The Guardian A romantic novelist of my acquaintance religiously sends me every new book she writes, always with a quasi-secret note implying that she knows I am a covert reader of romances and will not own up to it for fear of losing my reputation as an unforgiving critic. It's not easy denying a weakness. You end up sounding strident. And so the voluminous romances with their saccharine covers keep coming, like virgins thrown to quiet some insatiable beast. The truth is, however, that I would rather be thrown on a pyre of burning livestock than have to read a line of one of those 700-page blockbusters packaged, like porno, to promise not a single deviation from the formula.
Nothing is so grindingly difficult to read as calculated inanity.
And I know no one who has ever read a novel proper who feels differently. Except, that is, Fay Weldon, who confesses to having sat up half the night with Someone Like You and enjoyed it. Upwards of 200m romantic novels are sold every year. But I agree with Weldon that love's the thing, that love is what we sometimes feel we have been put on earth to do. No reading beats reading about love.