Romancing the Soul

I've been reading Romance since I was about ten. I can remember hiding away in my bedroom pouring over a paperback belonging to an aunt while everyone else was out in the world being busy. I sometimes wondered if there was something wrong with me. Certainly no one else in my family had their head in a book every spare moment. To my mother it was a sign of laziness. 

As I got older I started to realize that I wasn't the only lazy person burying their head in books and that, as far as the educated world was concerned, reading was anything but laziness. 

My love of reading led me to become a High School English Teacher, a soul destroying activity. No matter how hard I worked, getting the bulk of my students interested in the books on the syllabus was almost impossible. And I didn't blame them. Shakespeare is written in a foreign language and no matter how brilliant his words, if kids can't understand them what's the point? The same could be said for the novels we force-fed them back then. Books written fifty or more years before their time, which seemed to have no bearing on their modern lives. 

And my guilty secret all those years I was ateacher? I didn't read the Classics or even good literature in my spare time. I read Stephen King or Ursula Le Guin. And I still regard good literature like a bland salad I eat because its good for me. My chocolate fix comes from J  K Rowlings' Harry Potter series or J R Ward's Black Dagger Brotherhood. 

But my skills at analysis helps me to determine why I enjoy what I enjoy. What works and what doesn't. So on this blog I plan to write about the books I love and why I love them, and even if you, the reader, might never have considered reading these books, you might be more open to them in the future.