trueromance

BIO: Ana Grilo, Reviewer, Super Geek and Book Smugglers, first noticed her addiction to reading at a young age when her grandfather read her fairytales. When her book reading (and buying) became a problem with her significant other (“What do you mean, we need money for food, dear?”) she resorted to book smuggling by having the books delivered to her office and then smuggled home in small batches. In her blog partner, Thea James, she has found a kindred spirit (read: “also obsessed with books”) with whom to share the joy of reading. Hence, The Book Smugglers was born. Romance and Speculative Fiction are their speciality.

Ponderings on genre reading and romance

When I was invited to write a post for Borders’ True Romance blog, my first reaction was exhilaration until I realised I had no idea what I should write about and panicked. Ideas sprung left and right and I navigated between themes as varied as Emotional Reading (I am an emotional reader: books can make me become a pile of mush, a crying wreck, or a laughing maniac, and romance novels are capable of igniting all of these) or The Perils of Reading Romance (I became a book smuggler when I had to buy Julia Quinn’s entire backlist in one go. Book smuggling is a VERY dangerous occupation if you have no room for books in your house).
It was when I read Ursula Le Guin’s review of Margaret Atwood’s The Year of The Flood in The Guardian on 08.29 that I finally realised what I wanted to write about: how I became a romance reader and what it means to be one. In her review, Le Guin explores how Atwood does not want any of her books to be called science fiction because of how the genre is shunned by readers and reviewers alike.
And one of the reasons for this is how genre (or “popular”) novels seem to be perceived as stock filled with formula and conventions. In Le Guin’s own words:

“One of the features supposed to distinguish “popular” from “literary” fiction is the nature of the characters who enact the fiction. In a realistic novel we expect to find individual personalities of some complexity; in a western, mystery, romance or spy thriller, we accept or welcome conventional types, even stock figures – the Cowboy, the Feisty Heroine, the Dark Brooding Landowner”.

And then it struck me that the reason why I have become a romance reader so late in my reading life is that I had those very same expectations – for a long time I, too, was a literary snob. Having grown up in Brazil where genre fiction is practically non-existent probably helped to create that frame of mind, but the principle of the matter is that to an outsider, this is exactly what one expects from genre reading: conventional and formulaic characters and plotting.
Then, a few years ago I started to read Fantasy and was immediately won over by the genre and the amazing possibilities of imaginative new worlds. Romance remained a no-no, the last frontier, the line that I would not cross. Until that is, two years ago when a friend convinced me to try a Julia Quinn novel (The Viscount Who Loved Me) and that was it. I crossed over and never looked back.
In her review, Le Guin, carries on to say that the supposed distinction between popular and literary fiction is so often violated in both ways that it has become meaningless, and this is exactly what I found out once I submerged myself in the genre.
Which to me only proves that the distinction between genres is sometimes an unnatural division, a marketing choice because regardless of which genre a book belongs to, regardless of conventional tropes, a good story is a good story is a good story.
Yes, Romance has its own tropes and clichés (one of my favourites, which I think I will never tire of, is the Rake and the Reformer) and one of the most criticised is the certainty of a Happily Ever After. But the myriad of ways to get there, the multitude of possible subversions available, coupled with beautiful prose and the obvious penchant of the genre for some of the most amazing character-driven stories I have ever encountered in any genre, have made of me a Romance reader for life.
I suspect that most genre readers had at one point or another to excuse their own reading to someone – when I told my friends that I ran a blog and that I read Romance and Speculative Fiction their reaction was to ask, “But you read ‘real’ books too, right?” - every time that happens I usually begin my retort by saying that I understand where they are coming from and finish with a very simple, very clear remark: genre reading makes me happy.

And that is all there is to it really – I read because I love good stories and I have found that the best ones, in my opinion, are in genre fiction, including Romance.

Why do you read Romance?  Do you read other genre’s as well?  How do you deal with book snobs?  Enjoy the blog!