It’s personal.

Today I enjoyed reading the n+1 personals. My favorites are THE GIRL WHO WASTES HER TIME DETECTING EMOTIONAL NUANCE IN ARROGANT INTELLECTUALS and THE SEMI-PUT-TOGETHER UPTOWN BOY, but I’m rooting the hardest for THE ACADEMIC LADY, because being a woman in philosophy ain’t easy.

Were I on the n+1 market, which I’m not, mine might go like this:

THE WOMAN WHO ISN’T A GIRL OR A LADY

I do things with statistics and write about it for a living. It’s a great life where those who mind that I dress badly mind quietly. Someday I want to have a dishwasher and a dog. I already have a canoe. I’ll always want to share food at the restaurant, but if you eat the thing that I was saving, I will hunt you down first and then come after your loved ones. I know how to chair a meeting and I strive to use this power for good. My house is always a mess. It’s worse than you were imagining when you read that line. I am aware that ostentatiously close female friendships are part of the performance of being a girl, and this awareness does not make me value them less. I like pink and Pink. I will beat you at card games. I will gloat but never cheat. You don’t have to read all my favorite books, but you might have to listen to me explain at great length why I love them, where ‘might’ means ‘will definitely.’ I’ll repeat myself; I’m sorry. I can be the low-brow to your high-brow. In less than a month I’ll be able to do 100 pushups. I believe in humanity, its dignity and equality and all its possibilities. I have a problem with the internet. I laugh easily and loudly, and then I get angry that men are considered funny if they tell good jokes, and women are considered funny if they laugh at men’s jokes. I tell jokes. Pay attention to me. I used to be afraid of spiders but I’m getting better. I have written a long paragraph about myself and said nearly nothing about you. That’s because I don’t know you yet. I am enthusiastic. I am available for coffee.

…I’m thinking it’s a pretty good thing I’m not on the n+1 market.

Onwall personal ad

Pop quiz: Whose n+1 is this?

THE BOY WHO CAN HEAR YOU OVER THE MUSIC

I’ll pick you up anyplace anytime, but the stereo is mine. It might be Afrobeat. It might be techno. It won’t be Ke$ha: that’s not OK.

…No. It isn’t. It’s appalling.

…I might be a little judgmental. I might be a little angry, but it’ll be OK. I don’t care what anyone else thinks; I just want to know what you do. I’ll listen.

I guess I have to withhold tagging this post until someone gets it in the comments. Now you write one!

We’re baa-aaack!

Attention readers: After a rather long hiatus, during which apparently people kept finding and reading our blog, which is awesome and totally unexpected, and after telling ourselves and each other over and over and over again that we really have to restart the blog because we have THINGS TO SAY, but then not going forth with the typing, we are declaring an official re-activation of Underage Reading!  During the long gap since whenever we stopped blogging, and really during the long period before that when we weren’t really blogging about books but maintained the pretense of having a blog about books, sort of, we have read many excellent (and not so excellent) kids’ & YA books (not least the Hunger Games series, about which posts will be forthcoming, as Elizabeth somehow remembers large portions of the lengthy and vehement conversation we had like a year ago when Mockingjay came out). So stay tuned for Underage Reading 2.0 — sometimes sporadic, always emphatic.

Sincerely,

Elizabeth & Emily

I like my romantic ideals a bit less anti-romantic, actually.

It is because I am so committed to romance novels, and teen romance in particular, that I must register some objections. Why are so many of the romantic ideals in these books so… unromantic?

[Spoiler alert for HARRY POTTER and THE HUNGER GAMES]

As Exhibit A, take HARRY POTTER and THE HUNGER GAMES, and specifically their codas. Both of these books end by jumping into the future to show us that the protagonists really do stay Together Forever with their teen sweethearts, which I guess is meant to prove that it really was true love after all.

Which: have some confidence in the stories you told us, Rowling and Collins, because some bland factual knowledge that the characters are still together in 20 years doesn’t add anything to the emotional resonance of what I already experienced those characters experiencing together. I gather that the logic is that the significance of the relationship lies not in its meaning in the present, but in what it turns out to amount to in the future. And what exactly is romantic about that?

By the same token, I don’t see how a compelling story of those characters changing later on and maybe not working so well anymore cheapens the story we already saw. The scene when Willow and Tara blow out their candle in New Moon Rising does not take away one bit of power from the way Willow smiles when she gets that Oz really likes her, because how could it? The romance isn’t in the future; it’s in all the moments.

Also. I’ve had enough of this “you’re just what I was always waiting for” business that’s in every third teen romance*, mostly when the author doesn’t seem to have any idea what else a romantic hero might say to express their feelings, because the image it gives me is of a giant checklist that you create early in life of all the traits you seek in a person, and serendipitously there comes the creature that you have reductively decided to want. But is not the whole idea of romance that someone is always surprising to you, and this matters precisely because you never stop being curious enough about them to try to puzzle them out? And also that through their relationship, both parties to it become something a bit different than what they already were?

I feel like romance is an emergent property of a relationship, not something you can shellack on top of a story by offering proof (through declarations or longevity) that it must have been there the whole time. And I also feel like my idea of what romance is is the much more romantic one, in the sense that it’s so inherently idealized, and so it puzzles me that people drawn to writing romance don’t seem to share it.

And in truth I feel a bit plaintive here, because the fact is, I was built for romance stories. I cried and cried for Dawn and Tim, people. Why am I finding so little romance in my romance novels?

* And yes, I do make an exception for The National. Obviously.