January 2012, #6: Glory in Death, by J.D. Robb.
You know, I can’t swear to it, but I think part of the recent delay in updating (which has put me more than a week behind on the reading log, again) is because I didn’t want to admit that I was re-reading the In Death series.
J.D. Robb is Nora Roberts, a romance author so prolific and so popular that she has practically transcended the romance industry and become her own genre category. I enjoy most of her romances–not all of them, especially not when she’s off on some weird mystical kick, but for the most part they’re good solid contemporary romances. The books she publishes under the J.D. Robb name aren’t category romance, they’re more like futuristic police procedurals, with a strong romance element, I guess. I’ve been reading them, kind of half-heartedly, for years, and when I finished reading the most recent one in the series, I found myself wondering if I was imagining that the series had changed a lot over the years. Specifically, I remembered the earlier books in the series being more obviously sci-fi tinged, but the more recent ones feel like they’re downplaying the futuristic-y stuff. The BPL has a lot of them as ebooks, so I went back to the beginning and started working my way through.
This is a lot of writing, so far, for a book that I didn’t really want to admit I was reading.
Glory in Death is the second book in the series, and true to my memory, the sci-fi futuristic elements are a lot more prominent in this book than in the more recent ones. They’re talking all the damn time about orbital platforms and off-planet settlements, for instance. It’s a stupid fluffy candy of a book–like, if I consider reading most romance novels the literary equivalent of eating chocolate, this is more like eating Twizzlers, if that makes sense. It’s fine while you’re doing it, and afterwards you realize that you basically just stuffed your face with cherry-flavored plastic. Chocolate is at least a good solid guilty pleasure, this is just passing time. Of course, I’m still going to read the next one once it comes in at the library, because I’m stupid that way.
Posted Thursday, January 26th, 2012 at 3:22 pm. Filed under: personal.
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