Reader Interview: Candy

Candy Tan is a "Technical writer/illustrator/web designer/ office bitch (as in "Bitch, the color printer is broke! Go fix it!") from Portland, Oregon, USA, and has a blog: Smart Bitches Love Trashy Books. When you were a child, what did you usually read? When I was a wee, wee 'un, I read lots and lots of Ladybird books. I remember being obsessed with the illustrations and read-along version of Beauty and the Beast. The growly Beast voice terrified me and fascinated me at the same time. I also started reading Asterix comics, though 99% of the puns and jokes just flew right over my head. I didn't even get what "Vitalstatistix" was a pun of until I was embarrassingly old--like 15, 16 years old or so. Then when I was about 7 years old, I discovered Enid Blyton. Love at first sight, and I forsook all other forms of entertainment, including TV, just so I could read. Within a year I needed glasses. (According to my mom, it was due to reading too much in dim light, but given that four out of my five siblings needed prescription eyeglasses from a young age, I'm not all that convinced I can blame my shitty eyesight on Blyton). Anyway, I probably read her entire backlist, or close to it. Slowly, though, I started getting more and more tired of how simplistic her books were. I went through a very, very brief obsession with Nancy Drew, but her unrelenting perfection got tiresome real quick. And then, one magical, magical day, when I was 10 years old, I picked up The Twits by Roald Dahl. I can't express how big a revelation Dahl was after the rather saccharine onslaught of Blyton in which I'd immersed myself for the last three years. The bit in The Twits where the two boys escape Mr. Twit's trap by shucking their trousers and running away, "bums twinkling in the sun," both charmed me and horrified me. Authors can SAY that? In a CHILDREN'S book? Oh my God. I promptly went on a hunt for every Roald Dahl book I could find, and I wasn't disappointed. Unlike Blyton, Dahl wasn't shy about adding moral ambiguity into his stories or killing off the bad guys. When the two aunts were squashed by the peach in James and the Giant Peach, I chuckled with evil little girl glee while feeling shocked to my toes. My childhood reading list is really odd, though, because I basically read whatever I could find, which meant I frequently combed through my older siblings' book collection for reading material. So mixed in with the usual children's authors like Roald Dahl, E. Nesbitt, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, Joan Aiken, Rosemary Sutcliff, Lynn Reid Banks, Dick King-Smith, Willard Price, Geoffrey Trease, C.S. Lewis, Peter Dickinson, Judy Blume and the like, I was reading a lot of authors not exactly suitable for 9-year-olds like Sidney Sheldon, Jackie Collins, Stephen King, James Herbert and Agatha Christie. Again, as with reading Asterix at a young age, a lot of the stuff (especially the sexual bits) just went sailing right by my head. I remembered reading Nine and Half Weeks when I was 11 and feeling kind of turned-on, but not really knowing WHY. Semen? What the hell is semen? What the hell is a tampon? And why did the guy like putting one in the narrator? WHERE was he putting it in her? Some of these authors I really, really liked--by the time I was 13, I'd read all of Agatha Christie's backlist. Ditto Stephen King (and thanks to him, to this day I still sleep with the lights on if the Very Tall Husband isn't in bed with me--it's not that I think he'll save me, I just reckon he's a bigger, tastier target and the monster will eat him first, giving me time to escape.) Another staple of my childhood reading addiction was books about animals because I was (still am) an animal lover. Didn't matter if they were fantasy novels involving anthopomorphic animals (Wind in the Willows, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Redwall) or non-fiction like Gerald Durrell. Actually, now that I think back, I read a LOT of Durrell. As a romance reader, what do you usually read? My favorite sub-genre is and probably always will be historicals. But I'll read just about anything in romance, except maybe stories about reconciling couples. I love dark, angsty books, I love light, silly comedies. And I'm definitely enjoying the current paranormal and erotic romance trend. Apart from romance novels, what do you usually read? I read quite a bit of literary fiction, science fiction, fantasy, old adventure novels by people like H. Rider Haggard and Alexandre Dumas, children's books, scientific non-fiction, exposé-type non-fiction (Fast Food Nation was responsible for sparking that particular fascination), some thrillers, some horror. Oh, and I'm a bitch for Anthony Bourdain. I bought his Les Halles Cookbook pretty much for the cussing. How can I not love a man who writes this in his introduction to how to prepare poulet rôti:

"That's roast chicken, numbnuts! And if you can't roast a damn chicken then you are one helpless, hopeless, sorry-ass bivalve in an apron. Take that apron off, wrap it around your neck, and hang yourself."

