If you’re in the Washington, DC, area and feel like hearing some awesomeness directly fed into your excellent eardrums, heads up!
There is a Romance Pavilion at this year’s Library of Congress National Book Festival, which, hell YEAH, we get a pavilion! More things deserve a pavilion, right?
This Saturday night, September 5, at 7:15 pm, there’s a Romance Fiction event with Beverly Jenkins, Sarah MacLean, and Paige Tyler, moderated by Petra Mayer at NPR. Each author will be speaking for a few minutes, after which there will be a moderated Q&A with all three.
Tickets are free, and there seems to still be seats available – so if you’re thinking, Hey, that might be cool, definitely go. The more people in chairs, the more the Library of Congress National Book Festival board and organizers see that romance is something they should continue to include in the festival.
Also, can we talk about how adorable this image is?
I was so that girl, except my socks were never that cool.
Alas, I can’t go, but if you attend, please let me know how it goes?
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And speaking of NPR, I was on in the NPR Books website recently talking about The Holy Trinity of J – Jude Deveraux, Judith McNaught, and Julie Garwood:
The Trinity of J wrote incredible historicals and contemporaries, and if you mention their names to a romance fan, we make a sort of half sigh, similar to Good Book Noise, only with more nostalgia and awe. To us, these three authors are special. More than special. They’re a foundation for hundreds, if not thousands of romance readers who found one book, and kept reading through entwined families and Scottish brides and department store magnates and movie stars and rebellious hoydens and taciturn noblemen.
(I hope you’ll have a look to read it – I’m really excited to be on NPR Books, and really proud of this essay. It took forever to write because I kept re-reading the books I was writing about!)
I wrote in an early draft that, “many established writers with bestsellers of their own happily trace their desire to write romance to novels with magical J names on the cover. If the romance genre had its own institutional library built from the novels we read, Garwood, Deveraux and McNaught’s books would make up three of the front columns that support the books above them, and welcome readers daily into the genre.”
Of course, now I want a romance library built of romances and filled with them, too, but that might just be a sign I need more coffee.
We’ve built community recommendation lists for Julie Garwood, Judith McNaught, and Jude Deveraux, if you’d like to have a look and try one, or two, or six.
Do you have a favorite Garwood, Deveraux, or McNaught novel that you’ve kept for years? Which one?
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Here’s an interesting link courtesy of Amanda: Play Judgey, where you attempt to guess the GoodReads rating of a book based on its cover. I’m sort of surprised how well I did.
I also saw that the creators of this game released some of the data analysis after more than 3 million people played along.
If you’re into book covers and how the appearance of a book matches or doesn’t match the content (or the reader reviews) this is a bit of a deep-dive rabbit hole, so be warned, k?
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I found this article this week, and can’t link to it because it’s behind a paywall. But I wanted to tell everyone everywhere because I think this is SO COOL.
As part of the Girls Who Code initiative to teach young women coding languages, three high school students created an Android app called Enrighten Me which, “provides US citizens accessible information about their civil rights such as their right to free speech or to videotape police in a public location.”
The three women who created the app, Serena Simpkins, India Unger-Harquail, and Pavitthra Panduragan, designed and built the app as part of an NJIT Girls Who Code course.
I know teaching myself HTML my senior year of college changed my life in immeasurable ways. Encouraging young women to learn computer programming gives me all the happy.
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Finally, a comic by Chris Schweizer, on a sometimes-forgotten romance hero: Gomez Addams as played by Raul Julia.
Here’s hoping Bookspan (aka C-Span2) will chose to braodcast the romance forum. Then again, it’s only a ten hour drive… and it is a three day weekend… snd I have a friend who lives in D.C….
The Duchess by Jude Devereaux is my go to comfort read. The one I keep coming back to time and time again. The story is wonderful- but not perfect. Claire is smart, Trev isn’t a total alpha asshat like many of the time. The minor characters such as Trev’s eccentric relatives and The Brat are fantastic.
Aside from some HCRs and a couple of Jackie Collins’ books in my early 20s I had never really read romance. When I was younger, I held fast to the biased notion that romance wasn’t “real” writing. And of course, what I’d read just cemented that notion.
Then one night while stuck at work with nothing to do (I’d already finished the mystery I’d brought), I discovered a copy of Julie Garwood’s The Prize hidden in a filing cabinet. I loved that book! I appreciated the humor most of all. Not able to take it home with me to finish, I stopped at a fabulous used bookstore and grabbed a copy- which I still own more than 20 years later.
I can’t stand Jude Devereaux’s writing. Haven’t read very much Julie Garwood. For a while there, I devoured everything Judith McNaught wrote until I read one about a high powered businessman, possibly from Puerto Rico and the heroine was in Human Relations and together they were going to do great things. It was clear that Ms. McNaught knew nothing about the business world or HR so I stopped reading her.
The J I turn to is Jennifer Blake. That woman knows Louisiana history as if she owns it.
There is another “J” not mentioned but without whom I would never have read the 4 already listed: Johanna Lindsey. Now it was really Fabio that started all this romance reading, displayed on the cover of “Defy Not the Heart,” but once I picked it up and read it, I found all of Johanna’s books and read them. And I’m still reading her new ones to this day. After her, I moved on to other historical authors, happily including the other 4, and when I realized that a favorite, Amanda Quick, also wrote contemporaries as “Jayne Ann Krentz” (another “J”!), I started reading contemporaries, too. Then there was “Jayne Castle” and I was on to paranormals. Of the original 3 listed, I’m only still reading Julie Garwood and that only happened last year when I saw Paul Marron on the cover of one of her recent books. But I’m enjoying her current romantic suspense. It seemed to me that Jude Deveraux switched to women’s fiction and since there’s no guarantee of a happy ending, I stopped reading her. But her early historicals were happy reading for me. And now I’m going to go read your NPR article!
I managed to find a couple of other short NPR romance related podcasts this afternoon, not all of them recent
http://www.npr.org/templates/rss/podlayer.php?id=415832022
Fun listens though. Had to listen to PCHH again. It made me giggle again. Love that quiz!
I feel kinda guilty for not going to this since I’m literally just a few minutes away but I haven’t gone in years. I think the last one I went to was when Diana Gabaldon was on the program, but the crowds were so fierce I only got a sighting of her from afar while she was signing books. Seriously, I think some of the lines were longer than at Disney World. It makes me happy to see people so excited about books/authors, but the press of humanity and the heat are just too much for me. Saturday is my “me” day so I spent it quietly reading and listening to books instead. 🙂
I went to a couple of Dr Who conventions when I still lived in the Boston area. While it was fun, it took me days to recover. This introvert was shattered by the noise, number of people. I don’t do any more conventions. There’s a wonderful Comic Com in my city, I’m sure I’d love it once I was there, but the thought of all those people. <<<<<>>>>>
Thanks for the Judgey link. As a Goodreads-power-user, it is my jam 🙂
I was so excited to see a Romance Forum at the National Book Festival and didn’t realize this was the first one! I couldn’t pass hearing my new favorite author Beverly Jenkins speak and she did not disappoint. I’m looking forward to making thus a yearly event!
to which I can only say….MAMUSHKA!