It’s Wednesday! How are y’all doing? Is it warm where you are? Cold? The weather not cooperating for the designated season? The boob sweat is making its presence known over here at my house.
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Author Judith Krantz passed away at 91 over the weekend. Do you have fond memories of Krantz’s books and/or journalism? I remember seeing some lovely tributes going around on social media.
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Love a man in glasses? Don’t miss these contemporary-set romances with bespectacled heroes! Two of the books mention aren’t out yet, but definitely add them to your TBR pile.
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Glamour has a fantastic article on romance writers and the harassment they receive on social media and elsewhere. Content warning for this piece:
With more than 15,000 Twitter followers and a slew of best-selling romance novels—including Glutton for Pleasure, A Gentleman in the Street, and her latest, The Right Swipe—Rai is used to talking to readers on Twitter, email, and elsewhere on the internet. But with that success and connection also comes near-daily harassment—propositions in her DMs, alongside threats and abuse in her inbox.
“It feels like I almost can’t remember a time when it didn’t happen,” Rai says.
There’s also a read discussion on the common reactions of leer versus sneer. Even as a romance reviewer, I’ve experienced both of these online, on dates, and just in life in general.
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I’m trying so hard not to spend any money on these mystical light up charging pads.
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There’s a Choose Your Own Adventure-style Twitter thread going around where you see how long you can make it as Beyonce’s personal assistant.
Being Beyoncé’s assistant for the day: DONT GET FIRED THREAD pic.twitter.com/26ix05Hkhp
— Green Chyna (@CORNYASSBITCH) June 23, 2019
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Don’t forget to share what super cool things you’ve seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we’d like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way!
Ohhhh, I remember watching the “Till We Meet Again” miniseries (remember when networks did that?) in 5th grade and finding the book at the store and reading it. It’s how I learned about sex, and oral sex in particular. I cannot believe my parents let me buy that. And all her other books.
I think I’ve mentioned this before, but back in the day we used to call Krantz’s genre “shopping and fucking” books—because they featured lots of both, not necessarily in that order. I read SCRUPLES and PRINCESS DAISY (and watched the associated tv miniseries), but I sorta lost track of her after that.
I think I have read all of the Judith Krantz books, as they were published (yes, I am old). I liked them all, and loved some. “Princess Daisy” is my favorite. “I’ll Take Manhattan” is also really good – you can tell that Krantz worked in the magazine industry, and it was fun reading about how it worked (at least, how it worked in the ’80s). Probably at the time her main author competitor was Danielle Steele, but in my eyes Krantz books were better – no matter what happened in the books there was always a lot of humor. It was also fun living vicariously through her rich heroines. I haven’t re-read any of the books in a while, but I think I am going to as a remembrance of the good times I had reading these books when I was a lot younger. I hope they hold up. (Her autobiography “Sex and Shopping” is also a lot of fun. She had an interesting life.)
My plan one summer way back when was to save some money by buying two really big fat books instead of a bunch of shorter category novels. Surely they would keep me busy for a couple of weeks. One was The Stand (3 days), and the other was Scruples which I finished in less than two. Not a great plan for someone with zero self restraint.
We didn’t have the term “book boyfriend” in those days, if we had, Spider would have been mine.
The podcast I Don’t Even Own a TV did an episode about how bonkers (and problematic) SCRUPLES was: http://www.idontevenownatelevision.com/2016/02/16/049-scruples/
I loved Judith Krantz and still reread her regularly. I went for a language immersion course when I was 17 and Scruples was the only English book I had with me. It got read about eight times that summer. Back in the day, I always put her new release on reserve at the library and it was my treat when my son (now 35 years old) had gone to bed. The various mini-series based on her books were pretty meh in my opinion, but I adored the books.
I loved Krantz in college/med school and read most of her books. Sad that she is gone. She was a welcome escape and a reminder that people can thrive and find success and love in difficult circumstances.
It does my heart good to know I’m not the only “woman of a certain age” who frequents this site!
