I promise you, I wasn't going to write another Nora Roberts post, because you'll be sick of hearing about her now, as I am (almost) sick of reading her books. That's my OCD-ness, I can't stop until I've read them all, and she has so damn many. (and just in case you're wondering about my sanity, I haven't even come close to reading them all, just all the ones published since 2000--I tried a couple of earlier ones and trust me, you should skip them. She is a way better writer now. And also I have read many other books in the past couple of months--especially the past couple of weeks--I just haven't reported on them here. Hmmmm, maybe I should do that.)
Anyway, more than you wanted to know about how my brain works: I've told you before I'm sort of asperger's-ish, and you know how some asperger's people have certain topics that they obsess about? (trains, the Civil War, whatever) Mine is books. I bet that doesn't surprise you. I create lists and--I'm not kidding--spreadsheets and classification systems. Mostly they are just in my head because I'm too embarrassed to actually sit down and type them out. That summer when I read Georgette Heyer the entire summer? When I finally made myself stop was when I was sitting down to create a spreadsheet classification system, sorting her books into various categories. Not just a record of the books I'd read, but an entire annotated classification system. It's a sickness.
So anyway, last week I was driving somewhere and it occurred to me that I had spent considerable time listing my favorite NR reads, but I'd never made a list of the worst ones (which would otherwise be known as "my least favorites," which may or may not also be her worst ones in any larger sense of the word). This is the kind of thing that can keep me happily occupied for a couple of hours of a road trip. I told you: sickness.
So, the first and third of the Dream trilogy immediately came to mind, the second Ardmore one, and the second and fourth of the Bride quartet (the second one where the heroine gets in a huge snit because she waltzes into the hero's home when he's not expecting her, demands an expression of eternal commitment, then leaves brokenhearted when--caught off-guard and with a raging headache--he doesn't immediately come up with the response she wants. Oh, yeah, and then the priggish Parker insists that the hero can't even speak to the heroine unless he goes through her. Excuse me? Are we still in junior high here?) Oh, wait I'm getting off topic. And I can't tell you how much restraint it is requiring for me to not look up the actual titles and the character names I can't remember, but I'm pretty sure you're not all that interested.
But the one that stuck in my head as the very worst NR of all was Carolina Moon, which I read years ago and hated hated hated. Or so I thought. Since it had been so long, I thought I should try it again before putting it at the very top of my most-hated NR books. And guess what? It's not the book I remembered. I was trying to remember the title of an awful book I remembered when I wrote my original pet peeves list, so I breezed through plot summaries on Amazon, and assumed Carolina Moon was the book I was thinking about. But it's not. The beleaguered psychic is never going to be my favorite heroine, but this is definitely not the book I was remembering.
In that book (the one I hated), she can't tell anyone about her psychic gifts *insert anguished sigh here* because no one understands how hard it is. She doesn't tell the hero what's going on until it's too late and a dangerous situation has developed. But in Carolina Moon, everybody knows about her abilities (although not everyone believes her) right from the start. It's actually pretty good--it probably would even rank about #5 or so on my list of favorite NR books. So since I've mentioned my hatred for Carolina Moon in print here in the past, I decided I'd better actually confess, even though I promised you that last one was the end of the NR posts.
Now this one is. And thank the lord I can't remember that other book enough to even try and find it. I'm starting to think it wasn't even Nora, because I think I've read all of her standalones that have been published since 2000. Maybe it was Linda Howard or Elizabeth Lowell. Mea culpa, Nora.
[July 2014 update: OK, desperate for a good read, I read two that were published before 2000, The Reef and Homeport. The Reef, about a couple of divers who are looking for a nineteenth century wreck at the same time as an evil guy who is determined to beat them to it, spans about ten years of time, following the main characters as they meet and part and meet again. Homeport is about an art expert who is set up in a way that ruins her career, so her only chance to restore her reputation is to work with an art thief to prove what really happened. They were both good books--in fact, for the first half of The Reef I thought it was going to be my favorite all-time NR. But they both come unglued toward the end--characters act in ways that are inexplicable, plotlines get tangled, and --as was common in romance novels from the 90s-- as soon as the guy proposes, all problems are assumed to be over, even though there are some pronounced relationship issues that aren't addressed (especially in Homeport. I would have held the guy's feet to the fire before saying yes to that proposal, but she just goes ahead and melts. whatever.)]
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