, I highly recommend Smart Bitches Trashy Books. The reviews are often hysterically funny (including some of old titles from the real bodice-ripping days of the '70s and '80s), and there's lots more, including links to sale titles on Amazon, etc.

Not smutty at all but nice reads that probably did as much as Jane Austen to establish the Regency as THE time setting for historical romance are the works of Georgette Heyer. Once you've read her you can see how much a lot of other historical romance writers are copying her -- then adding smut. Those were the only romance books we had in my house when I was a kid -- my grandmother and mom both read them and eventually, so did I. I love seeing them in the library, in those good old-fashioned buckram covers though I'm also nostalgically fond of the cheesy '70s covers I first knew, like the one illustrating this post. And they're sometimes available at good prices as ebooks. My favorite is The Nonesuch. Another good one is The Tollgate. (Fun fact: ABE Books announced that Heyer is one of their Top Ten all-time sellers: ahead of Charles Dickens, James Patterson and even the mighty J.K. Rowling.)

Need more suggestions? NPR recently had a post on recommended romance reading from Eloisa James that includes some of these authors and some different ones. If it's the kink in the 50 Shades phenomenon that intrigues you, check out the titles mentioned in this recent piece from Time magazine, along with others in their Summer Books series.

You decide, I read

Every once in awhile I say to myself, hey you lazy self, you should read more classics. * Then a new work of historical fiction or a new season of Justified catches my attention and I conveniently forget. So now I'm going to take a serious step, the book-reading equivalent of one of those public weight-loss efforts. (No way am I doing that.) I'm going to publicly declare my intention to read a long-neglected classic work of literature. And report back on my progress.

To make this even more fun, I decided my summer classic read should be significant. No slim little Dostoyevsky for me. My classic is going to be a Capital C Classic, at least 500 pages, capable of stopping a door in its original hardcover form.

And you're going to choose it for me. I came up with four titles, all books that I should have read by now. But haven't. Here's my understanding of what each book is about.

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville: Man chases after whale. 1851, American

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes: Man tilts at windmills. 1605, Spanish

Pamela by Samuel Richardson: Young woman resists employer's son's advances. 1740, English

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray: Woman claws her way up social ranks. 1847, English

Please vote!

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* Just for the record I came up with this idea -- even drafted this blog post -- BEFORE the much-circulated Slow Books Manifesto that appeared on the Atlantic website. Modeled on Michael Pollan's rules for eating, it proclaims that we should "Read books. As often as we can. Mostly classics." At least it was much-discussed in library circles. I get what she's saying and I am feeling the need, obviously, for a little more classic fiber in my reading diet. But on the whole I agree with the reply of Seattle Public Library's David Wright, which I'm reposting beyond the jump here. It's a long reply but it's worth reading. Wright, by the way, is one of the authors of SPL's Shelf Talk blog, which is always a worthwhile read.

David Wright reply to the Slow Books Manifesto:

The basic error of this and all those other read-this-not-that pieces that pop up endlessly like nasty looks on a bus is that they so utterly fail to understand all the various things that reading is and does, attempting to valorize so-called “self-improvement” over all the other vital, crucial reasons that we read and consume stories and engage in literary acts. We read for a marvelous variety of reasons, none of them illegitimate or unhealthy. The precise analogy is “sex is for procreation only,” which is a laughable, ultimately futile but possibly quite harmful thing to go around preaching, as it can lead to people with an unhealthy or overly narrow or proscribed view of what sex/reading is, and is for. It turns pleasures into guilty ones, and turns off potential readers who come to feel that books are a matter of should and ought, rather than something living breathing people do for the joy of it. Better to go to a movie.

Having started with this faulty foundation, the minister of Good Books will then go on to opine just which sort of books improve us, and which do not, an exercise so fraught with serious nonsense, received notions, academic claptrap, cultural bullying, and opinions touted as fact as to be laughable, if – again – it weren’t so potentially harmful to would-be readers. Kelly doesn’t have much of a go at this, but what little thinking there is here is entirely unexamined.

