reading the love

All the Georgette Heyer readers are converging at Bookshelves of Doom at the moment. I wonder if there's a lot of crossover between (adult) children's book readers and romance readers? I suspect many children's book readers are also drawn to genre fiction because they share, generally speaking, an emphasis on satisfying storytelling that more highly regarded categories of literature often don't bother with.

I'm a little bemused by the idea of reprinting Eva Ibbotson for YA's though. I mean, yay for us adults who have been haunting ebay, but though her books are relatively clean, as these things go, they are kind of heavy on some of the more outdated romantic ideals. The hero is always spying the heroine giving a friendly hug to a beloved relative and immediately concluding she must be a hoo-ar. If I were choosing adult romances for a teenger, I might prefer something with actual sex but a saner attitude.

(No, wait! That would let out Twilight on both counts!)

when autism awareness goes bad

Toys R Us has all these "autism - solve the puzzle!" posters up, soliciting funds for an organization called autism speaks. (They're not even donating, mind you... they're just asking for more of our money.

I'm not familiar with this organization, but I have heard autism speak any number of times, and one of the things it says most often is, "I'm not a puzzle. I'm a person."

An attitude harder to maintain when you walk into a stores and see those posters.