Random whining

The heavy cream I bought last night is not cream. It's a milk-based product, to be sure, but the texture is somewhere between whole milk and light cream. Which made it kind of hard to whip. We tried putting the already-sweetened, lighter-than-cream stuff on our cereal this morning. (What else are we going to do with a pint of this stuff?) It was not the best idea ever.

I'm continuing on my "famous genre authors I never bothered to read kick", with a Nora Roberts book. So far? Don't get it. There is no plot here - it seems that the only plot involved is about these two people falling in love. But there's no obstacles - there is absolutely no reason why these two people shouldn't jump into bed together. Oh, she's trying to make a big point about how different their personalities are, and about how he's rich and she's not. But while the characters proclaim that they're too different and they must fight their passion, they don't actually act different. They've yet to have a real fight, or conflict of any kind. I suppose that this is more like a real, healthy relationship than the heiress who was forced to marry the rakish duke against her will, or the woman who thinks the guy's only dating her because of a bet. But I don't actually want to read books about reality - they're boring. I have a perfectly nice, healthy relationship of my own, I don't need to fantasize about someone else's. Nothing's happening in this book, and I'm bored.

The only one real jarring moment is at the beginning, when she overhears him talk about how she's a brilliant 25-year-old anthropologist, and he's not into professional spinsters. Um, dude? I don't think someone who's only 25 gets to count as a professional spinster yet. (This streak of assholish-ness, which at least might have made things interesting, disappears after page 3, by the way.) All I can say, though, is there better turn out to be a nice, traumatizing reason why a 25-year-old "leading authority on American Indian culture" is spending a month shacking up with a writer to play personal encyclopedia instead of being in, say, grad school. 'Cause this sounds like career suicide to me. (Also, how is someone who doesn't have a Ph.D. a "leading authority on American Indian culture"? Did Not Do the Research, Nora.)

More whining about Nora Roberts

So, over the course of my morning commute, stupid heroine demonstrated her amazing ability to be a pool shark, play Beethovan on guitar perfectly from memory, waltz, and speak flawless French. Each without any explanation or subsequent mention. Each suddenly out of the blue. (Oh, we need to distract this chef? I speak beautiful French at him!) Can we say "Mary Sue"?

She also seems to have written her doctorate in two years while mothering new-born twins, without an affiliation with any university or without having taken any grad classes.

Oh, and the blip of a plot? His mother threatens to sue for custody of his ward unless Perfect HeroineTM goes away, because Evil MotherTM knows that doing so would hurt the ward and Perfect HeroineTM could never stand that. So PH runs off without telling him and travels around the country to hide from the hero, despite being pregnant with his twins. When he finally catches up with her eight months later, her grandfather makes her explain. Hero's response is, "Oh, sorry about that, don't worry, I'll handle her." And that's that. Problem solved. Umm, what? PH was completely convinced that EM would tangle everyone up in a vicious lawsuit and ruin all their lives, and all Nora Roberts does to wrap this up is "don't worry, I'll handle her"?

Arrgh. This book was a marvel of telling instead of showing. This crap is why romance novels have a bad name. (I've read a number of romance novels that were quite excellent - good character development, interesting plots, good overall technique. This was crap.)

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