Gettin' Contemporary with the Romance

(Yeah, I don't know what that means. But, hey, it could sound raunchy, if you tried.)

So, I've discovered something about myself as a writer. To wit: if I want to actually do any writing, I have to not read anything by Kristan Higgins. She makes me throw in the towel. Her books are funny, and fun without being zany, and sweet. Her characters are real, and smart, and deserving of love. She makes me cry. A lot. So whenever I finish one of her romances, I sink into a depressive state, because why bother writing when she already has it under control? Foolishly, though, I read Until There Was You this week. Many tissues - many, many tissues - later, and I am happy to recommend anything by Higgins. At least I can rest easy knowing I only have one more of her novels to pick up before I've devoured everything she's ever published. That'll be a relief; I'll pencil in drafting the rest of my novel for a couple of weeks after I've finished that. (Kristan Higgins, if you're reading this, please don't publish anything new for a few months. Thanks.)

Another who makes me giggle is Jill Shalvis - I read my first (and second) by her this month, and anticipate ending 2012 with her name prominent on my Books Read spreadsheet. Based on The Trouble with Paradise and Instant Attraction, Shalvis makes frequent use of the zany / escapist fantasy tropes so common in romance novels. So, sure, I suspend disbelief a little to imagine being a cashier suddenly on a cruise in the South Pacific, surrounded by gorgeous, rich men. But if the dark brooding doctor with the French accent wants to irritate me and rile me up, I'll know that we're destined to be together, so that's nice. Shalvis has a very crisp writing style, sharp and light at the same time, and while hardly creditable, her characters are still believable and I enjoy their journeys to happily ever after moments.

The Rose Garden by Susanna Kearsley isn't strictly contemporary, what with the time travel and all, but much of it is set in modern Cornwall (a region I've encountered fictionally more and more lately. Cornwall is the new New England, I suppose.) I simply gobbled up Kearsley's first novel, The Winter Sea, and was hoping this would be as enchanting. It's not, quite, though it has many of the same elements: a woman searching for a place of her own, a man out of time, Jacobite plotters, and deft handling of the modern woman who finds herself in another century, I can almost hear Kearsley saying, "Why would this woman who suddenly time jumps back and forth NOT do X, Y, and Z when she was back in her own century?" and then creating a protagonist who applies logic to her freaky confusing situation. It's refreshing. (Yes, there are that many books with time travel, and yes, the modern people going back do show a surprising reluctance to Google about it.)

The Latest from My Bedside Table

After being charmed by his airport book, I checked out Alain De Botton's The Consolations of Philosophy. Oh, such fun. I had no idea I was such a Stoic, but De Botton's section on Seneca showed me I am. (This would be my mature outlook. I was more of a Hedonist earlier in life, naturally.) Anyway, the concept of this book is that whatever you're facing - heartbreak, ennui, aging, job stress - there's a philosophy to help you through it. Each philosopher's history and teaching is related to a current situation, making it a very amusing and different kind of self-help book. Eminently approachable, too - I don't now have a deep knowledge of any of the great philosophers, but I do have a pretty good precis of a field I never paid much attention to before this book.

The Portrait is the novel Iain Pears wrote before Stone's Fall, which I enjoyed reading last year. It has a less complex structure, but is possessed of its own literary tricks. The narrator is the artist, and the entire novel is his soliloquies to his subject, an old friend and art critic who has come to visit him in his exile from the London art scene. So, lots of "you should" and "did you not know?" as the artist covers their interwoven histories and explicates the reasons for his exile - and what he plans to do about it. There are guns on every mantlepiece in this one, so the ending wasn't as suspenseful as I think Pears intended, but it's still a good story and the sense of place and voice is very strong.

I read plenty without philosophers or literary conceits, and in the past couple of weeks that's included Kristan Higgins's Just One of the Guys, as well as a couple of her other modern romance/chick-lit novels. Published by Harlequin, so happily ever after and all that. Higgins is a fun writer, very good at a conversational but intelligent style, and her characters are cohesive and fleshed-out, making these sweet love stories with a little heartbreak and soul-searching thrown in. And the three I've read (Too Good to Be True and Catch of the Day are the others) are distinct enough that I'll be able to pick up a Higgins anytime I see one and tell from the back cover whether I've read it already or not, which is a huge plus.