Top Ten Tuesday, 14 February 2017: My Top Ten Romance Pet Peeves, 2nd edition

Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created and hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. Visit the hosting blog to see lots of other lists.

Today's topic is a romance freebie (what else), to celebrate Valentine's Day. Since I love freebies, I decided to participate this week. Please visit the originating blog to see some of the other lists.

I posted a list of 10 romance pet peeves of mine in 2011, and decided to revisit that theme in today‘s Top 10 Tuesdays. Some things have changed, while others haven't.

Here is the original for comparison.

The list:

Weak heroines who need rescuing by the hero or others – All. The. Fucking. Time. Understandable to a point in historical novels, since most of those are about the aristocratic classes, whose women were often quite sheltered, but I prefer to read about women who are strong and capable.
Alpha jerk heroes who remain jerks at the end of the story. If he doesn‘t change, he‘s not interesting. He don't have to stop being alpha, but the jerk part has to go.
Sexual violence. I get it that it‘s easy to create conflict and angst by having it happen to someone, but I feel it is overused. As for “forced seduction” of the heroine by the hero, please just don‘t. Not even when the heroine discovers halfway through the ordeal that she likes it.
Heroes who are gangsters, hit men, pirates or other violent criminals. Even if they become reformed by the end of the book.
Characters in historical romances who behave like modern people in historical drag. I don’t mind it a little - after all, we can’t know for certain that opinions and attitudes we think of as modern didn’t exist in olden times - but too much of it and the story becomes unconvincing.
Too much sex/Unnecessary sex scenes. I like it when a sex scene strengthens the bond between the principal characters or furthers the plot in other ways, but I detest sex scenes for the sake of sex. Especially when they are clearly padding and go on for chapters. I had to take a long break from Nora Roberts after reading a romance where a sex/love scene covered three chapters.
Slut-shaming. I don't care who she is, if she's good, bad or evil, or the heroine herself. Just stop it already. I don't mind if another character slut-shames someone (unless it's the heroine doing it), but if the author does it, shame on her/him.
Flat stereotypes as supporting cast. You know: the sassy gay friend, the plot-moppet, the creepy but otherwise characterless stalker, the bad parent, the evil ex, the wise elder, etc. They must have something more than just these characteristics to make them just a little bit rounded.
Insta-love/Lust=Love. Authors, if you can’t make the falling-in love development convincing, you have no business writing romance. (I like a slow build-up).
„Oops, why didn‘t you tell me you were a virgin?“ scenarios.

Icelandic folk-tale: The Laughing Merman

Icelanders not only believed in the existence of selkies, but also in mer-people. The mermaids were said to be very beautiful, while the mermen were supposed to be ugly as sin but very wise and able to see things others did not. O nce upon a time a farmer went out fishing and pulled up a merman. He tried to get the merman to talk to him but he would not answer, except to beg him to release him back into the sea, but this the farmer refused to do. The farmer rowed back to land, taking the captive merman with him. When he pulled up the boat on the shore, his wife came to him and greeted him with tenderness and kisses, which he received with pleasure. This made the merman laugh. Then the man’s dog came to him and greeted him tenderly in the way of dogs, by jumping up to him, but the farmer hit the dog. Again the merman laughed. Then the farmer walked up towards his house, but on the way he tripped over a tussock and hurt himself. He got angry and gave the tussock a good kicking. Then...

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove...

Reading in Reykjavík

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