I'm a huge fan of books. Actual books, the physical kind that require me to turn a page with more than a push of a button or swipe of my finger. And I have a rule in life that I read every night before going to bed. These two things have compounded to a book collection that's grown so large it has slowly leaked out of my room and into various other parts of the house.
My equally book-addicted friends often ask me what I'm reading or what I could recommend so I thought why not take a shot in a much more public forum.
My history with romance novels is an interesting one.
My love of books began early. A complete tomboy I remember mocking the mere thought of standing in the romance section at a book store. Don't get me wrong, I didn't find boys icky or the thought of romance to be gross. In fact from very early on I developed my first crush and never let go of it. But I was also "one of the guys" and the two pieces couldn't seem to co-exist well so I hid the part that would have made me lose the few friends I had. I hid the girly-romance.
Books based in the Star Wars or Star Trek universes interested me more than books about princes and princesses. But my first brush with a "romance" story was when I found a trio of books written in the first person in the young adult section of a local bookstore. I remember finding them too interesting not to purchase and sliding them under a handful of Star Wars novels and some comics before taking them up to the counter. I breezed through them within a few hours but re-read them over and over, loving the sheer romance of it all.
Then in 1998 I developed a new obsession. Long before Hollywood took notice and they exploded everywhere I found vampires. I headed back to the "classics" and read Dracula and other sci-fi books with a more horror-theme to them until around 2002 when I came across the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series in the sci-fi section. I was blown away.
A strong heroine who I could identify with (written in first person no less) with vampires and zombies and werewolves...I was in love. For anyone who's ever read the Anita Blake series (or really anything by the author Laurell K. Hamilton) you'll know that the deeper you get into the series the more sexual and then down right explicit the series becomes. Unlike many fans, the gradual shift didn't bother me too much. I could understand why the series went in that direction and heck I still loved it. More than that, I could still shop in the sci-fi section without feeling I was venturing into the romance section.
I sought out any other books like the Anita Blake series that I could find from the sci-fi section before I finally "broke down" and ventured into the romance section for the first time to browse the (then) budding paranormal romance section.
Ten years after picking up the first Anita novel my house is now home to several hundred novels, most of which were bought off of shelves in the romance sections of bookstores. Many of them are of the paranormal sub-genre though in the last few months I've been building up a suspense / military section as well.
How well have I come to terms standing in the "embarrassing" romance section of a bookstore? It doesn't bother me a bit. Though in the spirit of full disclosure I will say that my romance collection is mostly private. I'm pretty sure people at work would be shocked to learn of the obsession I have with the genre but part of that is the nature of the work that I do.
Work actually factors into my obsession as well. I work in a very high stress job where on a daily basis I'm reminded about the dark side of humanity and the horrible things that occur in the world. I work insane hours which leaves me with a rather hollow social life and no dating life to speak of. So I find my romance where I can get it, in the ink-filled pages of my books (and the occasional fantasy about Jeremy Renner while stuck in traffic).
I hope you will join me in my travels through books here and chime in every step of the way!
♥
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