Sakura of DOOM

Zoya Singh Solanki was born the exact moment India won the Cricket World Cup in 1983. Her next fateful encounter with cricket happens when she is assigned to work with India's cricket team for a Zing! ad for her agency, and soon, the team begins to win whenever she eats breakfast with them. Before she knows it, she is annoying the handsome captain of the team, getting a free ride to Australia for the World Cup, and being hailed as a cricket goddess by some people.

I don't usually read chick lit all that often because of the frequent focus on things like brand names and shopping, and because while I can deal with annoying gender roles in historical romances, it's much more difficult to brush them aside in contemporary romances. This book does have some of the things that annoy me—Zoya's initial stint in the ad company is obviously very conscious of brands—but it wasn't too bad. Also, you can tell where my priorities lie: I was incredibly annoyed at Nikhil Koda, the love interest, until he and Zoya went to a street market and had food. As Nikhil was a fan of the food, I decided I liked him a lot more.

I thought I would actually be more bored by the cricket than I was, seeing as how I am not a big sports person, but all the snippets from the articles from India and the overall excitement reminded me a lot of being in Asia during South Korea's run in the 2002 World Cup. By the end, I was enjoying the cricket bits more than the romance bits.

Unfortunately, the book is at least 100 pages or so too long; in order to stretch the story out, Chauhan basically has a ton of Not-Too-Big Misunderstandings get in the way of Zoya and Nikhil's happy ending. Zoya had decides to ignore Nikhil based on suspicions from gossip rags, her brother's speculations, her own doubts, and various other things that might have made sense the first two or three times, but have gotten incredibly boring the ninth or so time around.

That said, I do actually like Zoya and Nikhil, and I particularly like Zoya's family and friends. And I laughed so hard at Zoya wondering how on earth monolingual white Australians got by with only one language (what do they do when they are in a different mood?), along with the weirdness of being in a place so full of white people. I so sympathize. And there's just something really fun about Chauhan's narrative voice, from the toinnnnngggg commercial to the two sports announcers and the assorted excerpts from gossip magazines.

Anyway, it's definitely uneven, especially when it comes to the romance, but it felt a lot more familiar than almost all chick lit and/or contemporary romances I read, which is usually split between glamorous big city or small-town (very white) America. So, looking forward to reading her next two books, especially since it sounds like they have plot elements and/or settings that differ even more from standard chick lit/contemporary romance.

Links:
- reviews from the Anuja Chauhan reading club (also, thanks to deepad for setting it up in the first place!)

What I've read: Woe, didn't manage to finish anything this week. At least it was mostly because I was being social!

I did forget to note that I read Sampson Davis' Living and Dying in Brick City: An E.R. Doctor Returns Home. I really wanted to read about the medical cases intermixed with personal knowledge of the intersections of health and race and poverty. In the end, the book was too didactic for me. Each chapter is about a specific thing (HIV, obesity, drugs, history of medical experiments on black people, etc.), and each ends with a list of resources. I'm sure it is helpful for people, but I wanted something much more complicated than an introduction to the myriad problems of the US healthcare system and/or personal health issues and what to do about them. I was especially put off by the PSA on obesity, where he focuses on a woman he portrays as grotesquely obese (examples of how she can't be strapped to the gurney, fungus growing in folds of flesh, etc.). This is too bad, because the bits on his own life and history in Newark and how they intersect with his doctoring were really interesting, especially since he was one of the few doctors there who had grown up in and still lived in Newark, as opposed to commuting there from another, more affluent town.

I also forgot to mention Carolyn Jewel's novella Moonlight last week. It unfortunately is not particularly notable. There is some emotional stuff going on there re: a younger man in love with the slightly older women he grew up with and trying to not be seen as a goofy younger brother, but most of it focuses on the sex without tying it in to the conflict.

