If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound"?According to the all-knowing Wikipedia, this conundrum deals with such issues as the possibility of unperceived existence, knowledge of the unobserved world and the differences in perception and reality.
There are two broad categories of women’s romance literature. The first involves books in pink or fluorescent green or - when the publisher is feeling particularly audacious – pale yellow covers. These books are invariably set in New York and usually deal with a single working girl making her way in NY on a meager income but with a strange compulsion to buy $ 500 hand bags and $ 400 shoes and living in a loft with her best friend who happens to be sexy, glamorous and everything our heroine wishes to be but is not. In addition – and this is the main point - the said girlfriend possesses the world’s hunkiest and nicest boyfriend. Inevitably, our deserving heroine dumps her terrible job and gets a fancy new one that does justice to her unique talents. Of course, she also gets the hunk, and is not exactly overwhelmed by guilt at cheating her friend.
The other genre consists of super syrupy and very enjoyable historical romance with titles like “The Barefoot Bride”, “One Night with You” or “A Summer to Remember”. The guy is always a rich, cynical, irresistibly handsome nobleman who has sworn off love because of traumatic past experiences. The heroine is a not-so-rich nice girl who starts by sparring with the guy, but eventually redeems his faith in love and they get married and live happily ever after.
Both genres unfailingly employ every possible cliché and have such stereotypical story lines that I suspect that they are not really written by authors called Jane Feather, Adrianne Byrd or Rebecca Vinyard, but are actually generated by specially designed computer programs that publishers have installed in secret server farms. The programs are designed to accept crucial inputs such as heroine’s hair and eye color, length of hair as well as name of rich nobleman (Lord Harold Hussy, Duke David Doodle, Sir Gavin Goose). A set of complicated algorithms is then run and voila, an entire new book is generated and published to delight the hearts of millions of women yet again.
