The term literally means a man of old age, and it is used in that sense in Qur’anic Arabic. Later it came to be a title meaning leader, elder, or noble, especially in the Arabian Peninsula, where shaikh became a traditional title of a Bedouin tribal leader in recent centuries. In the Persian Gulf States the title is used for men of stature, whether they are managers in high posts, wealthy business owners, or local rulers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheikh

I hope that helps some. To be honest, I thought it was interesting to see what the term started out as and later became.

Yeah, when I’m having sex I always think of my father and his father etc etc. Because anal sex is digging in the past and like wearing kilts or looking up your family crest and that stuff.

I'm a little miffed that the fact that she apparently spent-I'm assuming-four years in post-secondary education to get a degree that she's NOT using. Essentially, what I'm saying is that a business degree is not required if you're going to be happy with a secretarial position.

I guess some of us do not have to pay off the severe loan entailed in a 4 year degree. Oh and I do not let my husband spend a red cent paying off my ed loan. I’m a liberated fag like that.

I love these comments by the way.

I think, though, that I read the same way in all genres but if I’m doing literary criticism I read differently, and my emotional response is less important, than if I’m caught up in the story. When I’m reading solely for pleasure, however, if I don’t find something of interest in the characters or plot (or if the characters irritate me or otherwise provoke a negative reaction), I’m not likely to be interested in reading further. I don’t think it’s gender specific: I might read on if I liked a hero, a heroine, a non-human creature, or if I wanted to know more about a quest/adventure. The thing with romance is that unless there’s a suspense subplot, the quest/adventure is pretty much about the characters’ evolving relationship, so if you don’t care about them/don’t want to spend time with them, there’s not so much of interest (at least, not to me, although, as I said, if I went into analytical mode I might get enjoyment out of analysing the novel).

I would hate hated Sugar Beth in high school, but I LOVED her as heroine of ASS. And that book — all of SEP, in fact — lends itself so well to selective passage re-reading, IMO. SEP’s books simultaneously charm me and annoy the ever-living crap out of me, but I could read those passages that charm me a thousand times, I suspect, without ever dimming my enjoyment. And then I get to skip all the frantically annoying stuff, too. Like Winnie’s whining.

I definitely think that ideology shapes our response to EVERYTHING we read, but perhaps there are 1) different modes of reading and 2) different expectations for different genres. In Romance, for example, there seems to be this tension between readers who claim they need to personally relate to the heroine and readers who claim they don’t need that connection. In a way, I think Romance invites the reader to connect personally to the heroine in a different way than, say, SF, F, lit fic, or mystery. And I do think readers read differently, with some finding their suspension of disbelief in the relatability of the characters. I haven’t worked all this out mentally, and right now I’m in the midst of a nasty bronchial virus, so there’s very little synaptic activity going on at all, but I’ve noticed this issue in Romance for a long time, that is, the question of whether a reader needs to relate personally to the heroine to like the book. And like I said, I think that the nature of the genre sort of encourages or invites that sense of identification to greater or lesser degree, because so much of the pleasure in the genre revolves around what each of us finds romantic (i.e. to what degree a book seduces the reader).

I don't expect the heroine in any novel to reflect me or how I would behave. They don't have to have my goals, morals or standards.

Neither do I. SEP’s Ain’t She Sweet is one of my favourite novels. I reread passages from this book every couple of months, but very carefully because I don’t want to crease the spine. (Heck, sometimes I want to snap on some latex gloves so I don’t smudge the cover with fingerprints.) But I so cannot relate to the heroine.

The characters need to reflect who the author has set them up and make it believable.

Yeah, I guess that’s the problem I had with this one. I didn’t feel the heroine is believable enough.

Of course, I seem to suspend disbelief very well for the prolific Robyn Donald and the not-prolific-enough Susan Napier.

I don’t expect the heroine in any novel to reflect me or how I would behave. They don’t have to have my goals, morals or standards. The characters need to reflect who the author has set them up and make it believable.

guess Susan Mallery wasn’t able to do that for you…. for me Kiley was honest, refreshing and very typical middle class… and I thought it was great that even though she wanted to be a wife and a mother she had a back up plan and wasn’t sitting back singing someday my prince will come – even if he did *g*.

Jessica

show me a woman who has never been unsure, nervous or trying on a ton of outfits trying to figure out what to wear the first time out with a man – or any situation they wanted to impress a person or people.

I wasn’t going to respond to this comment, but it kept niggling at me.

