I don't know why it never occurred to me to see if my favorite authors are on facebook, because of course they are. Actually, I do think I looked once a long time ago, but I wasn't very familiar with FB then, and forgot about it. So I found Lucy March and Jennifer Crusie and some others this week and ...well, .... cool. I don't think I'll check them every day because it feels too much like stalking, even though it's stuff they've publicly posted, so why should it feel like that? maybe it's just that it feels like too much information. But it's cool, anyway.
On Crusie's page, there's been some teasing/sparring back and forth between her and Susan Elizabeth Phillips that is very entertaining. So I've looked at SEP's website now, too, and I have to tell you, I think my suspicions about her (is that how you spell suspicion? I guess so, because it doesn 't have one of those wavy-red-you-spelled-it-wrong lines under it) were right-- I don't think she would be even remotely insulted by my review of her books. Well, not by the end of it anyway. There's a video letter to her readers on her website (about three minutes long), and it sounds .......... well, it sounds exactly like the woman who wrote the Chicago Stars books. Ha. So I thought, now that I understand her better, maybe I will try another one of her books. So I read Heaven, Texas this week, which I already had sitting on my to-be-read shelf. It starts out just like Match Me if You Can -- humiliate the heroine for comic affect-- but then (also like Match) it gets really intriguing for a couple hundred pages. I was completely hooked. But then the ending is just awful. Start by humiliating the heroine, end with the keystone cops. It was ludicrously stupid, and kept getting stupider. I can't laugh at that stuff. It strikes me that that's why I can't watch reality TV, either. I just don't enjoy watching people make fools of themselves. There are a whole lot of highly educated, intelligent people I know that are completely hooked on reality TV, so I'm willing to own that it's just me. It's definitely not my kind of humor.
and p.s. I do know there's a lot more to reality TV than public humiliation, but every time I've tried to watch one, that's where I end up turning it off. Because a big part of the appeal seems to be that kind of voyeurism of watching these people fail, or come unglued publicly, or humiliate or disgrace themselves. But it doesn't seem to bother them-- in fact, one suspects they're enjoying the attention-- and it doesn't bother the people who are watching avidly, so ........... more power to 'em. But it doesn't interest me. Heaven gets a B because after the first 50 pages and before the last 50 pages, it's great. But I'm not sure it convinced me to try any more SEP.
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