No Lucky Quitter

I nearly returned Jackie Collins' Lucky after the first night of reading it. I couldn't stand the style or the characters and didn't give much of a hoot as to what happened to the gorgeous divorced-from-the-husbands-they-married-at-16, coke-snorting rich girls and their married lovers. But I don't like to quit books (perhaps why I don't start that many books I'm not going to like) and felt it would be somehow unlucky to quit the book Lucky during my year on luck. So I continued reading and Collins' words sucked me into the soap opera world of the early 1980s and suddenly I stayed up late last night to finish it.

I had never previously read Jackie Collins, or any of the writers I've assumed are similar: Danielle Steele, Sidney Sheldon, V.C. Andrews, Joan Collins, Barbara Taylor Bradford, and I really thought I could handle a Hollywood-laced beach read. After all, I read and enjoy bodice rippers and have encountered plenty of escapist plot-driven pulp, from chic lit to action mysteries and don't consider myself surprised by convenient sudden deaths, implausible sudden stardom or oral sex. Still, I had never read anything quite like Lucky, and didn't know quite how to take it until the Mister commented it was just a soap opera with extra sex and violence: way to many characters, tons of beauty, incredible fast plot twists, and short chapters further divided so that only one-half to three pages is ever spent on a scene.

Not recommended unless you're into that kind of thing, and even then this is probably way outdated.

Classes start tomorrow, but I'm hoping to take some time to write about the books I did enjoy this summer as well as post some photos of our great trip to the Canadian Maritimes. In the meantime, I'm sharing the 27 cents of luck we found Friday, the fantastic fortune I recently received, "You will be surrounded by true friends" (thanks to all of you for making it come true), and a question: does looking like Jackie Collins does at 70 involve deals with the devil or just a fleet of human specialists?