From The Beaumont (TX) Enterprise: It’s a hugely popular genre, and it’s just as valid in terms of reading as any other type of literature. Women – and a growing number of men – are attracted to the fairytale endings, which some critics call trite and dull.
But others, including celeb. librarian Nancy Pearl wishes critics wouldn’t rank a Kathleen Woodiwiss (who died just last month) reader as less literary than, say Toni Morrison.
“When you start talking about reading in terms of literary value, you are devaluing reading,” she said in a telephone interview from her Seattle home. “As a librarian, we need to validate people’s reading (choices).”
If it were up to Pearl, libraries would not group books into genres such as mysteries, westerns and romances. “It narrows the world of the reader,” said Pearl, a frequent book reviewer on NPR author of Book Lust and its two sequels.
“Romance readers are looking for a particular thing: A happy ending,” Pearl said. “And what is so bad about that?”
show of hands
How many of you think that the awesome, near life-threatening comedy of “romance novel with a HAPPY ENDING” is lost on the people involved in this genre and article?
Do you have to pay extra for the happy ending?
The happier the better…
When I was a young teen I looked for the saddest books I could find and spent hours crying over GWTW and Jane Eyre. As I got older and faced more responsibilities and became aware of the actual saddness in life, I found that I gravitated toward romances because they 1) were ALWAYS happy in the end, and 2) didn’t take much time or energy to read…and that was something I had a short supply of. I think of them as Candy for the mind…a little goes a long way.