The equation of popular reading with junk food is a good old chestnut: back in 1890, in an issue of Library Journal, Herbert Putnam opined about the uselessness of “flabby mental nutriment,” suggesting the only reason for including popular fiction in public libraries was “to attract the reader who has not read at all, or who has formed a taste for only that class of literature and must be tolled by it in order to be wheedled into something better.” He shows his true colors in the next line: “Our American public hardly needs to be wheedled into the reading habit; it reads too many books, not too few.” This was before Movies and TV, which would no doubt have draw his ire had they been around to do so. Many libraries at that time banned fiction altogether at that time, for readers’ own good; William Kite, a librarian in Germantown PA, opined: “A very considerable number of frequenters of our library are factory girls, the class most disposed to seek amusement in novels and peculiarly liable to be injured by their false pictures of life.”

This old-timey paternalism follows the very impulse that motivates Ms. Kelly, and it is nothing new. They sneered at Dickens, with all that Hunger-Games-like mania over Little Nell, and yes, they did look down their noses at Shakespeare with his “little Latin and less Greek,” favoring instead abstruse self-improving Elizabethan prose the likes of which nobody reads today, for very good reason. They tsked at Punch and Judy shows, and inched their way through Anglo Saxon thrillers inserting edifying anachronisms about a Christian God. They shook their heads over Euripides – “Sure, the crowds love him, but he’s certainly no Aeschylus!” – and threw up their hands about the doomed state of literature when a bunch of meddling archaic technogeeks ruined the whole experience by Writing Things Down, in arguments mirrored by anti-audiobook snobs of today.

A good plot-driven story is no more inherently junk food than Woolf, Dickens, Bunyan or Homer. Someone has mentioned Sturgeon’s Law, that 90% of everything, genre or literary, is crap. Truer words were never spoken; the only reason so few readers will confess that they found this or that literary novel or “classic” uniteresting and unworthwhile is that they are cowed by the haughty status of the so-called literary. “Isn’t it supposed to be boring?” I once heard someone say.

I’m a librarian of the sort of works with and talks with readers all the livelong day; readers of every stripe, self-proclaimed snobs and so-called philistines; voracious genre fans who read books by the armload, and precious book group readers who read precisely one book a month, and don’t much like most of them; readers who seek out the classics because they love them, and readers who seek out the classics because they feel it a duty. And many novice readers who are bewildered and even intimidated by the world of books and reading, but something happened and all their friends were reading this year’s mega-hit, and they read it too, and lo and behold, they LIKED it. I pray that such novice readers steer clear of narrow proscriptions like the one in this piece. And they do – in droves. The only reason not to get too het up over this kind of thing is that it is always ignored, and all different sorts of people continue to find all different sorts of books in all different sorts of ways, for all different sorts of reasons. The best book on reading I ever read is Daniel Pennac’s “Better than Life,” which is the original source of a delightful counter-manifesto to this one, called the Reader’s Bill of Rights. Look it up – its great.

As for anyone who tells you to read this, not that, I suggest you tell them – in whatever register is appropriate to the situation – to kindly piss off and mind their own business.

Don't get attached to ...

In high school, one of my husband's friends ruined Top Gun before Mark got to see it with one phrase: Don't get attached to Goose. That phrase has become our household shorthand for spoilers, or mock spoilers. The phrase returned to me recently when I was reading the latest entry in a newish historical crime series. I am a big fan of Tudor-era crime fiction -- C.J. Sansom's Shardlake series, Rory Clements' John Shakespeare series, Patricia Finney's books, the David Becket/Simon Ames series under her own name as well as the Sir Robert Carey series under the pen name P.F. Chisholm -- I devour them. After reading lots of biographies and novelizations of the various royals, it's fun to see the action from around the edges and to imagine how life might have looked to an ordinary person, navigating the not-so-easy daily realities of life as well as the larger shifts in religious beliefs and power structures. There was certainly enough intrigue and ill will around the court during the reigns of both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I to come up with fodder for plausible crimes, aside from the never-ending human motives for murder (love, jealousy, money, etc.).

