I am totally beat tonight so I will have to make this short. I wanted to take the opportunity to explain one of my little quirks here. I talked about genre labels yesterday and you may notice that I tag my own reviews a bit strangely. As a bookseller, the easiest way for me to make recommendations was to first ask the customer what they had read and enjoyed recently. Since I can't really do that here, I put a very brief header on each of the reviews - format (hardcover/trade paper/mass market) release date, and genre.
Sometimes I will follow regular genre labels, but a lot of the time I tend to make up my own. Mystery doesn't always describe the book you are looking at. Carol Goodman is a great example. I would tag her books as literary mysteries.
Sonnet Lover concerns an American professor who goes to Italy to search for a collection of rumored sonnets by Shakespear's lover. It's a fantastic book full of suspense and intrigue as well as romance, but there is a very heavy literary aspect that you wouldn't find in the book that I am currently reading, Don Bruns's Stuff to Die For.
No, Stuff is a humorous mystery about a couple of guys who start a hauling business and find a severed finger on their very first job.
Another one that's hard to pin down is Janet Evanovich. I consider her Stephanie Plum books to be chick-lit mysteries. Some may not agree with me, but again, it's a better description than just mystery.
So, if you see a weird one, just know it's totally my opinion and you may not agree with it, but it's my attempt to help readers decide if it falls in a category that they may enjoy.
No comments:
Post a Comment