Sinking to a New Low

I love my ereaders (and have several so one is always available while others charge) and I've run up quite the tab with Amazon.  It's just so easy to click "buy" and there are so many good, cheap, and sometimes free books available.

If a writer has been recommended and a special for his/her work at Amazon appears, I tend to buy all that is available.  I watch the free and and bonus books closely.  Thus I'm continually adding to my collections of mystery authors, light-hearted reading materials (Jan Karon), or books that look like they have literary merit and I would enjoy the work of slogging through them (John Irving). 

Last summer I discovered 50 Shades of Gray (and wrote about it on this blog), admitting that I enjoyed the entire series of three books very much, even though they were outside my sphere of approved reading  Then a friend recommended Laura Willig and I downloaded several of her series of "flower books" including the Pink Carnation.  Joyce describes these books as "swashbucklers" in the vein of The Scarlett Pimpernel (one of my all time favorites) and frankly, she's a little optimistic in her descriptions.  These are romance novels with a hint of sexual play thrown in to keep us interested.  However, Willig is a decent writer and she holds a plot together so well that even when the mysteries of the books are superseded by the romantic tinglings of the heroine, you keep reading. 

Then Amazon recommended Sylvia Day to me and that's when I kind of lost perspective.  Any pretensions I still held as an English major with a MA degree became lost in the sex, sex, sex.  Romance, heartbreak, reconciliation.  More sex.  Good sex.  Redeeming sex.  Day's literature is called Mommy Porn -- and there's a reason it's called porn.  And every Mommy wants it "hot" like in Day's novel -- and even retired old ladies think it might be fun to sample.  Oooh!  Her novels are HOT!  But unlike E.L. James (50 Shades) who had good plot lines but wasn't that great a writer, Day is a decent, if not better than that, novelist.  She manages to hold you through 300 pages of "hot, steamy romance" in a seven hour marathon read -- and then you want another of her books.  It's like "you can't eat just one" -- and so she's hooked her readers by creating five novel sets.  And I'm reading them all and panting for the next one in the series.  Plus she has the swashbucklers and the period pieces -- and even the mystic romances. 

I started June on a high note, finishing off my Charles Todd series of novels / mysteries set during and after WWI.  I read P.D. James Death Comes to Pemberley (boring but I managed to finish it).  Then dear god, I veered off into Kathleen Morgan and her Highland period romances and several others of that ilk.  But I'd Still I always went back to something literate in between the romance and porn.  

This week, though, I hit a real low.  First I read Antoinette Stockenberg's A Month at the Shore.  Somebody on Facebook had announced that the ebook was on sale for something like $0.99 and so I bought it -- and the proceeded to read the entire thing, enjoying the romance immensely -- and the mystery plot just a little.  Not Mommy Porn, this was truly the ultimate in beach-read romance.. It wasn't art or good writing or fabulously interwoven plot -- it was just a good read. 

Finishing the Shore book last night, I chose the next one to the bottom of my extensive ebook download and, horror or horrors, I had a vampire book.  I hate them.  H A T E!  I don't see vampire movies, I don't read vampire books, I don't want a vampire to have hot steamy sex.   I had no idea when I opened A Hidden Fire (sounds like romance, right?) by Elizabeth Hunter I was embarking on a vampire series -- called Elementary Mysteries.  I had downloaded it free on recommendation and before I could scroll through to close the book, I was hooked and the mystery was good and the vampires were believable and I haven't really come to any romance / sex -- just a potential for one -- sometime in the distant future, maybe. 

June isn't even over yet and I'm reading Mommy Porn, sucking-up-time beach romances, and vampire novels.  Can I sink any lower?