Let us now praise Georgette Heyer

Sometimes people are shocked when I reveal that I occasionally read ... romance novels. I could give you an abbreviated version of my rant about how this is as valid a genre as, say, thriller or mystery, which seems to be perfectly acceptable as lighter literary fare. Only thrillers and mysteries generally have more violence and usually have less sex. Some romances are pretty well written. Many of them are terrible dreck. I think that's true in any area of literary output, including a lot of the stuff that is considered Literary. But I'll spare you (any more of) that rant. Instead, I'll blame my mom and grandmother. They did not leave what the smart women at Smart Bitches Trashy Books have dubbed Old Skool romances (Kathleen Woodiwiss, Rosemary Rogers) lying around the house. But they did have a weakness for the works of Georgette Heyer. Enough of a weakness that the bookshelves in our house, along with lots of Serious Nonfiction and Classic Works of Literature, had a pretty good collection of Heyer novels. These tended to be either well-worn hardcovers that had been discarded from the Chappaqua Library, where my grandmother was director, and some 1970s-vintage paperbacks, like the one I'm including here.

I don't know my romance novel history all that well but I suspect Heyer might be responsible for making the Regency the Big Mama of historical romance time periods. This, of course, is a nod to Jane Austen (by the way, people, the works of Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters are NOT HISTORICAL NOVELS. They are novels that were contemporary works of fiction; they just happen to have been written a long time ago. It makes me crazy when I see that stuff recommended as works of historical fiction). But back to Heyer. She's funny. She's entertaining. Her characters are smart and complicated (or stupid and funny). You're pretty much guaranteed a happy ending but you may be surprised and you're probably going to be amused by how she gets there.

Don't just take my word for it. How about the word of A.S. Byatt, Booker Prize-winner and all that? In her essay collection, Passions of the Mind, she has a whole piece about Heyer called "An Honourable Escape" (which sounds just like a Heyer title, as I'm sure Byatt intended). It comes right after essays about Sylvia Plath and Toni Morrison.

All of which is to say, if you need some good "escape literature," as Byatt calls Heyer, to distract yourself from hurricanes, economic stresses, political strife or whatever, you might consider giving Heyer a try. Especially since, if you are of the digital persuasion, you can get a lot of her stuff for pretty damned cheap, at least on Amazon. If you prefer reading on dead trees, we have a bunch of them in the Monroe County Library collection and I wouldn't be surprised if, outside of the Keys, your local library also had a good stock. My grandmother was not the only librarian with a weakness for Heyer. If you don't know where to start, two that I highly recommend are The Nonesuch and The Toll-Gate -- and not just because the Key West Library copies happen to have those old buckram library bindings, about which I am becoming ridiculously nostalgic.

The future of the book(store)

First of all, the important news: If you are a reader in the Key West area, get your butt down to Voltaire Books, at the corner of Simonton and Eaton streets -- they're going out of business and the stock is 50 percent off. Fabulous deals to be had, and you'll be helping out some very good guys in taking the books off their hands. This is happening at the same time as the national collapse of Borders, which is giving us a strange feeling in Key West, an allegedly literary little city if there ever was one. I'm sad that Voltaire is closing -- I loved to browse there, tried to buy books there when I was buying books and gave gift certificates as birthday presents for the last couple years. But even though the bibliogods are probably going to strike me down for thinking this, much less writing it, I don't feel like this is a sign of the book apocalypse.

For one thing, I just returned from a conference about the Future of the Book (more on that in future posts, I hope) and the future, it is clear, is largely digital. Not entirely and not for everyone. I expect to read print books for the rest of my life and after that .. well, that's not my problem.

I also think some part of me, having watched bookstores come and go over the years, knew not to invest too much emotionally into Voltaire. I supported them as best I could but I did not pin all my hopes on the future of the book on them. It was a wonderful little store for a time and now it's gone. Just like Blue Heron and lots of other bookstores I have loved and supported. Also: I work in a library. I have plentiful access to books -- new, old, donated, advanced review copies. Personally, selfishly, I don't feel a dearth of books. (When my husband sees me coming home with bags loaded with books I think he wishes I did.) You can buy books here, too -- we have donations and library discards for sale for as little as a quarter -- and paperbacks for free!

