If you’d like a cultural head trip, go over to the Wet Noodle Posse today. Our guest is Elisa Rolle, an Italian blogger at the forefront of trying to expand the availability of romance novels in Italy. She’s a charming, fascinating woman, and you’d never think that Italy, of all places, would be so down on romance fiction. Considering the books they can get are bowdlerized so they have a non-existent or tepid erotic level, that says to me that it’s a gender issue rather than a sexual one: Women read romances, therefore romances are trash. One bookseller asks her why she wants to read books that make her cry, and you can tell she’s gobsmacked by the question. Clearly he has no idea what the books are about.