Heh. Just read it - I have the same problem. I read damned near zero new published fiction anymore, not for pleasure. Only real exception is Michael Chabon. I'm curling up with "Werewolves in Their Youth" sometime soon; I have a signed copy.

I can't not read. But when I was editing so many romances a month (sometimes seven or eight, no shit) I definitely couldn't read romance for pleasure. And I wouldn't have read much else without the train commute, because I was just too tired. But now the only thing I don't read is the genre I'm writing, while I'm writing. I have to read.

Amy, I read nonfiction, or in fiction I revisit old friends, like Simenon or Stout or Hammett.

You like hardboiled and like Simon...you should read Pelecanos, too. And I think he's a liberal that likes Greek carrots. Sorry... Hard Revolution just rocked my socks. Swoon. One day, I need to thank him, too, if I get a chance because after the election I was tempted to throw out Model Citizen as a project because it struck me as insufficiently socially conscious. The political thread in those mysteries kept me from doing that.

I go through phases in what I read. Last year I was so busy racing through the Aubrey-Maturin series I hardly touched a romance, or really any other fiction. This year I've been reading mostly what I write. Historical romance. And it's been good, because I've been discovering there are more good authors out there than I thought. The one thing I'm not letting myself do is go anywhere near the Sharpe series (book or film) or Georgette Heyer's The Spanish Bride. I figure that since I couldn't resist writing about the Rifles, I need to stay away from the well-known fictional versions just to be sure I'm making them my own rather than commiting fanfic or plagiarism.

(I do make an exception for still images from the Sharpe series. Research purposes, you know. To remind myself what the uniforms look like on real people. Yeah, that's what I'm doing. Research. All research.)

Susan, I have a deep fondness for Heyer, which I know you don't share - but I love her acknowledgements at the front of her amazing novel about Waterloo, An Infamous Army. It's basically an acknowledgement of stealing from Thackeray. Not sure if she meant it to be funny, but I found myself nodding and laughing.

I need to read An Infamous Army one of these days, but AFAIK it hasn't yet been reprinted in the Heyer reprint bonanza of the last few years.

And it's not that I don't like Heyer, it's just that I don't think she's the be-all and end-all of everything Regency--her work reflected her own times as much as the ones she was writing about, IMO. If I'm going to worship at an author's altar, I'll stick with Austen, whom I adore beyond all reason.

her work reflected her own times as much as the ones she was writing about, IMO

Doesn't this usually happen? You're a product of your times, plus she may have been making compromises to make her work accessible to and interesting for her contemporary readers.

I love Austen, but from a distance; it's a similar reaction to the one I have for Emily Dickenson. But Persuasion kills me. I just adore it.

I don't know that Heyer is the be-all and end-all, but she's certainly the gold standard, and I think she earned it. Unbelievably meticulous researcher; I would kill for her library. Something like 40,000 books and original manuscripts from the period.

One nice thing about An Infamous Army is that it unites two families from two of her other books, the Alastairs and the Worths. And the blow by blow of Waterloo, leading up to it and the days following, had me in the kind of suspended state of "ogodogod" that Thackeray never managed to pull up in me.

Doesn't this usually happen? You're a product of your times, plus she may have been making compromises to make her work accessible to and interesting for her contemporary readers.

Yep. That's my take.