I was intrigued when S.J. Parris' series debuted a few years back, with Heresy, a mystery set around real events, with her hero the real-life scholar and fugitive ex-monk Giordano Bruno. Bruno really did spent a couple years in England in the 1580s, the heart of the Elizabethan era. He may well have been an agent for spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham and in the books, he definitely is. Heresy was quickly followed by Prophecy and just out, a third volume, Sacrilege (which I was lucky enough to get as an advanced copy through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program). I thought this was the best installment yet in this series, and the book itself got better as it went along. All good. But I have one big problem. I don't want to get attached to Bruno. Between reading the second and third volumes in this series, I read The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt, which includes a description of the real life Bruno's fate and it is ugly. After being imprisoned for seven years by the Roman Inquisition, defiant to the end, he was declared a heretic and executed. By being burned alive. With his tongue "bridled," which, according to some accounts, means he had a stake driven through his face, to keep him from addressing the crowd.

In any of these series, you get attached to your hero, flawed guy that he is: Matthew Shardlake, David Becket, Simon Ames, Sir Robert Carey, John Shakespeare. They're the protagonists; we're meant to identify with them and they're often trying to navigate conflicting loyalties while protecting more vulnerable souls, making them even more sympathetic. But now I don't want to identify too strongly with Bruno -- because I know he's heading for a prolonged and painful end. There's also something of a contract in series crime fiction; as readers we expect our hero is going to resolve the problem and be around to take on the next one. So far, the books have generally conformed to that convention but if you're dealing with the real-life Bruno's chronology, it can't continue for long. I wonder why Parris didn't simply create a fictional hero based on Bruno -- it would have given her scope for a lot more books if he could hang around England longer, for one thing. Perhaps she'll exercise the fiction writer's license and simply have Bruno head out into an alternate future, where he chooses not to return to Italy and avoids the Inquisition. For the sake of the fictional character and my attachment, I hope so. Otherwise I fear this series is not going to see too many more installments. Sacrilege is set in 1584 and we know Bruno left England in 1585.

More on the real Giordano Bruno, if you're curious but don't want to read a whole book on the guy, is available on the Wikipedia page and in a New Yorker review of a recent biography.

My current reading is about another real-life Tudor-era figure who also met an early and unhappy end: I'm reading Bring Up the Bodies, the second in Hilary Mantel's planned trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, the advisor to Henry VIII. But even though I know where he, too, is headed I don't mind entering Cromwell's mind and world. Maybe because it's literary fiction or perhaps because it is based on real events not embroidering on known facts, like the Bruno series. Or maybe because I knew Cromwell's fate from the beginning, and thus have been preparing myself all along. The third volume, which will presumably cover the Anne of Cleves disaster and Cromwell's downfall, should be a doozy.

Lurid Historical True Crime ... and Why I'm Not An Academic

I recently read a couple books about the case of Mary Rogers, a young woman in 19th century New York who was brutally murdered and possibly raped. Or maybe she'd had an abortion and the abortionists disposed of her body in a panic. In any case, she wound up dead in the waters off the shore of New Jersey. There were several different suspects and theories -- a jealous fiance, gang murder, abortion gone wrong? The case was never solved. The story was a sensation for the burgeoning penny press and inspired Edgar Allan Poe to write the Mystery of Marie Roget, set in Paris but clearly based on the Mary Rogers case. It continues to attract writers as a subject, a classic historical true crime subject.

The first book I read about it was an academic take: The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth Century New York. And for an academic book, it was fairly approachable. But I didn't finish it, which is rare for me. Two reasons. The first was the prose, which despite efforts to make the book comprehensible to ordinary humans, still included passages like this:

"As the subject of all forms of social discourse -- the newspaper, the mystery novel, and even that of legislators and reformers -- Rogers was the embodiment of all that antebellum middle-class culture named as unspeakable, but actually, according to the modern critic of the history of sexuality, Foucault, integrated into a 'regulated and polymorphous' variety of discourses."

Someday I will read an academic work in the humanities that does not name-check Foucault and/or Derrida within the first 20 pages. Or maybe I won't, because these works, as a class, are just too annoying. I spent too long in the world of reporting, I guess, but I can't stand being instructed on what something means. Just tell me what happened and let me draw my own conclusions, OK?

