gimme all your lovin'

(This is totally a rambling-confession-style blog post. If you're here for some of my wit, come back later.)

It was a lovely day, nearly 70 degrees and sunny. Rare enough for SF and some lovely friends sent texts to the effect that we simply HAD to go out. But, it's been a while since I spent a whole day at home reading, so for today, I refused to venture out into the sunshiney California paradise.

And, I mean, sure, I've read plenty of books on planes in the past few months, but a day spent reading at home is the best thing ever. Home has kittys curled up and purring. Home has a kitchen (no, I didn't cook, but the kitchen is where I keep my ice cream). Of course, I stretched the boundaries of my home a little today. I wandered as far as four blocks north this morning and read at a restaurant while eating breakfast; several hours later I managed to cross the street for a salad and two PBRs that I was able to portion into tiny little sips that lasted long enough to justify finishing the novel at Radish instead of interrupting myself mid-read to re-cross the street. And we wonder why I am low on cash.

(Tangent: I name-drop Radish because, even though I never considered the word this way before, now that it's the name of a restaurant in the Mission I think of "radish" as a hipster term for something that is not quite all the way rad, but still kind of approximately rad. Which is kind of perfect for that place.)

Anyway, gorgeous day. I read Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman, even though I totally just bought 1Q84. Murakami's more than a single day's worth of reading and will probably be traveling east with me next month. But on the other hand, I'm not sure that I'm going to really heft it all the way back east, really. Because...well, because, I've decided I'm just going to start publicly owning my massive romance novel habit.

My mom knows all about it, of course. In fact, she shushes me if I mention one that I got from her. Because, what? Because of how often we've been told that reading books by women for women about women's escapist fantasies is shameful somehow. Yeah, by society, but also (WARNING, gasp! I'm about to talk about my childhood, with blame and finger pointing:) my dad used to really insult her for reading them (and by extension, insult me for reading them, but I was like, 8*, and hiding them pretty well at that point, I think, but I remember the gist of what he said about women who read that filth). He would say she was wasting her time, she was reading trash, blah blah, she should read something that made her a better person instead of reading whatever frivolous waste of ink she was reading.

My dad used to read a whole lot of Louis L'Amour, by the way. (Maybe he still does?)

Feel free to spend a minute here laughing at his deliciously obvious lack of self-awareness. Interestingly, though, I only just noticed it. Yeah, I'm going to blame (society) (gender stereotypes) (small town small mindedness) (lack of education) (whatever, this is boring) for the fact that "men's romance," or Westerns in this case, get some respect and the ones I want to read get a bunch of scorn. Oh, I know, there's plenty of romance novels out there that deserve scorn. I've read a lot of them. But I've also read some pretty okay ones that made me really happy.

Which brings us to here and now, and me owning my guilty little pleasure and admitting I need a little help, I guess, finding more romance novels I'll like. It's too random to count on the luck of the bookstore draw, although I did accidentally stumbled into Diana Gabaldon's An Echo in the Bone the day I quit working at JWT. I bought it because it was thick and I had a lot of free time to kill. And I fell in love with it. I read the whole series in a matter of a few months and sometimes now I'll randomly catch myself missing the characters.

Where do I find more decent romance novels? I just read this awesome article about Nora Roberts and I think I'm totally going to start seeking out some of her books. From the Guardian:

...she's doing a signing and answering questions...What does she find helps keep her going when she's writing? "Alcoholic beverages." Does she tweet? "I'd rather stab myself in the eye with a flaming stick." What does she think of the recent news story claiming that romantic fiction gives women unrealistic expectations? "Because women aren't supposed to have expectations, right? We're pretty smart. I think we know the difference between reality and fiction. I don't think that people read Agatha Christie, and then think: I know, I'll go and murder someone."

She sounds like my kind of lady. I found the link to that article on a blog I just started reading called Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, which also sounds like my kind of ladies.

In other news, I have to sleep now so I can go poke around and gawk at big ol' redwoods tomorrow.

This blog post has been brought to you by stream-of-consciousness, fatigue, and the number 6**.

* I was probably 8. I have a memory of looking up the word "libido" in the dictionary, and this memory is set at the elementary school I went to for Kindergarten through second grade. Around this same time, I believed "temples" were some sexual part of the body because frustrated heroines were always going off alone and "rubbing their temples" and thinking about the jerky dude who was only being a jerk because of how into her he was. Anyway. I knew what "libido" meant before I understood which body parts were considered sexual, if that explains anything at all about me.

**"The number 6" being more of an Edible Woman reference than a Sesame Street joke, even though I hope by now to have gotten my unfortunate blog readers so helplessly lost in their own reminisces about their own childhood beliefs and misconceptions about sexuality that any dirty thoughts they ever had about Sesame Street will now be shared with me, either publicly or privately, for my own amusement.