A first timer at blogging, I feel like I'm trying to come up with something to write on a birthday card for a co-worker. I hope I'm clever, possibly amusing, and most of all original. Probably not going to happen here, but one can always hope.
A friend and colleague is blogging about all the nonfiction reading she does All Nonfiction, All the Time. I don't have that kind of focus. If you have to label me, call me a genre fiction junkie. I do read the nonfiction and literary stuff - but only for book groups or if they've been recommended by those I trust. My true reading loves are mysteries and romance and science fiction and fantasy. Just about anything that's considered literary trash by someone or another. I seek out books filled with conventions, endings that resolve plot threads and elements, and highly original stories.
Is that even possible? Genre conventions and originality? You bet your bippy. And that's what trips my trigger. In romance the Regency historical (especially those featuring aristocratic heroes who are former spies for the Crown) has been done to death. But a couple of years ago Tracy Grant worked wonders by melding suspense with romance in her Daughter of the Game and Beneath a Silent Moon. She turned the genre conventions on their head. Suddenly it was the heroine who had the tortured and checkered past and the hero who had to deal with the fallout.
More recently Susan Carroll has reappeared on the historical romance scene. Where once Ms. Carroll was writing within the overcrowded Regency subgenre and being largely overlooked, she is now taking readers back to the treacherous court of Catherine de Medici in Renaissance France with her new trilogy. Good stuff.
Whew! I've made it through a post. Though truthfully this is really about my fourth attempt as I learn how this blogging thing works. Bear with me.