Thursday, June 26, 2008

Postmortem


Well, the Tuesday Book Club has come and gone and it was a little disappointing -- not that Anne Gracie didn't do a brilliant job. How she kept smiling and being gracious to those panelists, who clearly knew nothing about romance books and didn't want to know anything about romance books is beyond me. Only one panelist admitted to ever having read a Mills and Boon and he was eight at the time and it wasn't his cup of tea. All M&Bs were dismissed on the basis of that one experience and on reactions to their covers -- although the discussion of the covers was edited out -- thank goodness.

The program was entitled Sex and Romance, but it was really only about sex and there was an underlying assumption that romance is only about sex, when we all know it encompasses so much more.

So without rattling on for too long, the result was that as far as academics and literary snobs are concerned, Romance in Australia is still a bad smell. Nothing new there...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I love your new website!!! Ally has done a wonderful job, though I miss your 'Hot News"!!! I watched the TBC special and I was disappointed too. How would it be if they had a topic like Murder Mysteries and 3 out of the 4 panellists had never read one?? Anne did a fine job, but I think the others were much more interested in the sex, rather than the romance. In good news, Melanie Milburne was on out local ABC radio yesterday!! Did a fabulous job!!

Barbara Hannay said...

How would it be if they had a topic like Murder Mysteries and 3 out of the 4 panellists had never read one??

That's a brilliant analogy, 2paw. And don't worry, the hot news will still be there -- just on my home page instead.