The humid, Wisconsin summer seems to have gotten to my normally intelligent book club.  We’ve deviated from our thoughtful fiction titles such as Brave New World, Poisonwood Bible, and You’re Not You.  In what can only be described as spontaneous combustion of a power outage, good wine, and too much talk about sex and drugs, we decided at the last meeting to make August’s selection a harlequin romance novel.  We will drink Pabst, deep fry all of our appetizers, wear lots of black eyeliner, apply stick-on gems to our manicures, and talk literature.  We plan to make a list of the linguistic strategies used to describe the male and female anatomy.

The best part is that BJ (names withheld to protect literary reputations) has an aunt with a basement full of exactly the types of novels we are looking for, mostly published in the 60s and 70s.  Yesterday, we were given permission to take what we wanted, having agreed to the “No Return” Return Policy.  How can a book with a cover like Heir To Falconhearst fail to excite (possibly in more ways than one)?

I am grateful for the good friends in book club who are smart, funny and willing to read trashy novels for kicks!