And there's this: We still have Key West Island Books on Fleming, just off Duval -- the venerable institution is now under new ownership and it's time to return and support them. It's a lot cleaner and less cluttered, too. They've always had a great selection of used books; now the challenge will be to see if they can pick up the new book market, beyond top 10 bestsellers and local interest titles. If not, that's OK -- there's always Amazon and it will give new justification to the occasional Books & Books binge on mainland trips. (A side note to fellow islanders: If you visit Miami and do not take the time to stop by Books & Books you are cheating yourself -- they have several locations but I recommend the Coral Gables flagship store -- amazing selection, dream atmosphere ... and a nice little cafe with terrific panninis.)

Santas in July

Late July in Key West means a couple things. It's hotter than Hades. You start seeing interesting blobs on satellite images of the Atlantic. If you live in my house, you spend most of your nonworking waking time watching the Tour de France. And if you hang around Old Town, you suddenly have sightings of Santa wherever you look. Only it's not supposed to be Santa. The hale white-bearded fellows are entrants in the annual Ernest Hemingway Look-Alike Contest, a guaranteed publicity winner for the tourism council (and I've been as guilty as anyone; I once wrote a cover story called "The Papas and the Papas" for the late, lamented Tropic magazine, chronicling one year's contest). An earlier story I wrote about Hemingway's long, strong, posthumous celebrity pointed out that Amherst doesn't hold Emily Dickinson lookalike contests -- only now they do.

I've always hoped one year the winner would be the rare entrant who looks like the younger, darker-haired, nonbearded Hemingway -- as Hemingway looked when he actually lived here in the 1930s. You do get the occasional entrant who gives it a try but since previous winners serve as the judges, the late-Hemingway look appears to have a lock on the thing.

All of which is a longwinded introduction to a couple of recent book reviews, one of which has a strong Hemingway connection: My review of A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses ran in Sunday's edition of Solares Hill. And a couple Sundays before that they ran my review of Janet Malcolm's Iphigenia in Forest Hills. Both interesting, well reported and written books of nonfiction, though naturally very different. I liked the Malcolm book a lot about the court system; not so much with her pronounciations on journalism. And I liked Trubek's tour of writers' house museums though she was a bit snarky in approach at times. I hadn't realized how many of these museums I had toured until I really thought about it though to be fair two of them are in my backyards, past and present (Emily Dickinson and Ernest Hemingway, whom Trubek holds up as sort of polar opposite of house museum ethos).

Like many a Key Wester, I'm almost as sick of Ernest Hemingway as I am of Jimmy Buffett -- but lately I've been thinking it might be time to read him again. One reason is the hilarious portrayal in Woody Allen's recent movie "Midnight in Paris" -- young Hemingway again, before he was the self-created celebrity and legend. Another is simply in reaction to all the late-Hemingway hysteria; I haven't read the short stories and early novels since I was in my 20s and I have learned that books take on a whole new dimension when you bring some life experience to them. Maybe it's time for A Farewell to Arms. After I finish re-reading Jane Austen.

Is this just fantasy?

Best lists aren't just for the end of the year -- and they're not just for professional book critics, either. Right now, NPR has a fun exercise going, compiling a list of the 100 best science fiction and fantasy books ever written. They're soliciting suggestions (five titles at a time) from listeners/readers and in four days they've received more than 4,600 posts. Take that, all you reading-is-dead handwringers! There are a couple rules -- you can suggest a series as one of your entries, as long as that series is written by a single author. And YA is banned, which made it a little difficult for me because Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy and Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy would have been high on my list.

Still, even though I would not consider myself a big reader of scifi or fantasy, I managed to come up with five. * Here's my list, in no particular order: Naomi Novik's Temeraire series (always glad to give this one a mention; it's alternative historical fiction, Napoleonic wars with dragons and it's AWESOME). Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, a loopy literary alternaworld to which I will be forever grateful for getting me through the Horrible Hurricane Year of 2005. Doomsday Book by Connie Willis -- highly recommended for people who like medieval stuff and/or time travel. American Gods by Neil Gaiman, which needs no help from me but is pretty cool, and will soon be a major motion picture. And The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas, a book about a book that is powerful and strange. Both books, I mean. Just read it.

If you are into books, by the way, and you don't follow or check NPR's books coverage (it's compiled at their website and has the requisite Facebook and Twitter feeds) then you are missing out. And if you prefer to get your radio auditorially but can't listen to NPR all day long, they do a nice podcast of compilations of their books coverage every week or two.

