Saturday, 11 March 2006

Why didn't anyone tell me...

...that Georgette Heyer is so much fun? Seriously, I picked up a couple of her books at WH Smith today, on a whim, because with all the knitting I have not been doing so much reading of late, and I miss it, and also the books were on Special Offer, and I love a Special Offer, and I am only about two chapters into Friday's Child, and already I can tell that I am going to love Georgette Heyer.

This is good! She writes well! The mother of the Regency Romance actually could, you know, totally fucking write! Unlike my somewhat pathetic Victoria Holt/Jean Plaidy addiction, I don't think I'm even slightly embarrassed to be reading Georgette Heyer. She's more like Patrick O'Brian than your standard crappy historical romance novelist, and believe me, I know from crappy historical romance novelists. Mind you, this doesn't mean I don't thoroughly enjoy a good trashy historical romance novel, but I wouldn't feel compelled to hide the cover of this one, which is more than I can say for something like My Enemy the Queen.

It could be worse. I could still be reading V.C. Andrews, an author I thankfully outgrew by the time I was in single-letter cup sizes, and whose ghost-written oeuvre I revisited in a brief spasm of nostalgie de la boue a few years ago, only to be stunned by just how terrible Flowers in the Attic actually was. I was embarrassed for myself, especially when the incestuous rape scene that the first three quarters of the book is merely killing time leading up to turned out to be so much less enthralling than I had remembered.

You really can't go home again.

No comments: