Guilty Pleasures

Everyone has their own list; mine might go something like this: a bowl of chocolate ice cream, a mystery on a stormy night, popcorn and Doritos, a chick flick when Mike is away at work ... Actually, I could make a pretty long list. Apparently, I have accrued a number of guilty pleasures for myself over the years that should be enjoyed in moderation (but not always are). I have a whole separate category for guilty pleasures when it comes to reading. These are books that I don't consider substantive or informative or life-changing, just a rollicking good time. They're not works of literary brilliance, they just need a riveting plot and tolerable writing and fun characters. Sometimes I crave one of these fast stories the way I crave sweets.

The one that I just read is The Temptation of the Night Jasmine, by Lauren Willig. This is part of the Pink Carnation series, which are historical romances with an espionage twist. Heavy on the romance, lighter on the history, although that fills in the edges with plenty of accurate details. Let's be honest, though, I'm reading these for the romance, and the history just creates an elaborate setting. The espionage bit is good fun, as I don't like romances that have no other plot device than the love story, they generally fall flat. I'm still looking for a story.

In this fifth outing of the series we have Charlotte and Robert as our primary characters. Charlotte is the Duchess of Dovedale's granddaughter, and has been living with her imposing grandmother for many years, her parents having died when she was little. She is a quiet and shy person, preferring to live in her books than the real world, and a customary wallflower at the parties her grandmother throws (she reminds me an awful lot of my pre-college self, actually). Enter Robert, her very distant cousin, hardly a relative at all, who has finally returned to England. While most, including Charlotte, think that Robert has returned to finally assume his ducal title, his true motives are far different. Actually, he is hunting down the assassin of his former mentor, and using his home front as a cover for some sleuthing. In an attempt to keep Charlotte safe, Robert breaks her heart, but she manages to find her way into the mystery through another angle just the same, and they are thrown together again. As they pursue assassins and nefarious French spies they'll need to work through their past mistakes and miscommunications if they hope to find happiness together.

The novel is just as silly and fun as it sounds. I liked Charlotte and Robert. They were good people, with integrity and strict moral codes, and their romance was appropriately chaste. I know that some readers were upset by the lack of more ... mature ... love scenes, but I'm not looking for sex scenes when I'm reading, and I thought the way the main characters behaved was true to their natures. It was a simple and sweet love story. The espionage aspect of the plot was less involved than in other stories, since Charlotte bumbles her way into it by accident, and Robert thinks he is just hunting down a killer; neither of them realize that national security is at stake until late in the novel. This is a small strike against the novel, which I still thoroughly enjoyed. A perfect book for escape reading. The third book is still my favorite thus far, but this one is a nice installment in the series.

Kickin' It Old School

Forgive the post title - I often like saying things that sound ridiculous coming out of my mouth. On the plus side, it is accurate.

I just finished reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip Dick. Old school, right? Despite my voracious reading of fantasy in high school, I never read much of its sister genre: straight up scifi. I knew about Dick, though, as well as some of the other heavy hitters in the field, and I loved the movie Bladerunner. Since my husband is a bigger fan of the scifi genre than I, we've had this book sitting around the house for a while* and I finally read it.

What struck me the most about this novel was its light touch when dealing with grim content. The plot, without giving too much away, follows a bounty hunter of androids who works for the San Francisco police. In this future, androids are sent as part of the immigration-to-Mars package, and every once and a while one decides it doesn't like being a slave; it kills the owners and escapes back to Earth, where androids are prohibited. Deckard, the bounty hunter, is sent on one of his biggest missions after another bounty hunter is lasered in the back, and from the beginning he starts to have doubts about his morality in terminating, or killing, these humanoids. Dick does an excellent job of showing the mechanical side of humans and the human side of androids. He doesn't give a heavy-handed message about the sanctity of all sentient life, either - I was feeling sympathetic towards the androids, just struggling to live on their own terms, and then he inserts a scene where they cut the legs off a spider, just to see if it can walk with only four. They have no empathy for anyone or anything, and that is a frankly scary trait.

I have to comment on the world he created, an essential ingredient in a science fiction work. If it's not different and technologically enhanced, it's not scifi, but if it's not believable, it's nothing. Dick does a great job of creating a semi-post-apocalyptic society with a reasonable explanation that is not overly explained. Lots of futuristic details you would expect in scifi, like the androids, laser guns, and hover cars, but all blended into a framework of life that is believable, mainly due to the humanity portrayed. The world may be different but people are the same. For instance, electronic animals. Due to radiation poisoning most of the animal life has become extinct. Few real animals survive, and these are prized and expensive; they've become a status symbol. If people can't afford an animal, they pay money for android replicas that are realistic enough to fool the neighbors. How truly and pathetically real.

In case you were wondering, this book is very different from the movie. If you are interested in the scifi genre, this author is a must read, and I think that this book is a good starting point.

*I won't say just how many unread books are lying around my house; it's a symptom of being a bibliophile.