Relationship Blues

Ah, love.  Amour.  You have finally found the One.  In the first throes of love, everything is new.  You can't get enough.  How did you live without this?  You give friends the brush off, wanting to spend the evening or weekend with your new love.  You forget to eat, forget to sleep, the new love is so fascinating.

But after a while things start to get stale. Slowly but surely, the newness wears off.  It's the same old same old.   Yet you persevere.  Maybe this is just a phase.  Don't all relationships go through this? Things become too comfortable, like an old pair of shoes. Predictable. Dare I say, boring?

Let the library set you up on a blind date. Through the month of February, the Superior Public Library will give readers a chance to go on a blind date with a book.  We select the books, wrap them up, and you check them out.  When you get home, rip off the cover to discover something new.

What's beneath the covers?

It is very easy today for a person to stay in their own comfort zone.  Only enjoy classical music?  or country? or hip-hop?  iHeart radio, Spotify, Sirius-XM will all give you more of the same.  Want to watch sports all day, or game shows, or only listen to a certain slant on the news?  Very easy to do with so many channels available.  Gone are the days of 3 major networks, when, because of limited offerings, a person was exposed to so much.  Ed Sullivan had the Beatles and Elvis Presley on his stage, but he also had the Russian Moiseyev Dance Troupe, an interview with Fidel Castro,and Topo Gigio.  If you wanted to see one of these, you were exposed to all of them. Talk about broadening your horizons.

Yes, you can go to Goodreads or Amazon to find the next thing to read.  Computer algorithms are very good at giving us more of what we already like. And sometimes we all go on a binge, reading every book ever written by M.C. Beaton or whoever.  But a steady diet of the same old same old gets dull. Blind Date with a Book is a low-stress way to get out of your reading comfort zone.

 But really, the whole library is a low-stress way to get out of your comfort zone.  If you only watch the new release movies, wander down the documentaries aisle.  Check out a few jazz CDs.  Walk past the new fiction to the non-fiction.  Or just head over to your usual aisle, close your eyes, and put out your hand.  Check out whatever you happen upon.  It's all there for free. You won't be out anything except a little time.  And you just might find a new love.

Summer's Guilty Pleasures: in Praise of the Gothic Novel

Lying out on a blanket in the backyard, a Shasta pop near at hand. The scent of Johnson's baby oil (for getting a tan-no sunscreen in those days).  A good friend to share the blanket with.  And a book, most likely some gothic romance. These are the things that marked summer days when I was growing up.

With the warmer weather of summer beckoning,  many of us turn to lighter reading.  Beach lit.  Chick lit.  The romance novel.  Fantasy. We all have our guilty pleasures and summer is the best time to indulge in them.  One of mine is the gothic novel.

What is a gothic novel?  They have a few characteristics.  They generally have a real sense of place-most often a house-the more run down the better.  The protagonist is isolated, physically or metaphorically. There is a sense of decay, either in location (the aforementioned house) or circumstance (a family that has come down in the world).' Wuthering Heights' is a classic gothic novel.  Other, newer examples include:

     'Rustication' by Charles Palliser.  The protagonist is a young man who has returned home after being kicked out of Oxford for mysterious reasons, only to find murder and suspicion rife among the village's inhabitants.

 'The Witching Hour' by Anne Rice.  If you've been reading this blog awhile you will know that his is one of my favorite books.The story takes place in modern day New Orleans The heroine is a brilliant young doctor who returns home after the death of her mother and learns about her family and the strange hauntings of their decrepit Garden District home.

     The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters.  Set in post war Warwickshire, England , not only is the family house, Hundreds Hall, in decline, but a whole way of life for the upper classes of England is on the brink.

But I have to admit that my favorite guilty pleasure is still the gothic romance novel. I was first introduced to this genre with the book 'My Brother Michael' by Mary Stewart. It has all the hallmarks of the.gothic romance:

 the Young Heroine-Camilla Haven, British subject;
 the Exotic Locale-Delphi, Greece;
 the Handsome Stranger-Simon Lester, searching for his brother who has gone missing;
 and, of course, a mystery to be solved by our heroine.

To a 12 year old this was all pretty sophisticated stuff. Romance, mystery, British dialogue. Like Nancy Drew, but all grown up. I wanted more. I devoured Ms. Stewart's other novels: Nine Coaches Waiting, Touch Not the Cat, This Rough Magic and more.  I also discovered M.M. Kaye and her 'Death in' series: Death in Zanzibar, in Kashmir, in Kenya, in Cyprus.  Today when I see a battered paperback with a fuzzy drawing of a young woman sneaking around I am invariably drawn to read it.  I stash these away for vacations or long twilight evenings on the porch.

 

Whatever your guilty reading pleasure, get out a blanket, pour yourself a beverage, and settle down for a good read. And don't forget the sunscreen.