Paging the #ArtmiageArmy! @RCArmitage has just been revealed as one of the narrators of @LaurenBlakely3's upcoming Audible-exclusive, #Wanderlust! Pre-order now: https://t.co/sVqUOlCKLJ https://t.co/pAiQA7cvrE
— Audible (@audible_com) January 11, 2018
Armitage Agonistes 
Wow. I think they might have just succeeded in confounding my “I’ll buy this b/c Armitage did it” boundary.
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This is more within my boundary than The Tattoo Artist – which I think is going to be a big hit. Still, not what I would have anticipated from him or Audible.
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LOL! That cover is very typical of modern contemporary romance. It sells them for whatever reason.
I WILL put this out there, though: I’m a romance reader and I’m gathering that most of the RA Blogoverse aren’t romance readers. So, I’d be open to doing a review of this on any blog willing to have my romance-reader POV. I’m not saying I’ll like it as contemporary romances are hit-and-miss with me. But if any non-romance reading fans want to suffer through it to review, I’ll give them mine to publish as well. 😉
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Or I will give them mine to publish INSTEAD. lol!
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You’re welcome here to review it, but why not use your own blog? I believe there are a number of RA fans who do , in fact, write Romance novels, with him as inspiration. I think Grati Lovelace is one. I’ll listen to this one and weigh in, but not as any sort of expert in the genre – so you’re welcome here.
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Yes. Grati will definitely be all over this one. Also possibly Carly Quinn.
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LOL! We’ll see. Like you, I have certain boundaries of what I enjoy. And I enjoy reading and writing romance stories with love and tenderness in them–usually with making love implied or restrained, letting readers fill in the blanks with their own imaginations. 😉
P.S. Other people’s stories that are almost a gps map of a character’s anatomy aren’t my cup of tea. Ha! However, may they rock on! No pun intended. 😉
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Obscura, too, come to think about it.
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I unintentionally overgeneralized. . . these are all bloggers I enjoy and should have known better!
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I read stuff and there is great fanfic out there ☺ which is great for the imagination and a better fit with the characters he played and such. I loved his Hayer narrations too. This as weird as it may seem is by it’s nature very far from anything my imagination could realistically associate with him. I hope i am making some sense ☺ just trying to explain why the combo doesn’t thrill me. And i terms of audio in particular i find his skills amazing so i enjoy him taking me through doors i might not open or wouldn’t stick with. His Copperfield was a revelation. I could read this in a couple of pleasant hours i suspect but i don’t believe he adds value to it for me at least ( not talking about the revenue audible would be raking in, if i didn’t have a subscription sorry but £28!!!! I would never pay for this, the £2 on Kindle book would be more than enough)
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Not everything is for everyone, for sure. Having preferences is okay. Like I said, I’m a romance reader and contemporaries are hit-and-miss with me.
But I have seen some comments out and out calling contemporary romance trash. There’s no shortage of derision toward the romance genre to begin with.
But to my mind, the romance genre is written (on the whole) by women for women about women’s pleasure and women’s priorities. Like any genre, some of it is better than others. Still, romances like these are big business and make the most money in the publishing world. Even with covers like this. Or perhaps because of?
I know it runs counter to a lot of what’s expected or associated with him. I can see how that would throw folks, though. I kind of think that dissonance will come up more and more as he heads into the latter half of his career.
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I thought the time for rom coms had passed 😉 maybe this is him taking advantage of the last opportunity of this genre that will likely come to him.
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haha! Well, in the audio world he can be 35 for at least another decade. 🙂
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I don’t think so: Vulture just ran a forum this week on the topic of what season of year is best for rom-coms. (Consensus: all of them).
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I meant age wise for him that rom com roles would def no longer be on offer 😉 so maybe he did want to have a stab at it this way. For readers the only seasonal fluctuations i would have expected would have been around holidays since people have more time but maybe not as the forum you mentioned found otherwise
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I don’t think all contemporary romance is trash, but some of it definitely is. By this, I mean that it is essentially one step away from pornography — it exists solely to provoke particular reactions in the reader that the reader finds pleasurable. It focuses all its energy on achieving that reaction, taking refuge in stereotypical, uncreative plots, stock characters, and florid prose. I don’t think the fact that women write it really rescues it from those problems. Men could write it just as well, and some do, I believe. (Would make a great Hallmark film: male contemporary romance writer has to hide from his readers, or something along those lines.) Perhaps it is empowering to read — but that doesn’t mitigate any of the other problems. Essentially, whatever my reaction to the dopamine trigger of that kind of writing, in the end I feel manipulated by it and the manipulation is right out in the open. I don’t find it empowering at all; it’s emotional comfort food with all the downsides that involves. This doesn’t mean I don’t read plenty of stuff I consider trashy (among that, a lot of fanfiction — one of my best fan buddies writes exactly this sort of thing about Porter, and it’s really well done, and she would be the first to call it trash), or recognize the important of certain kinds of genre projects for artists.
However: I don’t think this reaction of dissonance is anything new in Armitage’s career, if the legacy fans’ reaction to Robin Hood is any index. There was a big contingent who wanted him to keep doing projects that could be considered more clearly artistic. Some of this can still be read if you search C19. At the beginning of my time as a fan, there was a lot of snark over Strike Back, because the novel it’s based on is the male equivalent of contemporary romance. It’s *really* awful, and fans had a year to stew about it before they saw the episodes. Then there were the people who left when the Hobbit was announced, and the people who were horrified by Into the Storm (as I read someone saying today, I actually paid a full price ticket for that, so I’ll probably survive this, too). He’s done a lot of genre projects over the years, and every time there’s an exodus of people who felt disappointed by the new project, and an influx of people newly discovering him.
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I’ve put a finis note on my blog. Trimmed it back to mostly the theater-related posts, which I think were the most useful to people in general who may not have understood the rehearsal process. I just don’t have it in me to keep it up on even the barest level and I seem to function better as a fan as an occasional commenter. Just something I learned along the way.
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Giggles, Perry! Thanks for the shout out. Although my definition of “romance” reading and writing is not explicitly sexual as I believe some modern “romances” are. Ha! But I still get the love and tenderness across in my stories. 😉
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zeesmuse, potentially.
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