The National Bone Awards
Your treasury of literary boyfriends.
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Photo reblogged from I don't understand the question.
Almanzo Wilder, married at 28 to a very lucky 18-year-old Laura Ingalls Wilder
Submitted by Tina
I had one of my first sex dreams about Almanzo. And I really was too young to be having those sorts of dreams. But I also had one about Captain Von Trapp. I’m not sure my taste has changed. That could be my problem.
Uh huh. I mean, his name was Manly.
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Post reblogged from Lazy Self-Indulgent Book Reviews
Industrious: ‘Are there crimes to be solved?’
Lazy: ‘If…one counts the procedural injustices of early twentieth century English inheritance law as a crime, yes.’
And who among us does not read Jane Austen as a female child and then to this DAY sometimes find herself randomly caught in the grips of paralyzing entailment-related daymares, despite her “estate” being a glorified Brooklyn shotgun drenched in cat hair, which she rents?! (Boys, probably, god.)
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Draco, you nefarious lil’ bleach-blond, racist Mindfreak, get over here. You are like the average of Disney’s Jafar and Pretty-in-Pink’s James Spader and I want to get a dyed-to-match rat tail and make out with you in the Room of Retirement in front of talking photos of our relatives. Mmmm. I bet you drive a convertible. Mmmm. I bet you smell like Cumming.
F*CK: Draco Malfoy
You guys are like “ma’am, that boy is a criminal” and I’m like yesssss and I’m a Ssssslytherin. IRL, my boyfriend calls me Lucius and it’s funny cuz it’s true.
As Draco and I are giving each other sinister glares and hand job spells under our disappearing cloak, can someone just go kill Harry for me real quick?
K*LL: Harry Potter
I would do it myself but, god, to be honest I”d probably get bored and forget. Can you imagine there being 7 (ssssseven) books about wanting to kill Harry Potter and them all having the same plot? (“I sure can, ma’am!”) Maybe somebody needs a new hobby? I hear there is a cool open mic night at Shayz?
Anyway, ladies, just go ahead and install the chardonnay drip because, I’m sorry, but, you:
M*RRY: Ron Weasley
Either that or I suggest you put on a clean shirt and try eHarmony, missy.
Listen, it’s a controversial subject but the secret me and all your mom’s friends know is that gingers make the best husbands because they get over their behavioral problems long before they get any credit for being adorable, and by then it’s waaaay too late.
Plus you guys can get a pet weasel and name it Ouiser Weasley and all the neighbors and the people at the vet will be like “No, I LOVE them, they get it.”
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Post reblogged from Bad Romance Novels
Cupping her, he dipped his finger into her private well. “Temperature good.” He smiled.
“Tell Me Lies” - Claudia Dain
YES! NOO! ACK!!!
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Especially enjoyable were the three pages he wrote as an undergraduate on Pride and Prejudice. He freaking hated Miss Bingley, calling her “a mean-spirited, selfish little bitch who is so intent on grabbing Mr. Darcy for a husband that she is willing a) to be extremely obsequious and agreeable to Mr. Darcy and, b) to tear to shreds (subtly, if course) any woman in whom Darcy shows the slightest interest.
The Awl on David Foster Wallace
While surely generations of readers have concurred on Miss Bingley being “a selfish little bitch”, probably only DFW actually phrased it like that in a paper.
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Post reblogged from Scribner Books
Even circa 1900, Edith Wharton’s socially sensitive anti-heroine Lily Bart in The House of Mirth has strong opinions about what sort of female belongs in a flat, instead of a proper house: “Oh, governesses—or widows. But not girls!”
from New York Magazine’s cover story on The New York Apartment
*Sigh*
And don’t even get her started on those slutty bitches who live in hotels.
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Tess of the d’Urbervilles is the kind of book that makes you want to hole up in a Florida hotel with 97 advertising executives and load the contents of an Ortgies calibre 7.65 automatic straight into your temple. Your Madonna/Whore complex called and it wants its nightmare back.
So you are like “I’ll have neither of both, please” and, yes ma’am, my pure woman, we all want to pass on this one. But for the sake of the argument pretend you’re a gaunt spectral creature with tragical eyes trapped in a Thomas Hardy choose-your-own-adventure for which the options are (a) continue to thresh yourself to death on a starve acre farm or (b) temporarily escape the black flag of your ever-encroaching early grave in the arms of one of these two gentlemen:
ALEC D’URBERVILLE
Alec is a total Kennedy. Your consummate rich, 24-year-old sex offender who will leave you in a ditch somewhere and then someday seek redemption through Jesus and stalking you.
He is handsome with the curled mustache (ma ‘STOSH) and bold, rolling eye of literature’s most canonical hatefucks, and has some decent one liners, and he thinks you’re reallllllllllly pretty. Mainly though, he is a rapist.
The academy has spent the last century trying to figure out if it what he did to you in the woods that night was technically rape-rape, but I think we can safely assume that if you’d been into it you wouldn’t have named the resulting baby Sorrow.