And I forgot Courtney Milan's A Kiss for Midwinter. Wow, I read a lot the week before. Anyway, I don't dislike it to the same extent coffeeandink does, but the noted discrepancy between what people say about Lydia's cheerful disposition and what we actually read on the page is very disconcerting. I also thought Jonas never quite gelled as a character to me; he read more as a collection of traits—blunt and socially awkward doctor who shows compassion to underserved populations—than an actual person. Definitely not one of Milan's better works.

What I'm reading: I still haven't finished Spillover. So of course I started Mira Grant's Feed, which is one of those "everyone was talking about it when it came out and I am only now getting around to reading it" books. So far, it is entertaining and easy to read—too easy, given how I lost track of time at bedtime! I'm not terribly caught up in the characters yet; they are very snarky and capable, but there's no real emotional hook for me to grab on to. Also, it is interesting reading this in 2013 when the presumed zombie apocalypse is in 2014 (the book was published in 2010). I'm not sure I would have fully bought into Grant's projection of how blogging grows increasingly important even back then, but now it's even odder to compare to what has actually been happening.

What I'm reading next: Er, hopefully Hiromi Goto's Half World, because I keep meaning to read it and then forgetting that I do when it comes time to select a book.

OMG I read stuff! I suspect this is largely because I am out of playable content on Here Be Monsters and have run out of suitably addicting puzzles on my phone.

What I've read: I finished the new Cecilia Grant, A Woman Entangled, and even managed to write it up. Overall, it has a lot of the things I've been liking about Grant's books so far: lack of noblepeople, believable conflict, an awareness of money, and things that aren't resolved too neatly. I think my favorite of hers so far is still her second book, but I do like this one for the hero and heroine's desire to climb up socially, which isn't condemned.

I also finished (two books! I finished two books yay!) Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald's Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People, which I will hopefully write up in more depth. Anyway, Greenwald was the person who developed the Implicit Association Test (IAT), and since then, he and Banaji have conducted many experiments on unconscious prejudice and biases. As the subtitle indicates, Banaji and Greenwald are very careful to not assign blame or motive, which would probably make this very good for 101 stuff. Anyway, it's a quick read in plain and simple language, and after taking (and retaking) some IATs, it's interesting to see what's changed with me since 2006.

AND I finished Courtney Milan's novella, The Lady Always Wins. Like most of Milan's books, the hero and heroine actually talk to each other instead of the hero going through with his planned deception, but it felt like the denouement of one of her novels rather than a complete work in itself. There's not quite enough in the beginning to make the bulk of the payoff worth it, imo. Then again, that's how I feel about most romance novellas—there's either not enough set up or not enough payoff.

What I'm reading: I, er, of course haven't continued anything I was in the middle of last week. Instead, I started Bee Wilson's Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat, which is exactly what the title says, if by "we" the author actually means "people like her and not me." In other words, it's the standard "A History of Everything!" that follows a (primarily Western) European history through to the US, with bits and pieces of other cultures thrown in every so often to look diverse. I sound more bitter than I am; I am mostly used to this and pretty much expected it going in, given the title.

I'm also in the middle of Meljean Brook's Iron Seas novella Salvage. Unfortunately, the Iron Seas novellas overall have not been very satisfactory, and this one is no exception. At least there's no eyebrow-raising consent scenarios, unlike some of the others, but the central conflict is a Big Misunderstanding that could have been cleared up if the hero and heroine had actually bothered to sit down and talk for five minutes instead of running off on an assumption based off a single sentence. My eyes roll forever. ( Spoilers? For the assumption at least )

What I'm reading next: Uh. Hopefully a book.

What I've read: I finished Alison Bechdel's Fun Home after seeing her at a City Arts & Lectures event. The event itself was great; Bechdel herself isn't all too talkative, but there was a short video clip of her creating a comic page and discussion of her process, which I hadn't been expecting and was really interesting. I don't have much to say about Fun Home yet, especially since I'm still in the middle of her next memoir about her mother, but it's definitely worth reading, and I kind of wish I had read her stuff before going to see her. Oh well! At least it was incentive to get some of her books!

