23.07.03 | 11:15 p.m. | Book Du Jour

i take the marc train into dc every day to go to work. looking at the people commuting, it's easy to separate the regulars, the tourists, and the business trippers. and the summer interns. it seems that the only people who ride the train in on a regular basis and are under thirty scream, "i am a summer intern. i am young and get paid next to nothing, if at all!! take pity and give me a real job!!!"

the girl i sit next to is one of these. she works for the national institute of health and has a very sensible bio/pre-med air about her. she also reads romance novels by the cartfull. seriously. bodice rippers, with sappy flowing faux-script titles that are all some play on words like "the prince's bride" rather than the princess bride and "married . . . with castle", &c. Simpering maidens and debonair-looking pirate-prince-highwaymen swoon melodramatically across the fuscia and gold-embossed paperback covers at me. and it never fails - she has a new one nearly every single morning. some don't even have the border's price tag peeled off yet. she could keep the romance publishing industry afloat all by herself, i suspect.

for my part, i have never actually met anyone who reads romance novels. it's obscurely like heroin addicts and people who buy the spice girls' cds. some one has clearly bought a whole lot of these, but no one admits to it publicly. it has been an education in the design and execution of romance books.

really.

i think this every morning when i sit across from her, before i open up my fantasy novel and delve into a nice magical non-reality.

. . .

i never said anything was wrong with liking romance novels.