EVERY WEEK, WE bring you a round-up of the best longreads of the past seven days in Sitdown Sunday.
And now, every weeknight, we bring you an evening longread to enjoy which will help you to escape the news cycle.
We’ll be keeping an eye on new longreads and digging back into the archives for some classics.
Sarah Hughes writes about so-called ‘bonkbusters’, and what they taught her about friendship and feminism.
(The Guardian, approx 12 mins reading time)
“It’s easy to mock so-called “trashy” novels. People do it all the time. They’re dismissed as bonkbusters and shagathons. Laughed at for their over-the-top prose. Characterised as being about nothing more than sex and shopping. To their many detractors they are sugary book bonbons, the gilded covers with their (often one word) titles raised up on the front – Lace, Rivals, Scandal, Lucky – further signs that these books lack purpose. They are “women’s fiction”, frivolous works, not the sort of thing a serious reader should bother with. Those critics are wrong. There is much to learn within the pages of the so-called bonkbuster – and, no, not all of it is about sex. These are books filled with wit and hard-won wisdom.”
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