I also finished Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London, which I like, but possibly not as much as everyone else. As most people have said, the voice is fantastic, as is the sense of place, but every time I was getting into it, more murder mystery details showed up and I would promptly lose track of what was going on. Clearly plot brain has disappeared again.

( A lot of Meljean Brook )

What I'm reading now: I'm still in the middle of Bechdel's Are You My Mother, which is an interesting experience because it has therapy and mothers, but Bechdel's relationship to her mother, problematic as it is, is very different from mine with my mother. (Me: I WISH my mom would not talk to me!) I also started Aaronovitch's Moon over Soho because I wanted to see how a few dangling threads at the end of Rivers of London were resolved, but now the mystery has hit and, predictably and sadly, I have lost interest.

What I'm reading next: Who knows! I feel like a fantasy + romance fun blend but don't like most paranormals and their more dominant than you heroes, but I can't really think of anything. I should also read vol. 2 of Wandering Son before it's due back at the library.

What I've just read: Finally finished Cecilia Grant's first book and read the second (interesting new author, see review), which lead to a bit of a romance spree. Went through Sherry Thomas' Tempting the Bride, which I liked due to longing and unrequitedness and amnesia, though tbh, didn't really buy the hero's sudden non-taunting of the heroine even though I love it due to aforementioned angst. Read Meredith Duran's That Scandalous Summer (like the heroine, bleh for the hero, got really disinterested toward the middle and end) and her novella, Your Wicked Heart, which has a heroine who reminds me a great deal of Olympia from Laura Kinsale's Seize the Fire. Also, I think it has the hero I've liked best out of her books so far... I love Duran's prose and I love her heroines, but I frequently want to brain the heroes and get really lost during her plots. Then Rose Lerner's A Lily Among Thorns, which has an adorkable tailor hero who asks about clothes and fashion and can cook. Couldn't completely get into it, though, I think because the dialogue sounded too modern for me? (Then again, I know zero about Regency outside of romance novels.)

Finally finished Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, which I had been reading for so long that I forgot to include it on my "currently reading list" for the past few Wednesdays.

Also read Alaya Dawn Johnson's The Summer Prince, which I REALLY liked. The reviews on Goodreads seem to be very love it or hate it, though. Also, I rolled my eyes at the ones that were all "There's so much sex in this! Homosexuality and bisexuality is no big deal?!" and reviews complaining about too many original terms ("waka," "grande," etc.). I suspect I have very different expectations compared to the current YA SF audience?

...the length of this section correlates inversely with how much sleep I have been getting. orz

What I'm reading now: Still in the middle of Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London. Probably something else I started months ago and promptly forgot?

What I'm reading next: Er, hopefully the book I'm reviewing for my Con or Bust offer. More realistically, probably a ton more romance novels.

I've been reading and rereading a lot of Courtney Milan's books lately, and I think she is a new favorite romance author. Most of her romances focus heavily on the heroine's journey and growth, and although not all her heroes are to my taste, she so far has had a relatively small amount of annoying alpha males. I also like that several of her books have featured non-neurotypicalness, particularly since she does so in a way that doesn't make me want to throw things.

Also, she has shown a willingness to write about non-lords, which is extremely welcome in duke-heavy Romanceland. Now that she is self publishing, I'm very much hoping that there will be more of class politics and gender dynamics, especially since what I've read so far of her seems to be feminist and looks at class in ways that also don't make me want to throw things.

Sometimes I find her resolutions overly optimistic, but I like her characters (esp. the heroines) so much that I don't mind. Also, it helps that people tend to behave like adults and use their words. I find the most interesting parts of her books to be the second half, after people have circumvented the Big Secret or Big Misunderstanding by talking to each other; the characters actually have to work together and communicate and own up to their own weaknesses to make things work out. Since I enjoy reading about functional romantic relationships, this is particularly nice.

