Entertainment on the brain

After Hurricane Katrina, Obie Joe decided to load up the minivan for a trip to the hometown. What better bulk than dozens of books slated for one of NOLA's recently reopened schools?

A woman in the neighborhood responded to our call for donated books. In her living room, boxed and labeled, were hundreds of books.

"What can I say? I'm a romance novel junkie. I love a good story," she shrugged. Turns out she bought and read about 30 books a month, which is about the average for romance novels.

Pulp fiction, romance, sci-fi, historical fiction....all easily derided as detriments to "true" literature, yet for the readers of these forms, the story is key, and they could care less about the aspirations of the form.

Ms. Obie Joe loved today's Lev Grossman's editorial in The Wall Street Journal reminding us that literature shouldn't exult in distancing itself from the reader. Perhaps one of the reasons why Young Adult as well as graphic novels are gathering huge contingents of new fans might be a response to the lack of good stories found in grown-up lit.

(credit: Jon Krause, Wall Street Journal for graphic)

Romance novels founded USA democracy!

In a riveting review of the new book, Inventing Human Rights: A History by Lynn Hunt (W.W. Norton), essayist Joanna Banks makes the well known point that human rights are invented, and a recent invention at that.

Yet the contradictions between ideals espoused and lives lived among those who espouse human rights, like slave owner Thomas Jefferson fascinate Mr. Obie Joe. How is it possible that men like him could come up with the revolutionary concept of "inalienable" and "self-evident" rights?

Romance novels.

"Hunt believes the burgeoning expression of sympathy toward strangers was the outcome of the dramatic explosion in the publication and reading of the (popular) novel." Three titles draw particular note: Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded, Clarissa, and Julie -- all published during the raucous time in America when the concept of the rights of men became the cornerstone of American democracy. Each of these titles showed that the inner life existed even in the lowly of young women, and in this identification with these beset-upon protagonists, the concept that all men are equal began.

Given the certainty of fans of romance novels...then and now...it's possible.