I love books. God knows I do. And I am facing such a dilemma, weaning myself off certain literature, because of how much the world of the arts and literature has changed.
Right from my primary school days, I always had a Nancy Drew copy in my bag, and by S.1 I had ‘promoted’ myself to Mills & Boon, Silhouette and Harlequin romance publications. I had to wait for S.1, because my primary school teachers were weird; just as I got into trouble for being caught reading the Song of Songs book of the Bible, one pupil that found me reading my first Mills & Boon in P.7 made my life hell with threats of reporting me to the teacher!
My secondary school reading was thus absolute bliss. Everything from simple romance novels to sob stories by Danielle Steel; from Sydney Sheldon, Tom Clancy and Ken Follet to Barbara Taylor Bradford and Jackie Collins; name it, I greedily read it.
But as the stresses of life set in, I found myself losing taste for action-packed, thriller novels, concentrating on the good old romance titles that made me forget the horrors outside my gates, at least for a while.
But goodness, gracious me; just as a good Hollywood series is these days incomplete without satisfying the ‘woke’ culture by starring a gay couple or two (not to mention explicit sex scenes), romance novels are very much like written porn these days!
I don’t know how often I start reading an engrossing love story, then bang, in the middle of it all, the most explicit sex scenes jump at me off the pages and leave me muttering a prayer of repentance. Am I alone in this? Eh! And I consider myself quite liberal on several matters that would make others flinch, but still…
Be it a historical romance or a contemporary one by Sophie Kinsella, brace yourself for some very explicit sex scenes and language when you read. And since E.L James released her X-rated 50 Shades of Grey trilogy and it became a massive hit, writers now seem to be tripping over one another to out a steamier, raunchier novel, alienating some readers in the process.
Romance novels, including Mills & Boon, are of course incomplete without the sex scene, but it was never as explicit as it is today. Not even in Jackie Collins’ books – the sex never overshadowed the plot/story.
I love series, but I have had to wean myself off many of them. My last guilty pleasure as a born-again Christian was romance novels, but it looks like I may resort to reading while skipping over several pages, or go back to good old Dean Koontz and Stephen King and their horrors…
malita@observer.ug
Source: The Observer