( Unveiled )

( Unlocked )

( Unclaimed )

( Unraveled )

Tessa Dare has been getting a fair amount of press from romance blogs (afaict?), probably helped by the fact that she is releasing a trilogy a year.

I mildly liked her debut, Goddess of the Hunt, which has some funny bits, and I was going to say I read some of the first book of the Stud Club trilogy but was too bored to finish, except my handy book database says I actually did finish.

... uh. Yeah. That right there tells you how I enjoyed the book.

I like the idea of the trilogy: Dare thought a club called "The Stud Club" would be funny, decided the members should be based on random chance as opposed to the many family connections of other romance novel series, and then went with horses for the "stud." As such, although the protagonists of previous books show up in the next few, it's much less annoying because they are very decidedly not bosom buddies. Leo, the founder of the Stud Club and owner of prize horse Osiris, has been killed, and his friend Julian wants to find out why.

One Dance with the Duke - Spencer DuMarque, Duke of Morland, only dances at midnight with one lady, and then disappears. Amelia d'Orsay ends up being this lady one night, except instead of disappearing, the two end up getting married. I like that Amelia is not conventionally attractive and that Spencer is basically a jerk to the other two Stud Club members, but other than that, I remember next to nothing about the romance, save that Amelia is a homebody and likes embroidering, which made me like her. There is a sweet scene in which Spencer values her for who she is, but since I have read many other "gruff people with hearts of marshmallows ostensibly yelling at loved ones" scenes from manga, it did not impress me quite as much as, say, Sanzo.

Three Nights with a Scoundrel - Julian Bellamy was Leo's best friend, and now that Leo's dead, he wants to avenge what he thinks was murder. At the same time, he wants to protect Leo's deaf twin sister Lily by marrying her off. Only Lily doesn't so much want to be protected, she's rather annoyed at Julian's "I am a bastard and therefore not worthy" attitude, and really, she doesn't see why she can't just be happy with Julian. This has the two people in love from afar button for me, which automatically gives it a leg up. I also like how Dare deals with Lily's deafness—it's very much a part of her life, but she's not inspirational or noble, and a lot of the book is about how Julian keeps wanting to protect her from a world she's not actually very afraid of. I especially like how she tells Julian that yes, deafness makes certain situations difficult, but if he'd listen to her and help instead of insisting he knew best, those situations would be much easier for her. Also, bonus points for looking at Deaf communities during the time. I don't know how historically accurate it is, because I don't know much about the subject, so YMMV, but I liked the acknowledgement of Deafness vs. deafness.

I wish I could talk more about how the book handles class, except I don't remember it very well, save that it didn't make me want to throw things. I don't think it was exceptionally awesome, but on the other hand, romances that deal with class and don't make me want to throw things = yay!

Julian's manpain is one of the drawbacks of the book, but on the other hand, I very much like that Dare is dealing with it as manpain, and that Lily has extremely little patience for it. (skip spoiler)



In conclusion: first book is very skippable, and the third isn't the best romance ever, but it has enough interesting elements in it for me to keep it around for a reread.

I have recently been extremely annoyed by the pervasive narrative of sex and sexuality in USian mainstream culture, particularly as represented by romance novels. Lest people think I am bashing romance novels, I suspect much of this narrative is in a lot of USian mainstream culture, particularly mainstream porn; I focus on romances since that's where I get the bulk of my sex narratives as of the past few years.

Thanks to the OKCupid experiment, I looked up dating advice on the Internet, which brought up site after site after site on how men can tell if a woman will hook up with him, how women can secretly signal their willingness to have sex without ever saying so, how having sex or not having sex after date #[x] means [y] about you or your partner, how to flirt, how to dress, and etc. All the advice basically seems aimed toward cis het monogamous 20- to 30-somethings, and the most annoying thing is that all the advice is the same. I'm not actually surprised by this; I've read enough Cosmopolitan and GQ magazine to have seen all the advice before, but it was disappointing to realize that despite all my qualms with romance novels, they actually model better sexual relationships than these stupid articles. At least in romances, there are different characters who like different things and do different things for different reasons.