The Guardian, another bastion of book coverage in the popular media, has also compiled a 100 best list recently, their picks for best nonfiction titles. They solicited reader suggestions after the fact; my contribution was The Song of the Dodo by David Quammen. Amazing book about biodiversity and evolution and island biogeography and if those sound like heavy, dry subjects then trust me, in Quammen's hands they are not. If and when I have to do a serious weed of my own book collection, this will be one of the last to go.

* Addendum from 8/18/11 -- Since writing this I have joined the George R. R. Martin Cult and am midway through the third book in his Song of Ice and Fire series -- and they really as addictive as everyone says. Martin didn't need my help -- he still scored high on the final list -- and I'm not sure which of my initial five I'd knock out. Either American Gods or the Thursday Next series, which is loopier than straight-up fantasy anyway.

Reading about reading Jane Austen

Like just about every female English major on the planet, I am a Jane-ite. I read the books. I watched the movies. I watched the various miniseries. It was a screen version -- the 1980 BBC adaptation of "Pride and Prejudice," shown on Masterpiece Theater -- that first sent me to read Austen as a youngster. As an adult in the 1990s, when the BBC began a new round of Austen adaptations, I bought the new P&P miniseries on VHS. I bought it again on DVD. I go to the movies for new adaptations and then I buy THEM on DVD. I own a gigantic Modern Library Jane Austen compendium and a couple of the novels as individual volumes.  They're free on Kindle so I have them there, too. I have never, however, been a big consumer of the rest of Janeworld -- the zombie mash-ups, the novels where Jane solves crimes, etc. I read The Jane Austen Book Club and thought it was OK. But generally, I prefer the original.

Only I realized recently that it has been quite some time since I've actually read the original. For the last decade and a half -- yes, OK, since the Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle adaptation of "Pride and Prejudice" -- my Austen consumption has been almost entirely onscreen.

And that's too bad, as William Deresiewicz reminded me in his appealing new memoir, "A Jane Austen Education." He doesn't diss the movies (well he does, a little; more on that later). But his focus is all on the books, the actual Austen, and the life lessons her small but significant output offered him.

The book is broken into six sections, one for each of the published novels, with a lesson or moral value he received from each. That can feel a little pat and I disagree with a couple of his choices -- he has "Persuasion," my favorite Austen novel, teaching him about true friendship. He makes a good case but, to me, that novel is all about constancy, and learning to have the courage to do what's right for you, even if the people around you disapprove.

As a memoir of a relatively privileged, intelligent but self-absorbed young man's journey to self-awareness and maturity, "A Jane Austen Education" is fine -- it's just that memoirs aren't really my thing, especially memoirs about learning not to be a jerk. Congratulations! I'm happy for you and those around you, really, but is that worth a couple hours of my time? As an evaluation of Austen's work, by someone trained to think critically about literature but who writes for what Virginia Woolf famously called the common reader, it is superb. And it has inspired me to pull out my 1,364-page, 3-pound (yes, I weighed it) edition of the Complete Novels. They are arranged in order of publication; I'm 56 pages into "Sense and Sensibility" and wondering why I've been neglecting Jane -- the real Jane, not her on-screen stepchildren -- so long.

About the movies: While I will swoon along with everyone else when Colin Firth-as-Darcy dives into the pond, my favorite screen adaptation remains "Persuasion" starring Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds. I've always had a Ciaran Hinds thing. And more significantly, it was the first Austen adaptation that struck me as remotely realistic -- the rooms were small and dark, the clothing was not unfailingly elegant, Anne Elliott did look like a woman past her prime and depressed. And the acting is superb. Plus you don't need to commit an entire weekend (or sick day home on the couch) to watch it.

My husband's favorite, on the other hand, is the 1999 Mansfield Park. He says it's because it's the only Austen adaptation that acknowledges the existence of sex. Which is just why Deresiewicz, apparently, hated it: he refers to it as a "travesty" because it "turns prudish Fanny Price into a naughty and bold young rebel with teasing eyes and a sensuous mouth."

And  for the record, the Kate Beckinsale Emma is way better than the Gwyneth Paltrow version and I much prefer the recent (2008) two-part BBC Sense and Sensibility to the much-lauded Emma Thompson/Ang Lee movie. Love Emma and all  but Elinor Dashwood is supposed to be nineteen. And Hugh Grant (way too good-looking for Edward Farrars) looks like he just left a fancy dress party at Oxford or something. The more recent version didn't have any big name actors I recognized (unless you count Mark Gatiss, the hapless patient-killing veterinarian from "League of Gentleman" as the useless older brother) but it was, like the huge majority of BBC productions, well executed all around.