A common misconception that people have is that while boys/men read ‘dirty’ magazines/books girls don’t do that and I have heard loads of comments about this from my friends, online in book forums etc. From what I have seen this is utter nonsense. Yes, guys read dirty magazines but atleast they are known and clearly visible/marked as such. Girls tend to hide their dirty magazines/novels under the title of ‘Romance novels’.
You are probably wondering, how could I possibly know this, right? No. I don’t read Romance novels. However I love Paranormal books, unfortunately a lot of the paranormal books are actually Paranormal Romances which has given me a lot closer look at the Romance novel genre that I ever wanted. I am not saying all these paranormal romances are bad, just that some of them are very explicit and some don’t have any story at all, just sex.
The last few Anita Blake novels by Laurell K Hamilton are a good example. In another one of the books I read, the summary of the book was awesome: Something about demons appearing randomly in this one village and a hunter who would go out and kill them. Can’t remember the author’s name or the name of the book but it sounded really interesting. When I actually read the book I found out that out of 100 pages 80 pages were descriptions of really explicit sex and the remaining 20 pages was the actual story line. Needless to say I was pretty irritated with the book. Other examples are the Dark Realm series by Delilah Devlin, books by Lydia Parks etc.
I have no issues with people reading erotica. Its their choice. But don’t label erotica as “Paranormal Romance” or Romance and then act all superior/snotty and pretend that you are reading something different.
This blog is read by people of all ages otherwise I would post an extract from one of these books. If you have some time read one of these books, then come and tell me that they are not porn novels masquerading as “Romance” novels.
This was something I had been meaning to blog about for a long time and I have finally gotten around to doing it. Yay Me 🙂
Well this is all for now. Will post more later.
– Suramya