I like to read a lot. I mean REALLY a lot- probably an unhealthy amount.
I read every day and it doesn’t much matter what. Mostly, it’s novels. Bad or good, it doesn’t matter. The good ones I admire and the bad ones I have great fun tearing apart and grumbling “My GOD! How did this ever get published!?”
You can have a look at my Profile on the right side of this page. There is a list there of stuff I have read and enjoyed lately.
There is also a great link over there to a site by a guy called Mark Longmire. He has done an amazing, hilarious job of remixing actual romance novel covers. He adds appropriate snarky titles and captions. Try this at home, kids!

What brought on today’s blog subject is my current reading material: "Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife" by Linda Berdolll. It’s supposed to be a sequel to Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. I should have known better. What was I thinking? Get this: the author wrote the book because she saw a mini-series version of "Pride &Prejudice" on A&E. And within a few pages, I realized that the author has obviously not only never read the original, but has offered an unedited first draft of her sexual fantasies about Colin Firth and charged the public seventeen dollars for the privilege of reading it.
Poorly written and completely unresearched it’s an anachronistic literary disaster. The scene where Lydia imparts the “facts of life” to Jane and Lizzie is excruciating. No….just….no.
Note to all future writers of P&P pastiches: The fact that you have peppered your dialogue with the words “whilst” and “exceedingly” does not mean that you “write like Austen”. Sorry.
As I said before, I’m not picky about what I read and I can enjoy bad books, in a sick, twisted kind of way. It can be hard to get reading material here in Burkina, so I have learned to take what I can get. But I am on page 40 of this thing and I’m just not sure I can go on.
Have any of you tried to read this, or any other P&P “sequel”? I understand there are several. Do they all suck so wretchedly?
Chime in down in the “Comments” section below.