I just need something here so that this irritating block isn't over anything important.

Random floaty text!!! What am I doing here?

EW's New Classics

1. The Road , Cormac McCarthy

2. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling

3. Beloved, Toni Morrison

4. The Liars' Club, Mary Karr

5. American Pastoral, Philip Roth

6. Mystic River, Dennis Lehane

7. Maus, Art Spiegelman

8. Selected Stories, Alice Munro

9. Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier

10. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami

11. Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer

12. Blindness, José Saramago

13. Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

14. Black Water, Joyce Carol Oates

15. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers

16. The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood

17. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez

18. Rabbit at Rest, John Updike

19. On Beauty, Zadie Smith

20. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding

21. On Writing, Stephen King

22. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz

23. The Ghost Road, Pat Barker

24. Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry

25. The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan

26. Neuromancer, William Gibson

27. Possession, A.S. Byatt

28. Naked, David Sedaris

29. Bel Canto, Anne Patchett

30. Case Histories, Kate Atkinson

31. The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien

32. Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch

33. The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion

34. The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold

35. The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst

36. Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt

37. Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi

38. Birds of America, Lorrie Moore

39. Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri

40. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman

41. The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros

42. LaBrava, Elmore Leonard

43. Borrowed Time, Paul Monette

44. Praying for Sheetrock, Melissa Fay Greene

45. Eva Luna, Isabel Allende

46. Sandman, Neil Gaiman

47. World's Fair, E.L. Doctorow

48. The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver

49. Clockers, Richard Price

50. The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen

51. The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcom

52. Waiting to Exhale, Terry McMillan

53. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon

54. Jimmy Corrigan, Chris Ware

55. The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls

56. The Night Manager, John le Carré

57. The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe

58. Drop City, TC Boyle

59. Krik? Krak! Edwidge Danticat

60. Nickel & Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich

61. Money, Martin Amis

62. Last Train To Memphis, Peter Guralnick

63. Pastoralia, George Saunders

64. Underworld, Don DeLillo

65. The Giver, Lois Lowry

66. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace

67. The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini

68. Fun Home, Alison Bechdel

69. Secret History, Donna Tartt

70. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell

71. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Ann Fadiman

72. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon

73. A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving

74. Friday Night Lights, H.G. Bissinger

75. Cathedral, Raymond Carver

76. A Sight for Sore Eyes, Ruth Rendell

77. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro

78. Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert

79. The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell

80. Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney

81. Backlash, Susan Faludi

82. Atonement, Ian McEwan

83. The Stone Diaries, Carol Shields

84. Holes, Louis Sachar

85. Gilead, Marilynne Robinson

86. And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts

87. The Ruins, Scott Smith

88. High Fidelity, Nick Hornby

89. Close Range, Annie Proulx

90. Comfort Me With Apples, Ruth Reichl

91. Random Family, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

92. Presumed Innocent, Scott Turow

93. A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley

94. Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser

95. Kaaterskill Falls, Allegra Goodman

96. The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown

97. Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson

98. The Predators' Ball, Connie Bruck

99. Practical Magic, Alice Hoffman

100. America (the Book), Jon Stewart/Daily Show (2004)

In Memoriam

In Memoriam

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Monday, February 1, 2010

The Masqueraders - Georgette Heyer

Heyer!  You are a fount of easy, fabulous reads!  I will be taking you to the beach with me from now on, you wacky dame.

So.  Robin and his sister Prudence wander into high society after a childhood/teens/early-twenties-in-Prudence's-case of adventuring, except that for absolutely no discernible reason whatsoever, they both go about as the opposite sex (ok, Robin is an escaped Jacobite and going as a woman is a clever disguise and one unlikely to be uncovered in this era [the era in which there were Jacobites, i.e. 1745], but Prudence as a man is completely unnecessary [although if Robin is going to be traveling around in petticoats he could use a male escort, so I guess it makes sense from a practical standpoint {but for actually, the reason is to allow hilarity to ensue}]). 

Hilarity ensues!  Robin and Prudence, as Kate and Peter (respectively), rescue the lovely heiress Letty, who is having Eloper's Remorse.  With the help of her lately-arrived family friend Anthony, they restore her to her worried papa.  In short order, Robin/Kate becomes very special friends with Letty, and Prudence/Peter is taken under Anthony's manly wing, and everybody falls in love with everybody because this is a regency romance.  Also, somewhere in there Robin and Prudence's conniving father is trying to get himself named Viscount, but that's sort of not the point of anything.  ROMANCE!

And the romantic shiz is remarkably free from ickiness.  This I can read, as it is mostly just people zinging other people, and then sometimes proposing and protesting.  My fears have been allayed: Heyer's romances are not awful.  However, however, despite the zany premise, it lacked the delightful looniness that so endeared me to Death in the Stocks.  Stocks is CHOCK FULL of winsome wtf-ery, whereas Masqueraders is maybe eight-ninths full.  Maybe the other ninth is the romance, I 'unno.

But the dialogue is smart and the adventures are completely nonsensical but somehow totally believable and the heaps of passive voice and 'egads's can be chalked either up to an attempt at historical tone or to this being only Heyer's 3rd novel.

Eight caterpillars.
Requisite ass-covering:
Thanks, Sourcebooks!
Posted by raych at 6:00 AM
Labels: , ,

5 comments:

  1. This is not my favorite Heyer, but I do like the hilarity that ensues in it :-) If you liked this one, you might like The Talisman Ring, too- I highly recommend that one!

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  2. Romances aren't inherently awful, *lol* Some are very VERY good, but like the girl in the nursery rhyme, when they are bad they are horrid.

    I dare you read The Prince of Midnight by Laura Kinsale and not enjoy the hell out of it.

    As for Heyer, I'm looking forward to reading "Powder & Patch" next, which is a man-makeover story where the dude puts on wigs and makeup and high heels to impress his lady (it's the 1700s where this stuff is allowed).

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  3. I don't know...it takes a pretty sharp romance to keep me out of the barf bag. I HAVE heard lovely things about Heyer though, so I will have to give her a go at some point.

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  4. This sounds very much like a Shakespeare play I read once, but I can't remember the title. Regardless, the point is to be ENTERTAINED. So, everybody wins, I guess.

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  5. I just discovered Heyer this year, and I agree! She is 100% beachariffic. I would love to read a bio of her because I bet she was awesome in her non-writerly life, too.

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