The other reason I gave up on this book is I felt there was a fundamental hypocrisy at work. It purports, in passages like that quoted above, to analyze and, to some extent, judge Rogers' treatment as an object of prurience by the press and the public at large. Well, yeah. And why exactly did you choose this subject for your book anyway? Perhaps because you realized that people are fascinated with crime, particularly crimes against attractive young women? Perhaps that's why you also included the word sex in your title? Edgar Allan Poe got it and he didn't feel the need to cast himself as a moral authority who is horrified by other people's interest while he was doing it. Then again, he didn't have Foucault and Derrida to tell him what was really going on.

Speaking of Poe, he is a major player in another nonfiction book about the case which I read all the way through: The Beautiful Cigar Girl by Daniel Stashower. This is a standard work of historical true crime, made sexier by Poe's role in the story. It suffers a bit from the basic problem with the Mary Rogers story -- we never do find out what, exactly, happened to her and who was responsible -- as opposed to other great works of historical true crime, like The Devil in the White City and The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher. Those books give you an answer to what the hell happened. Stashower's book gave me a lot more insight into Poe, so that was a plus. If you're interested in this story or in that genre, I recommend it. The subtitle, I must say, is a bit much: "Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe and the Invention of Murder." I get that you want to get Poe in there. And I get that this case was part of the beginnings of both widespread public interest in crime, via the new popular press. But murder's been around for a long time, hasn't it?

The book I really liked, though, was the one I just finished: The Mystery of Mary Rogers by Rick Geary. It's a graphic novel, part of a series by Geary called A Treasury of Victorian Murder, which also includes famous cases like Lizzie Borden. He's done some 20th century cases, too, and a biography of J. Edgar Hoover. I've now read three of his books and I think they're all terrific. So if you're going to read one book about this case, this one is my recommendation. And if you're a true crime buff, especially a historical true crime buff, definitely check Geary out. They're a good introduction to graphic novels, too, if you're curious about that genre but are not sure where to jump in.

It's not about the horse

A review of Catherine the Great by Robert K. Massie, along with consideration of The Winter Palace by Eva Stachniak: First, the biography:

Only in the bizarre chessboard world of 18^th century European monarchy could an obscure princess from the German nation-state of Anhalt-Zerbst rise to become Empress of Russia, the vast and powerful nation that dominates the eastern part of the continent, then and now.

Catherine, writes biographer Robert K. Massie, was the equal of her illustrious predecessor Peter the Great – “his only equal – in vision, strength of purpose and achievement during the centuries that Russia was ruled by tsars, emperors and empresses.”

The story of her reign is fascinating but equally so is the unlikely tale of how it came about. Catherine – born Sophia – was plucked from relative obscurity by Empress Elizabeth, a daughter of Peter the Great.

Elizabeth was childless and had taken her nephew, Peter, also a German, as her heir. For his consort, she chose another German related to Peter’s House of Holstein – little Sophia. As a young teenager, the princess was summoned to St. Petersburg.

While Sophia, soon rebaptized in the Russian Orthodox Church as Catherine, was an eager and willing student of Russian language, religion and culture, her young husband-to-be was not. Whether he was mentally ill or just damaged from a neglected and traumatic childhood, young Peter was certainly strange. He idolized the Prussian emperor Frederick the Great, and he spent most of his waking hours conducting pretend military drills in the Prussian manner. For his “soldiers,” he employed servants and, well into adulthood, dolls.

Young Catherine was left to learn the navigation of Russian imperial court life herself, dealing with the vain and unpredictable Elizabeth as well as her immature and unprepared young fiancé. Even after the pair were married – and Catherine had grown into an attractive young woman – the marriage went unconsummated and the heir Elizabeth had essentially ordered up did not appear.

Finally Catherine was encouraged to take a lover and she bore the first of her three children – fathered by three different men, none of them her husband, according to Massie. It was a boy and the delighted Empress Elizabeth immediately seized custody.

