What fools these mortals be (part 879)

[alexsarll]

Yes, I could complain about Sudanese shariah idiocy or government corruption or the idiocy of bringing Billie Piper back to Doctor Who, but by now I think my opinions on these matters can be taken as read. Instead, I wish to alert you all to a new and terrible threat which has gradually intruded upon my awareness: vampire chick-lit*. I'm not talking about the sub-Anne Rice stuff peddled by Laurell Hamilton et al. (and, let's be frank, by Anne Rice herself a lot of the time), or the stuff with swoony, old-style romance covers which makes up a worrying proportion of Amazon's fantasy/SF/horror bestselling pre-release charts; I'm talking about books with the standard chick-lit pastel covers and Lidl art-deco swoopiness, except gothed up slightly, like a Hallowe'en hen night. When I saw my first one, it seemed like an amusing twist. My second, well, everyone's got an imitator. But it has now become clear that this stuff's a whole subgenre. Because, you know, it's not as if either chick-lit or vampire fiction were sufficiently inbred already, is it?

In other depressing book news, this piece on copyright libraries is written by a berk who keeps asking things like "Wouldn't it be great if you could just sell this stuff on eBay or recycle it sensibly?" or describing ours as "an era when, one might think, unprecedented levels of trash are published" and thinking he's terribly clever**. Which would be bad enough, but the custodians who attempt to disabuse him of this idiotic, ahistoric attitude are (at least in the case of Cambridge University Library) dreadful hypocrites. Tabs will know this bit, so skip onwards, but for the rest of you - the old hardcopy catalogue exists in books, in a well-appointed room. Except if you're researching something a little beyond the canon, the books you seek won't be in there. How is this possible? Ah, well trash (as judged by the librarians of the time)is only in the Auxiliary Catalogue, out in the corridor. Both only run up to a certain date, which I forget, with the catalogue thenceforth computerised - but even here, respectable books are being added to the catalogue as a priority, whereas anything a bit 'genre' has to wait. And wait, because by then there'll be another crate of middlebrow literary fiction to catalogue. And wait. That is no way to run a library. I mean, I may have no respect for the aforementioned vampire chick-lit, but nor do I think the latest eminently respectable novel about a miserable marriage should be fast-tracked past it - or even, heavens forbid, anything actually *good*.
(The same magazine redeems itself somewhat with a pretty good Ian McKellen interview, although I still don't quite know whether it's cause for celebration or facepalming when a broadsheet journalist asks a knight of the realm "Who'd win a fight out of Dumbledore and Gandalf?")

Oh, and lest anyone still somehow deduce some form of sexism from the above comments on chick-lit, I'm also wondering how I could have missed or forgotten the survey showing that domestic violence rises by a third on the day of England matches, given how perfectly it confirms my belief that professional football appeals to the most atrophied, contemptible aspects of the most atavistic and unpleasant masculine drives.

*Some would have you believe that the term 'chick-lit' is "calculated to damn all women, bundling together into a big fluffy ball of triviality what women read and write". Clearly this is nonsense - have you ever seen anyone fool enough to call Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Yourcenar or Angela Carter 'chick-lit'? I certainly haven't. The term refers to a certain genre, maybe even a certain publication format. I'm told that some few books within that genre are not dross, and on principle I can believe that (cf Sturgeon's Law); certainly the first Bridget Jones book was entertaining enough, and I suspect that Jenny Colgan's stuff might be as good as I've heard, even if the covers continue to put me off attempting one.
**Speaking of what should and should not be in libraries, I was disappointed to see Ontario taking a lead from Jesusland idiots and removing His Dark Materials from school library shelves now that the film's attendant controversy has alerted them to what the books actually say. Though when Daniel Craig says "These books are not anti-religious", I fear he's going beyond the film's tactful, tactical euphemisms and into outright disingenousness.

Comments

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I always assumed one of the criteria for chick-lit was being unchallenging to the reader? Kind of like S Club Juniors. Can be enjoyable, but you really don't want to think too hard about what's actually going on there.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'd say that was fair, but I think on some level that can be said of any work which operates rigidly within genre conventions - it gives people exactly what they expect.