No more dreaming like a girl so in love with the wrong world

[sovay]

My Courtney Milan hit-or-miss rate holds steady at fifty percent even when tested on novellas: I thought The Governess Affair (2012) was fantastic, so much so that I would cheerfully have read a full-length novel about its protagonists instead of glimpsing them only in the background of The Heiress Effect (2013), and Unlocked (2011) left me cold, possibly because its heroine reads in some ways like a dry run for Jane Fairfield of the same novel, but not as complicatedly. So I have not run out of ability to read romances, it just depends on what else is going on in them. I do feel like this is a lot of heterosexuality all at once, though.

Comments

[thawrecka]

I find there's only so much heterosexuality I can read at once before I have to read a cheesy (and quite possibly terrible) f/f romance, or reread some of my favourite queer SF. I do find that Milan writes heterosexuality in a way that makes me understand the appeal for people who partake in it, unlike a lot of romance novelists. I read a fair amount of romance but I did grow up hate-reading a lot of Mills and Boon/Harlequin Silhouettes with creepy, domineering 'alpha males' and the doormat women who give up their careers for them.

[sovay]

I find there's only so much heterosexuality I can read at once before I have to read a cheesy (and quite possibly terrible) f/f romance, or reread some of my favourite queer SF.

What's your favorite queer SF? I'm taking recommendations.

I read a fair amount of romance but I did grow up hate-reading a lot of Mills and Boon/Harlequin Silhouettes with creepy, domineering 'alpha males' and the doormat women who give up their careers for them.

I have never read very much romance, unless you count Mary Stewart's "novels of romantic suspense." But I had a bookstore job from the mid-'90's to early 2000's that involved a lot of stocking and shelving of mainstream paperback romances and I would keep trying to pick them up and read them just to see what they were like and they were universally awful from the prose to the plots to the porn and I understood nothing about the existence of the genre. I recognize it's improved in several directions since then, but it's still not my first instinct when looking for a book.

[thawrecka]

What's your favorite queer SF? I'm taking recommendations.

I'm not sure I would actually recommend any of it, as a lot of it is cheesy horror novels and ridiculous comic books I read when I was young enough for them to bypass my critical faculties and go straight to the id.

Re: romance novels

For me, I found the rise of chick lit in the 90s (Bridget Jones et al.) helped me find romance novels I could enjoy, and I have even better luck now, though I mostly go off recommendations so I can avoid the, still popular in some quarters, bullshit alpha male stuff. I still find the sex scenes in most pretty dreadful, but I'm used to the sex scenes in fanfiction (which, again, I mostly only read the popular stuff so I'm sticking to the best of the best anyway).

[handful_ofdust]

That's such a wonderful way to put it.:)

[sovay]

That's such a wonderful way to put it.

Thank you.

Unrelated comment is unrelated

[rydra_wong]

Except that it might help balance out the overdose of heterosexuality:

https://madamehardy.tumblr.com/post/166617186129/twixnmix-anna-may-wong-photographed-by-carl-van

I think I may have seen (and posssibly linked you to) one of these before, but I've never seen the full set.

Re: Unrelated comment is unrelated

[sovay]

I think I may have seen (and posssibly linked you to) one of these before, but I've never seen the full set.

I've seen a couple of these, but never the full set, either, and they are a very good antidote, thank you.