"It's so bad that it's good"

"It's so bad that it's good": everybody knows at least one film like that (Clash of the Titans!!!).

 The same can be said about quite a few free-and-available-online harlequin novels. Be it the short story of a Spanish Antonio-Banderas-'Custodian' and the new school teacher, each with pirate roots (it's so very very very very strained, that sub plot) or a longer, slightly disturbing but hilarious story of a stereotypical Scarlet-O'Hara-wannabe falling in love with a rogue who might or might not have been a highway robber, and finding a way out of the horrendous marriage her parents' have lined up for her (a rapist-vocabulary-using rake), Harlequins are frankly fantastic books to read if your brain simply doesn't want to work.

<--- Exhibit A: A stereotypical romance novel book cover, as seen on Google image search.

After long months of reading tedious or interesting articles on historical people, events, periods or whatever, it can be a great relief to read something incredibly stupid. Harlequins cover that. Ok, yeah, most men will go with the argument that it's just ''porn for bookworms'', and I agree that some of them are as bad as those porn films men apparently watch with the poor backstory or plot. Some of them, I just skim through wondering why the author bothered with the introductory descriptions and dialogue and didn't just get straight to the dirty, since that was pretty much what the entire 4 or 5 pages of a short story consisted of, or was for.

The *best* kind, though, if you are looking for a real laugh, is the sort with disturbingly detailed scenes, cheesy dialogue (preferably in an attempt to sound worldly, either on the author's part, or the characters') and the main lovers of the tale ending up married after falling in love in the space of 3 nights and 2 conversations. If the author shows great knowledge of period clothing, then all the better.


Great Literature, I love thee, but sometimes, just sometimes, I need something that is honestly so awful that I'm tempted to rewrite it myself. <3