Gauntlet, Thrown

     Ideally, friends, this will be the first in a longish series of blog posts in which I read books that my friend Johanna Parkhurst recommends to me, her goal being to get me to positively review books that I would ordinarily never read on my own. Books from genres that make me cringe, make me feel embarrassment on the author's behalf, and books that generally I have a crappy and even childish attitude about. Because I'm not going to lie to you. I'm kind of a dick about some things (and also we may as well get it out there that I curse like a sailor; if you are a visitor from Johanna's website, I apologize in advance and promise to try to keep such shenanigans to a minimum). Be warned as we move forward that I hate romance as a literary genre, along with other genres, and I'm bluntly judgmental about people who like them. This is not something I'm proud of, but it is an accurate picture of how I *can* be.

     I mean, this whole thing started when Johanna, pretty much one of the nicest people on the planet, had the lovely experience of having her therapist openly smirk in her face after learning that Johanna is a published YA and romance author and ghostwriter. Naturally, my response was to go to her heartfelt Facebook post about it and state for the record that I enjoy and reserve the right to judge genre preferences. I'm pretty reliable in that way. See Exhibit "Facebook Screengrab".
     For the record, if you're just encountering the likes of me for the first time, I am neither, despite evidence to the contrary, Johanna's *former* crap therapist, nor a total dick, and therefore I decided that if I am going to be smug about something that clearly hurt my friend, I should at least be open to experiencing how it feels for myself. I am, after all, the self-same girl who read the entire Twilight series just because a classmate in undergrad was writing her thesis about it, and I wanted to have sure footing to engage in brutal mockery of her choice. Maybe not the classiest move, but anyone who has ever tried to read those things really must admire my commitment.

     So here we are. I messaged Johanna that I would be willing to slum it with genres I find gross if she is herself willing to come to her senses and read some genres I know to be amazing. Which is to say, she recommends a book to me, I recommend one to her, and we both read and review the recommendations with an open mind. Johanna, being who she is, was down to try it. Below, you can see how our personal literary tastes compare. And if I stop playing and trash-talking for a minute, I have to go on the record and say that what makes this challenge so cool is that we are both into genres that are not usually respected by literary elites (I match her love of romance with my own geekdom over sci-fi and weird), and in this sense we both know what it's like to have the things we love and make be maligned as "low-brow", "pulp", or "trash". 

So, welcome to our little challenge, and read on to see how we fared on the first leg, in which Johanna reads 14 by Peter Clines upon my recommendation, and I reluctantly dive into A Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue by MacKenzi Lee, the book Johanna decided to lob my way.