When you run into him way later after he has ruined your life, when your husband has left and you are spiraling ever more deeply into fatigues of rejection and despair, you will find that he is now a preacher, is still obsessed with you, and intends to harass you until you agree to marry him. Which you do, kind of, but right before your real husband gets back from South America to apologize and beg you to take him back, ruining your life for the third and final time.
On the plus side, you do eventually get to murder him.
ANGEL CLARE
Normally, the choice would be clear: waiter, we will take the not-rapist and a glass of your driest white wine, case closed.
Especially if he is a fancy blond outdoorsy type who is dreamy at the idea of starting a life with you and convinces his family you’rere good enough for him and sweeps you off our feet and showers you with diamonds in a beautiful mansion on your wedding night.
Except right then he confesses he once had a tiiiiny bachelor indiscretion with (lol) a cougar in London, making you think you can finally unburden yourself of your darkest secret — your tragic sexual assualt and the death of your infant baby — and he — wait for it — sleeps on the couch and then flees to Brazil but not before taking up with a floozy from the dairy farm.
Don’t worry. After like a decade of sulking and refusing to answer your letters he will finally come back to ask your forgiveness for ABANDONING YOU ON YOUR WEDDING NIGHT IN A FIT OF HYPOCRISY AND DISAPPEARING FOR SEVERAL YEARS WITH NO CONTACT. But by then you will be married to Alec D’urberville, the original author of the shame and self-loathing that has determined your entire short, brutal life.
Maybe the kicker is that when you finally kill Alec and are executed, he starts dating your little sister.
VERDICT
They are both so horrible that …Sophie’s Choice, gagging sounds, etc… but it’s going to have to be Alec. Slowly. And with an evil glint in your eye and the soothing cool grip of the knife in your hand under the pillow. One last time before you quietly shut the door, arrange a vacation, and leave him to bleed out through the floorboards.
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The director’s Mildred is sort of an olden day Elaine Benes; she means well but she ends up sleeping with the weirdest guys. I believe Elaine even did Newman in an episode that doesn’t run in syndication anymore.This Recording on Mildred Pierce
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Is it possible that Boo Radley is actually your secret hipster boyfriend? (No creep-o? Just kidding. Hey Boo. Xoxxo.)
Listen, I know you’re all like “Moooom, stop being gross, I do NOT have a crush on Boo Radley, echchc” but actually I think you met him at that bar in Brooklyn one time and he…
Attractions/Repulsions
Had that soft voice and those grey eyes and such a calmness about him.
He was very pale. One time, his neighbor’s house burnt down, and he snuck into the crowd extra-quietly just to put a blanket around a scared little girl. Your quiet hero.
Plus…He was artsy and sensitive.
He hid those little vintage presents in trees for the kids in the neighborhood. He had that interesting hair. He made those collages out of newspaper clippings, remember?
Just stop. I know what you’re thinking.
No, it’s fine. Even if he DID stab his dad, it was a long time ago, and his dad sounds like an asshole. It’s not like he would stab you with scissors.
Anyway, he saved those kids’ lives.
Yeah, actually, a lot of your boyfriend’s activities seemed to focus on, like, lurking around kids? And presenting himself as a “protector” and offering gifts to earn their trust. Like many grown men do…
Who follow neighborhood kids around in the woods in the middle of the night. And sneak into their bedrooms after shooting a guy. And just like, stand there. Watching a little boy breathe. And then getting a little girl to walk him home?
You have to stop. It’s not that kind of thing. It wasn’t like that.
No, no, I’m sure it’s not like that.
But, you always kind of had a thing for creeps. No, it’s ok. Just own it.
Score: 3.3 -
Is it possible that we have found the anti-Darcy? Someone who weepily drippily loves you because he hates HIMSELF? Someone who is all sensitivity and attraction, but powerless to save either of you from the forces that strip you both of your humanity so fully that, all apologies to our girl Edith, you morph from characters into heavy-handed symbols of society’s repression and regret?
And that, for some reason, he is being played by Daniel Day-Lewis? Which is not as epic a miscast as, say, Gillian Anderson in the role LILY BART but COME ON it is 1993 and no part has ever been so obviously right out of the Dermot Mulroney Gen X emo playbook.
Listen, Newland Archer is not your boyfriend. (It is possible he’s your husband. Bless your heart.)
Attractions/Repulsions
The depth of his passion for you correlates 1:1 with the depth of his hatred for himself.
And unlike our friend Fitzwilliam, he will not save you, and he will not save himself.
Instead, he will marry a boring debutante out of a sense of duty.
And love her with gentle resignation and despair until she finally dies of infectious pneumonia three decades later.
Whoops, now you’re old.
And he’s nostalgic for what could have been while on a trip literally across continents to your neighborhood but instead of visiting you, his purported soul mate, like “Hey my wife’s dead want to take a shot at happiness” —
He will just send his rando son up to your apartment to say hi while he mopes on a park bench outside, thinking:
It’s more real to me here than if I went up.
Gross.
Plus, I think we are all grownups who can read between the lines here, mmmmk:
“Then stay with me a little longer,’ Madame Olenska said in a low tone, just touching his knee with her plumed fan. It was the lightest touch, but it thrilled him like a caress.”
Score: -11.0
