well, there goes the weekend...

I incautiously wandered into the bookshop this morning in the course of an expedition in honour of w-n's approaching baby, and was flabberlighted to discover they had two of the Stephanie Plum novels I'm missing from my collection and have been fruitlessly hunting lo these many moons. This was beautifully staged on top of (a) payday yesterday, with (b) an extra payment for thesis supervision, and (c) an unexpected R2500 tax refund, so I acquired them forthwith without actually even looking at the price, something which never happens in the underpaid annals of extemporaneousness. Apart from making my mother happy when she comes to visit next month, this acquisition basically does for the bits of my weekend which aren't taken up with baby showers, SCA meetings and the traditional Sunday night jo&stv braai thing, now with added X-Files. In fact, this post is an exercise in delayed gratification.

I'm not sure I should be admitting this on the heels of the Great Next Top Model revelations, but I completely adore the unabashed chicklit-thrilleriness of Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series. This is, actually, a surprisingly complex pleasure. Stephanie is a low-grade New Jersey bounty hunter, which means she spends the series dragging in minor criminals and desperately escaping the attentions of major ones. She's also a complete ditz, but mercifully, not in the club-yourself-to-death-while-reading Bridget Jones mould. She operates in a world which is occupied by people and values completely and utterly alien to me, and yet I respond with sympathy and immersion. Why the hell? Bemused by my own enjoyment, I reason thusly:

• Part of it is the character. I have little in common with her: she's unliterary, inefficient, addicted to fast food, overly focused on clothes and make-up, college-educated yet doing nothing with it. But she has grit, determination, an ability to rise above threat, pain and (frequent) embarrassment to achieve her goals. She knows she's flawed, but she has an amazing ability not to let it get her down. You have to root for her.
• Part of it is also the humour. These books are laugh-out-loud funny - rude, crude, slapstick, iconoclastic, but witty, well-observed, infused with an irreverent but affectionate view of human foibles which rings all too true.
• Contrariwise, the violence is very real. It's refreshing to have a heroine who throws up, cries, passes out and loses her cool when faced with death, blood, garbage, violence or a maternal guilt trip.
• The supporting cast is nothing short of inspired. Evanovich's characters don't actually leap off the page at you, but that's because they're all too busy arguing, gossiping, having inappropriate sex, eating, shopping, comparing guns and generally raising hell. They live; a lot of them are bona fide eccentrics who nonetheless feel real. Stephanie's granny, in particular, is a continual delight.
• Possibly the world appeals because it is so alien. The environment is urban, polluted, lower middle-class, corrupt, gun-happy, fast-food-dependent, incestuously small-town suburban, criminal and uneducated, but many of these people are depicted with a sense of self and a pride in their lives which you have to respect. I couldn't live there, but it's a fascinating world to watch. It's also bizarrely multi-cultural, not only in the melting-pot construction of Jersey suburban life (a lot of Hungarian and Italian influence) but in the ability of the series to cheerfully and sympathetically depict gays, prostitutes, cross-dressers, sexual deviants, drug addicts and scary Italian grannies with the Evil Eye.
• It really doesn't hurt that Stephanie's complicated love-life revolves around two very attractive men who both embody and deconstruct romance clichés of dominance, violence, otherness, mystery, what have you. They're hot.

So, I have to go now, employing for the purpose the immortal words of Edward Lear: "I must close this, as the Cyclopses used to say of their one eye." I have books to read, guilty pleasures to indulge. I am, I have to say, completely unrepentant.