(I found to my delight that the recipes are really, really good, too.) I think there may be a genre or two I'm missing, but I think this is a pretty good representation of what I currently like to read. Name top five favourite romance authors if any. Only five?? Whiiiine. OK:

• Laura Kinsale
• Jennifer Crusie
• Loretta Chase
• Patricia Gaffney
• Barbara Samuel/Ruth Wind

And Sharon and Tom Curtis. Sorry, I had to sneak them in. And since they write as a team, they count as ONE person, right? No, Candy. Five is five. Do you have any weaknesses for certain themes, storylines, settings or such in romances? If so, what are they? Oh my, yes. I love pirates. I don't know why, since most pirate romances tend to be just godawful, and there's nothing at all romantic about real-life pirates, but somehow, in my head, pirates = RRROWR. I'm also a sucker for a good beta hero, bonus points if he's a convincing geek, and double bonus points if he's a virgin or sexually inexperienced compared to the heroine. I also love me a good medieval, though those are hard to find nowadays. I also enjoy reading about the Elizabethan, Reformation and Georgian eras, though romances set in those time periods are pretty difficult to find as a rule. When you buy romance novels, how do you make your selection? Back in the Bad Old Days, before I had any sort of an Internet connection, I'd go to Novel House (book rental chain in Malaysia) and just picked up romance novels at random. I'd give them my 15-page in-store test, and if they passed, I'd bring them home with me. Things got a lot more complicated when I moved to America, because I discovered All About Romance and all of a sudden there were all these recommendations and LISTS for me to check out--you know, "If you like this author, try this author" kind of a thing. For a while I followed some of these recommendations blindly, and some of them worked (Judith Ivory) and some of them didn't (Marsha Canham). I also paid attention to new author buzz, and for a couple of years I'd pick up the buzz books blind, too. Woo damn did I EVER get burnt. Adele Ashworth, Liz Carlyle, Stephanie Laurens and many other buzz-worthy authors just didn't work for me (the two big exceptions were Dara Joy and Jennifer Crusie), and after a while I realized I needed to re-instate my 15-page test before buying books, unless they were by trusted auto-buy authors. Nowadays if I want to try out a new author I get the book from the library if at all possible, and if the book is really good I'll buy my own keeper copy; if the library doesn't have what I want, I'll look at a few review sites, ask people for their opinions (Smart Bitches is such a good tool for this--perhaps TOO good) and then give the book the 15-page trial. If it passes, I buy it. For that reason, I really dig Amazon.com's "Look inside this book!" feature. I still occasionally buy blind, though--mostly when I feel like acting a little crazy and livin' on the edge. (Yes, contrary to popular belief, my life isn't all glitz and glamor and crazed sheikhs abducting me for passionate desert lovin'.) What are your pet hates with romance? Oh boy, people who visit Smart Bitches regularly are going to be in for an earful of repetition. Anyway, here's a (not-so) short list:

• Virgin widows
• Orgasmless widows
• Sexual double-standards for heroines vs. heroes in contemporaries
• TSTL protagonists
• Asshole heroes who don't grovel enough
• Rapist heroes
• Secret babies
• Gay villains who also molest children and small animals
• The 'Sudden Realization of Love' plot device, wherein the hero and heroine hate each other with a passion but are hit with this epiphany in the last 3 pages of the novel: they've been physically, mentally and verbally abusing each other for the last 416 pages because THEY LOVE EACH OTHER.

When discussing romance novels and/or the romance genre with fellow readers, which issues interest you most? Oh, just about everything. The top three would probably be:

• Why people like to read what they read
• Sexism in romances
• The double-standards applied to romance novels but not other types of genre fiction.

If an influential romance editor asked you for an opinion on the romance genre, what would you say? Please, for the love of God, buy what's good, not what's trendy. Also, can you please tell the women who write sexy romances with sizzling love scenes but can't even bear to have their so-called bad boy heroes to say "damn" or "fuck" to please, please stop referring to their dick as their "arousal"? Thanks. Name up to five romance novels that left you lasting impressions.

1. Desire's Blossom - Cassie Edwards Worst. Book. EVER. The sentences in this book aren't even grammatical, the Chinese is gibberish, and the punctuation is ... creative.
2. Something Wonderful - Judith McNaught First romance novel I loved. I haven't re-read it in about 10 years, and I'm kind of afraid to.
3. Special Gifts - Anne Stuart PEOPLE REALLY DO KISS EACH OTHER *DOWN THERE*?
4. The Shadow and the Star - Laura Kinsale The first Laura Kinsale book I picked up, and... oh my. It's a book that sounds as if it'd be sordid and cheesy (gaijin ninja in the Victorian era falls in love with a poor seamstress!) but it's so not.
5. The Windflower - Laura London (aka Sharon and Tom Curtis) What can I say about The Windflower? I love it. It has held up to multiple re-reads, and it helped pull me through a truly awful hospital stay. If I had a million dollars, I'd pay the Curtises to write Cat and Raven's stories.

What was the last romance novel you bought? Fool For Love by Eloisa James. I read about 30 pages of it, but I'm abandoning it for the moment and I have no plans to pick it up in the immediate future. Thanks, Candy. :) Be good, be bad & be safe.