Happy Hump Day, everyone! Sometimes, you need a few things to get you through the rest of the week. Hopefully, these links will help!
Reader Bethany sent us a link to an Ideas episode, a Canadian podcast/radio show, on romantic love in literature and how it relates to consent. It has some great discussion with some awesome women:
PhD student Elissa Gurman draws out the roots of a very powerful narrative, the Crazy Woman In Love, as it developed in 19th-century novels, and asks why even the best novelists of the time struggled to avoid its clichés, such as the way it gave fictional heroines only two options: thankless marriage or death. Elissa argues that the depictions of women falling crazily in love and leaving their rational selves behind continue to haunt our culture today, especially when dealing with issues of sexual consent.
It’s about an hour long, so feel free to save this one for a long commute!
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From February 8-14 there’s an amazing sale on romances feature women of color and by authors of color. You wallets will be very happy to know that each book is available for 99c or less!
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Sarah is over at Prevention magazine, along with Sarah Lyons (editorial director of Riptide Publishing), and author Lauren Willig, talking about some of the best recent releases they’d recommend. I definitely suggest checking out the list and I know I’ve added a couple of the books mentioned to my TBR pile!
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We all know Redheadedgirl loves her history and we all appreciated this tedious, yet hilarious, bit of it:
It’s hard for us to imagine today, but even super-long books like the Bible were copied entirely by hand. And the monks and priests who did it did a great job! But that doesn’t mean they weren’t still human.
Sometimes, a scribe would leave a short note in the margins. Examples include things like, “St. Patrick of Armagh, deliver me from writing,” “The parchment is hairy,” and “Oh, my hand.”
I will never take my laptop for granted again.
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Author Adelle Waldman has an interesting essay over at The New Yorker about what an ideal marriage looks like according to novels. She also talks about how men and women write about marriage differently. It’s a long piece, but worth the read:
In literature, the desire to find an equal, and the belief that love in its ideal form should comprise a meeting of minds as well as bodies, appears to be a much greater psychological driver for women than it is for men. This abstract difference ripples through the novels that men and women write in all sorts of ways.
As someone who reads a lot of romance, I was fascinated that most of the examples came more from a literary fiction standpoint
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In case you’ve missed it, we have a giveaway running until Sunday, February 14th with two Activité fitness watches up for grabs! They’re fun, stylish, and functional.
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Lastly, if you’re looking for a new icebreaking game or just something to do with your significant other (probably after a few glasses of wine), The Grommet has launched a new product called The Love Game:
The Love Game is designed to help make deeper, more meaningful connections between people. It isn’t actually a game, but rather a series of questions aimed to open up communication and foster trust between you and your partner—or a potential one.
Granted, it’s no Cards Against Humanity, but it seems like a fun alternative!
What interesting thing have you read this week? Or listened to?
The New Yorker article is fascinating and totally worth checking out. I don’t agree with her at all – she cherry picks her samples and is in no way systematic, plus I can’t believe we’re still discussing a fake gender dichotomy – but it’s still very enjoyable reading.
Agree with kkw! I thought the New Yorker piece was fascinating. She definitely discounts sexism too much, I think, because part of the disappointment the male characters mentioned feel at the reality of marriage and towards domestic life, is in direct correlation to societal expectations of gender roles.
I would love to see something like this that is more systematic. I often want to shove romance novels at my single guy friends as a clue to what women want- respect, autonomy, and to not be objectified in the way this article describes (and how she gets through the whole piece without calling that objectification, I don’t know).
One of my favorite things about romance is questioning why I am drawn to certain tropes. heroes, and heroines and what that says about me in both my fantasy life and real life. Equally interesting is how different people are in what they like. It’s fascinating. If we could have a meta thread about this I would love it.