Due to the recent hostessing of Betty Debbie at my house (en route to further destinations afield), Mijneer van Voorhees had, out of necessity, to swim through Betty infested waters. Betty Debbie and I ate (yum! Thanks Betty Magdalen), drank and slept Betty. After enduring all this shop talk, my Mijneer finally, in what I imagine was a fatal fascination with vintage cover art, said these words, "Is it something that I could read?"
Hmm. I furrowed my Betty brow. This would require bullet points:
- I read an Amazon review (sometime ago) of one Neels book which claimed that the novel was much beloved by herself, her daughter and HER HUSBAND. My first thought was that this anonymous woman had left it in the bathroom by mistake and he'd been desperate for literature.
- Mijneer van Voorhees (and your own Mijneers, I guess) gets snippets of Betty Neels read to him under duress after I laugh out loud and he asks me what's so funny. That's just like reading them, right?
- Does The Wonder of Neels translate into Man-ese?
- I mean, I can defend the reading of them to you, gentle readers but I have to live with this man for the rest of eternity. Would he hate it (because I can't see him reading the plural 'them')?
- Winter Wedding is my favorite but would he misunderstand a dawning realization over twins doped up with Seconal?
- Damsel in Green--chock-a-block with family life and the joys of domesticity...
- Gem of a Girl--RDD punches the daylights out of the fink. Action is good, right?
- What book would you recommend to an absolute Betty novice? It took most of us reading a few books before we got The Venerable Neels. What would win them over in one? And why?
- What would you pass along to your spouse (or brother or fella) with a glimmer of hope that he might like it? WHY?
There's one in the "Middle Canon" where they go to Trondheim and she's the nurse at some engineering station or something, and there's a massive pile-up at a tunnel -- and you get the idea. (I may be mashing up several books; that's the way my brain works.) But between the travelogue aspect and some nuts & bolts for the mechanically inclined, I think it could work.
ReplyDeleteBetty Ross has suggested Liam Neeson with a Norwegian accent, but I'm pretty sure the hero is still an RDD.
Good suggestion - appeal to the inner engineer.
ReplyDeleteThere are a couple of "engineering" books - Midnight Sun's Magic - on the isle of Spitzbergen (the engineering/science aspect is rather vague, but it is more of a man-centric book), and then there's Heaven Around the Corner - in which the hero is an civil engineer(building bridges)and has an alcoholic step-sister. I can't think of the name of the tunnel crash book - the heroine is acting as a companion to a selfish older woman(I'm pretty sure the heroine has a despised mole coloured dress in this one).
My initial thought was Midnight Sun...seemed more "manly". Honestly, I'm not sure I want to pass on this guilty pleasure. I like to read my Betty's with my beautiful book covers and smile like I'm up to no good.
ReplyDeleteBetty Debbie -- Trying to limit the Canon to only those books in which the heroine has a "mole coloured dress" is a bit like saying, "I'll only eat the one McVitie's chocolate digestive."
ReplyDeleteWell, actually, no -- those two things are nothing alike, except they're both hard to do.
Never mind. (I'm just hungry.)