Even so, I hate the dominant narrative of non-communication, the assumption that your perfect sex partner (or partners, although usually it's singular) will magically know exactly how to get you off and bring you to orgasm. I've seen very few examples of negotiation in the romances I've read, and very few examples of sex that deviate from the kissing -> touching breasts -> touching vagina/clitoris -> oral sex performed on the woman -> penis-in-vagina sex. Not only is there nearly no acknowledgement of trans people, gender fluidity, queerness, kink, poly, disabled people, people of different ages and orientations, or different levels of sexuality, there isn't even a lot of room for het cis couples to deviate. I've literally seen one heroine in a romance novel saying having her nipples touched did nil for her (Lydia Joyce, The Veil of Night, for the record).

I haven't read fic for a long time, so I don't know how much the narrative changes there. What I do remember from fic is a greater openness to OT#, male and female slash, some gender fluidity, and a fair amount of kink, but I still get frustrated that it often goes from kissing to touching to oral sex to some sort of penile penetration. I haven't read as much femslash, so I don't know if a lot of it ends with vaginal penetration? And the sex is almost always magically mind blowing, orgasms happen regularly, and people don't suddenly get hand cramps or lose their arousal or accidentally elbow someone or get hair stuck in awkward places. I think there is actually more of that in the fic I've read, but the focus on amazing sex and orgasms still annoys me. I do think the fantasy sex is a nice fantasy, where everything goes off perfectly and is awesome and there are spouting geysers and fireworks and whatnot, and believe me, I am especially grateful to have that type of narrative by and for the female gaze. So while I don't want to reduce that type of sexual narrative, I also want alternatives, because I've found that while sites like Scarleteen have great advice, it's still really hard to implement said advice unless you've seen and read and ingested many many many permutations of said advice. And a lot of how I personally do that is via fiction. (I could also talk about how taboos of talking about sex result in getting more of this from fiction than from friends and family.)

And even though I am feminist and firmly believe in consent and saying "no" and figuring out boundaries, it was scary realizing how difficult it was putting theory into practice. A friend linked me to No and no and no and yes (non-explicit descriptions of kink, consent boundaries, and restraints), and I was just, "YES. YES THAT."

So if anyone else has recommendations, either fictional or non-fictional, for sexual narratives that involve negotiating consent and boundaries and figuring out what you like and don't like and are kind of meh about but will try or hate the idea of and awkwardness during sex, I will love you forever! I've been going through The Pervocracy, but really, I'd love more to read, especially real-life applications of the above. As in, Scarleteen and Our Bodies Ourselves are helpful, but I think what I really want are ways to see theory put into practice, fictional or non-fictional, to get a better idea of ranges and methods and just... options. I am a cis het Asian woman in a monogamous relationship that isn't particularly kinky, but honestly, anything that has the negotiation and learning about sexuality especially would be great. Double plus bonus points for things that reference mental illness and dealing with heteronormative gender expectations and being girly and feminist. Also, normally in these cases, I am all "Who cares about the mens?!" but in this case, if there is stuff for cis het men who read as more stereotypically feminine than masculine, that would be awesome. (FWIW, aforementioned guy is Asian.)

General overview for books 1-6 on race and gender and other stuff.

Each write up contains spoilers for the books.

( The Unsung Hero (2000) )

( The Defiant Hero (2000) )

( Over the Edge (2001) )

I feel the romances in the second and third book all suffer from the surfeit of thriller plot, but I liked the first book a lot.


Links:
- rushthatspeaks' review of Unsung Hero
- kate_nepveu's reviews of Unsung Hero and Defiant Hero and Over the Edge