On Putting Books Down

Wednesday night, on the way home from the KGB reading, I had to put down the book I was reading; I didn't pick it up again yesterday, but I hope to get back to it this weekend.

Some books you put down because they're annoyingly wrong, or just annoying -- but this one I had to put it down because it was too true.

Now, I'm a man, so I'm familiar with male violence. I don't like it, and I think my temper is much better than it used to be, but I know a bit about violence, and the sources of violence. What I don't know, at least not firsthand, is that horrible fascination some women have for dangerously violent men.

I recognize that it's real -- it's been canonized in the romance field as the "bad boy" subgenre, where of course the violent men are tamed by the true love of a heroine -- but when I'm reading a book with a first-person narrator who goes weak in the knees (and other places) over a man who has just explicitly threatened her with death, I need to stop for a while.

Not because it's not exactly right; not because I don't believe completely in her reaction. But because I do, and because I wish the human race wasn't like that...either of them.