As someone who was tormented as a child because her parents were immigrants and couldn’t afford new clothes so she had to make do with ill-fitting hand-me-downs, I’ve learned very early not to care about physical appearance and clothes. To this day, I don’t worry about my appearance. While some of the people I work with dress to the nines every day, I go in casual unless I’m meeting with senior execs. Then, I pick out any old suit and put it on. I don’t have nervous fits and try on every suit hanging in my closet.

My mother always asks me how I got hired when I always dress like I’m struggling for money. I tell her I was hired for my brain and not my wardrobe, which does have some very nice and expensive pieces, but I hate shelling out money for dry cleaning.

As for impressing a man, the BF knew what he was getting with me from the start and he likes knowing he never has to wait while I try on outfit after outfit. Our first date was jeans and T-shirt–and that set the tone. When I do break out the evening gown and high heels, he appreciates it so much more because it’s uncommon. Even then, I don’t spend time waffling about what to wear (but that’s because the selection’s limited).

I think they’re important in other genres too. For example a lot of spy/adventure films are very heavily influenced by ideology. If you’re really wanting the “bad guys” to win, or if you’re sitting there thinking “a plague on both your houses”, then you aren’t likely to enjoy the film.

What allowed Fielding's books (and the adapted films) to cross over but not others?

As I’ve not read more than a couple of paragraphs of one of Fielding’s books, I can’t say. I couldn’t relate to that either, for different reasons. I wonder if the crossing over has got to do with something else that Crusie mentions in that essay:

stories that do not spell out every single motive for every action, describe every setting in detail, and provide every moment of back story, leave room for the reader to co-write the story filling in the blanks with her own assumptions based on her own experiences.

So, for example, Austen leaves out a lot of details which, judging by the fan fic I’ve seen, different people fill in in extremely diverse ways. And it can be apparently very small, insignificant things which fill too much of that blank space and annoy/alienate the reader:

I made the mistake of giving my hero in my first novel a mustache; a lot of readers have told me since that in their version of Manhunting, Jake does not have a mustache. I didn't leave enough white space for them

There was little in Kiley that matched up to my own life circumstances, but I at least felt that Mallery made her consistent and comprehensible to me, so it worked for me. I don’t know if your opinion would have changed if you had finished the book, Laura, but regardless, I think it just goes back to all those elements of reading that factor in to one’s response: cultural background, personal experience, religion, etc. I wonder if the cultural tags are particularly relevant in genres like Romance or chick lit, where the reader is invited into a pretty intimate relationship with the characters. I don’t know, though, since I haven’t given it a lot of thought. I am reminded, though, of the ruckus in Britain when Renee Zellweger was cast as Bridget Jones instead of an English actress. And yet both sides of the pond seemed convinced after the film came out. What allowed Fielding’s books (and the adapted films) to cross over but not others?

Possibly, but it wasn’t as though the clothes were a deal-breaker for me: like I said, it was a combination of factors which made me feel that I couldn’t relate to Kiley. None of her ways of reacting to anything that happened (albeit in the few chapters I read) were ones I could relate to. For example, I can relate to someone wanting to do something to get back at a fiancé who did what Kiley’s had done, but it would never cross my mind to do it the way she did. I can relate to someone feeling nervous, but it would never manifest itself in me in worrying about my clothes or vomiting. I can relate to someone studying for a degree which is perhaps not directly relevant to the job they end up with, but I know I’ll never be a super-mum.

The way I see it, the dynamic of this sort of sheik story is that the heroine is supposed to represent “normality” and be contrasted with the sheik who’s exotic. But for me Kiley was more exotic than the sheik, which is, I think, why emotionally the whole thing wasn’t working, because there were then two characters I couldn’t relate to. It reminds me of something that Jenny Crusie wrote about community:

the reader will bond to the community in the book if the community appears to share her values, which means the characters would recognize her as one of their own if she came into the story and would invite her to sit down and stay. This one is pretty much out of your hands: the reader chooses the kind of book he or she likes to read, the type of book that has the kind of community that shares her values

I can’t imagine those characters inviting me to sit down and stay, and if they did, I wouldn’t want to, because I don’t share their sense of humour or know how to relate to them. So, because I didn’t have to, I didn’t finish the book.

I feel I should add that because my reaction is based on cultural/emotional factors it doesn’t in any way imply a judgement about the quality of the writing.

Though I haven’t been a huge category fan in the past, I really enjoyed this. It made me laugh, and shiver deliciously in all the right places. I think very highly of Susan Mallery’s storytelling ability — and the way she turned the trope into something new and fun. It was like an updated HQN fairytale.