I loved Judith Krantz’s books … I read them as they came out, except the last few – they stopped appealing to me. But I distinctly remember shocking the socks off a friend’s husband when I was talking to her about Scruples and described how it made finding the right dress sound better than sex.
I remember sneak-reading Krantz’s I’ll Take Manhattan at my grandma’s house in junior high. (She’d buy the latest bestseller, get scandalized halfway through, and cast it aside half-read while shaking her head at me about the “strong content.”) I went through every romance she had, but that one was the one I liked most…
I remember sneaking Scruples to read when I was about 10-12 years old which was around the same time I read Looking for Mr. Goodbar. (Mom should not have said “don’t read this stack of books” because I’d read them as soon as I could.) I also read Princess Daisy as a youngster too.
I remember reading and loving all of her big novels in the 80s. Part of me really wants to do a re-read, but I’m worried I’ll find them far too dated and won’t enjoy them. I may be better off leaving them as happy memories.
In addition to the article on bespectacled heroes, Frolic also features this tribute to our new favorite webcomic: https://frolic.media/this-lore-olympus-style-guide-will-give-you-a-fresh-new-ancient-greek-look/
I read “Scruples” as a teen in the early 2000 (borrowed a shopping bag of books from my aunt, she never looked IN the shopping bag).
It did have some problematic parts, but the one thing that did NOT make sense to me was that Billy got to have a life after her husband died. It felt wrong.
And THAT made me question EVERY single story I’d ever read: because in Scruples, it felt like the females characters did stuff and got rewarded with boyfriends. And for that, I thank you Judith Krantz.
(Though she never knew what to do with characters after they got paired up)
I so loved Princess Daisy when I first read the book back in 1980 as an early career woman and have re-read it many times. A tattered copy remains on my keeper shelf.
Godspeed, Judith Krantz.
i have read some of her books , i ll take manhattan was a hoot to read , so funny, the mini series was fun too, i hear scruples being remade is it? and what other books could be fun like these is what we need to know i think and are there more fook and shop books around still? anyway , fun is what we need now ,and that was fun times . oh i read them way back before 2000 for sure . the late 80s, early 90s
mamx
I read an excerpt of Scruples in one of the “ladies’ magazines” and immediately set out to get a copy of the book. Literally, the only things I remember about it now are the fact that it dealt with weight in a way I’d never read before and one sex scene that blew my mind at the time. Mind you, I’d been married four years at the time, but I was still pretty ignorant. I’m not sure why, but I was never inclined to seek out her other works.
I have some deep reservations about the sexualization of about just about everything in this century, but I am also grateful that my daughters did not grow up in the closed off, silent atmosphere that I did. I’m grateful to writers like Krantz who were and still are a part of my wake up process.
@DiscoDollyDeb You have never been alone.
I reread Mistral’s Daughter (my favourite Krantz) last year and it totally held up. Three generations of beautiful independent and empowered redheads, Paris in the heady artistic 20’s, Provence during the wartime, jewish history in France, the model wars and the birth of the supermodel in the 1970’s – this book had it all and I ate it all up at 47 just as I had at 15.
It also made me realize how much I miss those sprawling generational books that span fifty or sixty years.
I also admired her ability to endow even the “villains” with complex and very human flaws – they were never cardboard mustache twirling baddies but real people with feelings.
Ooh! Ooh! Just one more thing.
I have a bespectacled hero rec. I just finished Penny Reid’s Kissing Galileo, and it has a really interesting hero and oddly enough, a faint (very faint) thematic connection to Scruples. KG is a short, (unlike Scruples) fun read.
I remember finding I’ll take Manhattan back in 90s, when stuff like that started appearing in Russia. I read in in one day in a weird daze – everything was so shiny, colorful and felt like a fantasy novel – full of words and things that had no meaning for me, but signified something to the characters. Of course, now I know it’s a fantasy for American readers as well, but it stayed with me through all these years nevertheless. Other books had less of an impact, but were also a fun ride. I am afraid to re-read it now, but grateful to Judith Krantz for hours of fun I had with her books.
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