When Elizabeth died, Catherine’s husband Peter ascended the throne. His brief reign was a disaster. He tried to remake the Orthodox Church in the Lutheran image, ordering the destruction of icons and the shaving of the priests’ beards. He tried to remake the Russian Army in the image of his beloved Prussia, putting an uncle from Holstein with no military experience in command. And he embarked on a disastrous war with Denmark, over a territorial dispute that was important to Holstein but had no bearing on Russia. Within a few months “Peter had provoked and insulted the Orthodox Church, infuriated and alienated the army and betrayed his allies,” Massie writes.

Desperate, military and political men in Russia’s top circles turned to Peter’s wife – the mother of his purported son and heir, Paul. For the start of his reign she had been out of commission – pregnant with another child by a dashing Russian officer. Peter, meanwhile, had taken a mistress he much preferred to Catherine and hoped to replace her. But after giving birth, Catherine quickly reasserted her influence and seized the reins.

When a group of soldiers appeared at her residence, she told them “that her life and that of her son had been threatened by the emperor but that it was not for her own sake, but for that of her beloved country and their holy Orthodox religion that she was compelled to throw herself on their protection.”

From there, Catherine consolidated her hold on power -- helped along the way when her allies (including her lover's brother) -- managed to kill the deposed emperor in a dinnertime struggle at his place of confinement. Her regime claimed Peter died of hemorrhoidal colic (!)  but no one really believed it (even if few in Russia would dare to say so) and throughout Europe she was always considered a usurper even as she befriended Enlightenment figures including Diderot and Voltaire and created one of the world's great Western art collections, which survives today at the Hermitage.

Like Elizabeth I before her and Victoria after, Catherine's long and stable reign is a historical anamoly. A woman managing to gain, hold and exercise power and literally rule men is so incredibly unlikely that when it happens it becomes mythic. And unlike English queens, it appears Russian empresses were acknowledged to have sex lives, even outside of marriage. Empress Elizabeth and Catherine both had a series of "favorites" with all-hours access to their private chambers. Catherine eventually installed one as King of Poland (under heavy Russian control). The most famous, Gregory Potemkin, was rumored to be her husband though they never could have acknowledged it and their partnership evolved from romance to administration. Massie matter-of-factly recounts Catherine's lovers (a total of 12) but never brings up the notorious rumors about sexual relations with a horse. Untrue rumors, I should add. Even Snopes says so.

When Catherine died in 1796, her son Paul succeeded her -- but their relationship had always been a difficult one, starting from his birth when the Empress Elizabeth took him away and severely limited Catherine's access to her own son. Peter the Great had changed the law so that a Russian ruler could name his or own successor -- meaning Catherine had tactical power to keep her son under her control. When Paul finally reached the throne he changed it back to primogeniture, or the nearest male heir. "Never again would an heir have to go through what Paul had been through," Massie writes. "And never again would Russia be ruled by a woman."

After reading the biography, it was interesting to see a different perspective on the German princess in Eva Stachniak's novel The Winter Palace. The story is told from the perspective of a Polish girl, a few years older than Catherine, who becomes a ward of Empress Elizabeth when her parents die while living in St. Petersburg. Barbara is recruited as a household spy by the aging Empress, directed to befriend Catherine and report back about the actions and thoughts of the Grand Duchess. Eventually, though, she becomes a sort of double agent, serving Catherine -- and simply seeking to survive the normal intrigues of palace life and then the upheaval after Elizabeth dies, Peter is deposed and Catherine takes over. After having read the biography, I was surprised at the portrait of Peter -- I wouldn't call it sympathetic but in Massie's account, he was far worse, especially in his treatment of Catherine. And his actions upon assuming the throne, both in allying himself with the Prussia, hated by most Russians, and in making enemies of the Orthodox Church, are almost unmentioned. Barbara herself is a fairly sympathetic character though even her developing relationship with her husband is merely hinted at. And this may be a bit of a spoiler but her disillusionment toward the end of the book seems just implausible -- surely someone who had spent so many formative -- and successful -- years at court would have developed a healthy self-protective realism and cynicism about the motives and duplicity of powerful people.

I enjoyed both these books, the biography more than the novel, though I will still read the next in Stachniak's planned series about Catherine. If nothing else, it makes a nice break from the machinations of the English court.

Catherine the Great: A-

The Winter Palace: B