Years ago, I swiped a bunch of discarded novels from the garbage at the store where I worked, and read them. One of them turned out to be a romance novel, which was not immediately apparent from the missing cover, but a couple of years ago the opportunity arose to purchase the complete book for less than a dime, so I did out of morbid curiousity to see what the whole story was like (the first two chapters came off with the cover of the first copy). The entire book was excerable and stupid and I posted a blow-by-blow description of its inanity over on the books MB. It was called "Remeber When" by Judith McNaught, and was published in 1996. I don't have my copy anymore because my house burned down, which might have been collateral damage from the literary gods attempting to eradicate every copy from existance.

Anyway, this week, the library in my hometown was having their annual used book sale. I have avoided most of these in the past, due to pretty much having way too many books already, but now they only fill up a shelf and a half in my new book case, so I felt justified (I scored hardbound copies of Barbara Tuchman's "Guns of August" and all 6 volumes of Churchill's history of WW2, as well as the first two books in Shelby Foote's Civil War history, so it was a general success), and while making my circuit of the paperback section, I found books by Judith McNaught. I couldn't resist, so I bought one called "Double Standards."

"Remember When" was about a business woman who pulls her company out of a nose dive caused by double standards being applied to her personal life, so maybe "Double Standards" would be less offensive to my feminist sensibilities. No, I don't actually have what almost anyone else would consider feminist sensibilities. That's how low "Remember When" had to stoop to offend - the title seems to refer to the heroine getting blackout drunk and not remembering that her childhood crush raped her while she was intoxicated, and that's even not the stupidest thing in the book!. Maybe "Double Standards" was better in that regard. I don't know. I could not finish the first couple of chapters. "Double Standards" was 12 years older than "Remember When", and astonishing as it seems, Judith McNaught got BETTER AT WRITING over those 12 years! "Remember When" is the result of 12 years of development and maturation in the career of a professional writer!

"Remember When" does exposition by having characters repeatedly explaining basic business principles to successful and internationally renowned businessmen and -women, and fills in audiences on backstory, by having them describe in bewildering detail, the family histories of people who shared those same experiences! Set in the mid-90s, it features a young woman forced to take over her father's business after her dies in order to provide for her step-mother, step-sister and step-grandparents, all of whom joined her family less than a decade before, and a nationally-reviled businessman who is scorned by the local elites for the aggressive tactics he used to build a billion-dollar company up from nothing, but whose uncle is going to sabotage his ownership of the company, because the nephew has no wife and thus no prospects of heirs to the family fortune that did not exist before he created it. So when the heroine needs to save her public image and preserve the livelihoods of four competent adults all over the age of thirty, the solution is to fake marry the businessman whom everyone hates, because that will make her popular again, and his uncle can die nursing the delusion that kids will be forthcoming. And he takes advantage of her when she gets hammered on his private jet, because the most realistic event in the novel is the alcoholic contribution to her decision. And this book is the improvement!

The older novel is pretty much the same plot as that movie from a few years ago "Paranoia" in which a Hemsworth brother is sent as a corporate spy for Gary Oldman to infiltrate Harrison Ford's company. That's what "Double Standards" is about. Except the corporate spy, Lauren, is going to fall in love with the guy she is spying on. But where the Hemsworth was a greedy douchebag, who learned a lesson before getting out and getting the girl anyway, Lauren can't be blamed. Years before the novel started, a rich lady discovered their families were distant cousins, and contacted them. Now that she's grown up and her mother is dead, and her father is laid off from his professor job, she has to get a job to support him, but she only has a music degree, so she has to go to her rich family members to ask for a job. When the rich guy (husband or son of the amateur geneologist, I forget) tells her the only thing she is qualified for is secretary, she is reluctant, because she doesn't want to be a secretary. I guess she wanted a BETTER corporate job, at age 23 with no real experience and a music degree, so her rich kinsman, in the midst of explaining the kind of access secretaries actually have, suddenly realizes that this would be a perfect way to get some counter-intelligence on his ruggedly handsome corporate rival, and has her apply for a secretarial job with the enemy company. Lauren doesn't want to do this kind of dishonest crap, and she bungles the application process (instead of saying "no" or telling someone what she was asked to do, like an ACTUAL honest person would) so they won't hire her. But she trips or something on her way out the door and is "rescued" by the head of the company whom the back of the book describes as follows: "The ruggedly handsome president of Global Industries handled his business the way he handled his women -- with charm, daring and ruthless self-control." So he's obviously going to hire her, and there's going to be intrigue and romance and crap, but I quit at that point. The descriptions and expository conversation made "Remember When" look restrained, plausible and realistic.

And it is a WOMAN who writes this crap. It was a woman who wrote "50 Shades of Gray", which, from the movie promotional material, is just as insulting as Judith McNaught. And she's apparently not even notorious or anything as a particularly bad writer, so she is probably representative of that whole genre. How?! Why?! This was in 1984, so it's not like there was internet or a lot of TV to dumb people down that much. Back then, they were still creating original movies and probably hadn't even invented the concept of "part 4", so how stupid could the general public have really been? Stupid enough to buy enough copies of "Double Standard" that Judith stayed in business long enough to write "Remember When", and according to Wikipedia, four more books after that one.

Other interesting things in the Wikipedia entry for Judith McNaught:

• She received the book cover for the first book she sold, the day after her husband was killed in an accident. Judith, that was a hint.

• She was unaware of the rules of romance novels, and wrote novels that "tended to be 'intensely sensual and witty.' " That in no way describes "Remember When" and I am sooo glad I pulled the ripcord on "Double Standards" before I got to the sensual parts.

• Her pre-writing career featured stints as "assistant director for a film crew, an assistant controller of a major trucking company, president of a temporary employment agency, and president of an executive search firm." This dingbat was in charge of finding people for executive positions! "Well, we found you this candidate who has a propensity for violence, and buys roofies by the truckload, but he's VERY intense and ruggedly handsome, so we offered him a huge signing bonus!"

• She "was one of the first romance authors to receive a multi-million dollar contract and have her novels published in hardcover" and made the NY Times Best Seller list. Her first time was in 1988, and "all of her subsequent books have also placed on the NYT Bestseller List." "Remember When" was 1996, so it was a NY Times Bestseller. This cannot be true. It just can't.

• "In the early 1990s, Coors Brewing asked her to write a book that would appeal to women and could be used by the company to promote its women's literacy program. Appalled at the discovery that one in five women was functionally illiterate, McNaught offered to rewrite her almost-completed manuscript,Perfectto insert the literacy theme. The change took her an additional six weeks to incorporate."

Fuck. I have to read this now. How the hell did Judith McNaught approach the issue of illiteracy. How would she know what that entails? Does she realize that after a decade of publishing, she might have been one of the reasons people were preventing their daughters from reading? It's like Amy Schumer tackling the problem of millions of Americans lacking class and dignity. She got results too:
"McNaught asked her publishers to include a response card in the book packaging. Because of its inclusion, thousands of women who had read the book volunteered to become tutors and help people learn to read." Can you imagine being tutored in reading by someone who has a reaction other than "appalled" to a Judith McNaught book? Even if I had been so inspired to want to teach people how to read, if I had found one of those cards in a Judith McNaught book, my first instinct would be to tear it into shreds, because immediately after reading it, you don't want anyone to read again ever.

Maybe this sounds excessive, but this woman has taken $2.01 of my hard-earned money, and something like four hours out of my life with her pair of stupid novels! Our world is a bad place. I somehow resent that more than Brandon Sanderson swindling me out of thirty times as much with the promise of WoT novels.