Apparently from today until Monday, bloggers are ceasing reviews and discussing our love of reading and the romance community.
We're joining with them because honestly, it's easy to forget why we're all in this and why we care.
And I'll begin with my little story:
I've always been a voracious reader but it was mostly literary fiction. Loved that shizz. Still do. Give me a beautifully written book and I puddle on the floor in a gooey mess.
But I also loved to buy Harlequins from Goodwill... a bag of them for about $5 and I could finish them off quickly and sometimes sigh. Sometimes get really annoyed because the heroines always seemed so damned weak. I hate really young heroines. Hate really innocent heroines. And a lot of the books I was reading had young, innocent heroines. So I had a great love/hate thing going on with the books.
And then somewhere I read a review for Absolutely Positively by Jayne Ann Krentz. I don't remember but since she was a Seattle author and I lived in Seattle, it was probably a local review. And I bought the book.
Ms. Krentz doesn't write innocent schoolgirls who need saving. Her heroes were alphas but her heroines were too. They worked together and saved each other. And I fell in love.
I read everything she wrote and hunted down her entire backlist (except the historicals because I just wasn't interesting in that genre). It might have ended there too except I was in a bookstore looking for anything else Krentz and somehow saw Welcome to Temptation by Jennifer Crusie. I picked it up and read the blurb. Decided to try it.
My life changed forever.
Oh, I didn't realize. I'll talk about my stuff tomorrow. :-)
ReplyDeleteGlad you nagged me about Crusie. Welcome to Temptation is my favorite of hers, but it was enough to get me hooked.
I am in the tiny minority of romance bloggers who doesn't care for Jennifer Cruise.
ReplyDeleteI have always, always read--my mother was a librarian since before I was born, and my house was basically a library with bookcases in every room, hallway and closet. (Only book-free places were kitchen and bathrooms--humidity is not good for bound books, which we learned early and well.)
I always loved the romance in the other books I read--Agatha Christie has some subtle romances in several of her books and those were always my favorite as re-read her obsessively.
The I found a cover of The Sheik--almost thirty years and four countries later, I still own that copy--and I have never stopped reading romance since. My tastes, thankfully, have evolved a lot, and while I still enjoy some very old romances, I also prefer my heroines not to be innocent, virginal doormats, and my heroes to not be irredeemable assholes.
Romance has always been there to give hope when my life has been in the total crapper--externally and internally.
The romance community, which I found little by little starting with Suzanne Brockmann's defunct message board in 1999, has changed my life--and continues to help me grow.