THE DA VINCI CODE IS NOT A COPY…so says the British courts. As suc­cess­ful as that book was, one almost always expects to see law­suits claim­ing almost any­thing just to get a piece of the pie. I read the Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (who hasn’t?). His story wasn’t all that orig­i­nal but it was a good sus­pense story that I rated a B read.

Just So You KnowRITA AWARDS ANNOUNCED THIS WEEK and every­body has an opin­ion on them. Of course I’ve shared the opin­ion of other read­ers who don’t really put much empha­sis on RITA award win­ners because it is an award given to authors by authors. That doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily equate to qual­ity or a good, memorable read for that mat­ter nor does it mean that the book sucks either. I’ve always been curi­ous since as Bar­bara Samuel’s stated so pas­sion­ately that read­ers should pay more atten­tion to the RITA’s like some fans do for the OSCARS.  Side note: She cer­tainly wasn’t refer­ring to me as I could give a rat’s ass about the OSCAR WINNERS either. End note. Do writer’s get a bump in salary or is this just to help them get a 100% sell through? I heard sell through’s are very impor­tant for a writer and that may explain why I don’t see many of my favorite writ­ers around much any­more. I can’t see how it could hurt to win a RITA award. If I saw “RITA award win­ner” on the cover of  a book titled “MOMMA’S LAST BABY”, you guessed right, I wouldn’t be buy­ing it. You can have a look at the final­ists here.

EXAMINING STEROTYPES IN ROMANCE…now here was an inter­est­ing arti­cle. The arti­cle dis­cusses Ms. Kelly Turpin’s the­sis on the neg­a­tive impact of stereo­types in romance nov­els. Why romance nov­els? Ms. Turpin read them in her youth and decided to exam­ine it’s impact on socialization. She used Har­le­quin Presents as her focus of study since the pub­lish­ing house gen­er­ates more than half of the romance nov­els on the shelf you read (not me) and rep­re­sents 55% of paper­back sales. Ms. Turpin found pre­vail­ing themes such as female sub­jec­tiv­ity, male dom­i­nance and racial prej­u­dice abound in romance nov­els. [Hmm. I didn’t know that.] Young girls and young women are thereby receiv­ing the wrong mes­sage and this has an impact on soci­etal expec­ta­tions. Let me see. Every­thing I learned about life came from kinder­garten but every­thing I learned about rela­tion­ships came from a Har­le­quin Presents? Any rebut­tals? Here’s mine: I agree par­tially with her assess­ment that many young read­ers are impres­sion­able and that romance nov­els don’t rep­re­sent the true or real­is­tic view of rela­tion­ships. How­ever, it is fan­tasy and if young peo­ple can’t dif­fer­en­ti­ate between real­ity and fic­tion then they have a much big­ger prob­lem than read­ing romance nov­els, methinks. It’s the same old argu­ment really. Pffffttt. Any­way, this is just for you to know.…