'Touched'
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
I think Kate Bolin has a whole website dedicated to those.
Found it: [link]
I've still never read a Harlequin Presents, though I picked up one from the "return when finished" paperback rack at my local library because it was by an author from my RWA chapter.
Except for my mother forcing me to read Gone with the Wind when I was 11 or 12, I hadn't ever read a romance novel until I was almost 30. My friend Kij brought over a stack of Heyer romances for me when I had the flu.
I read all those too, David. I would buy Robert E. Howard's Conan books from the hardware store in the next town, where they would sell paperbacks with the covers torn off on a shelf by the door. It was at least ten years later that I learned this meant they were stolen.
Ha! "We're getting low on books, we'd better go dumpster diving behind the B. Dalton tonight."
I found the only used bookstore in South Florida where I could get paperbacks for half the cover price. Which meant if you were lucky enough to find an early sixties edition, meant it only cost you 30 cents for a book. I read Frank Yerby for my porn allotment, until I swiped Xavier Goes Wild from a department store.
I was the anti-StregaHeh. It's probably a good way to be. I just read Lieber last year. I think it's for the best I didn't read those when I was in jr. high.
I read McCaffrey and I-don't-even-remember-what-all, too. It was just that, if I needed something to read, I'd raid the basement, which was full of 50s & 60s SF. And, like, Lives of a Cell, but I never got that desperate. Oh! And a lot of Fleming's Bond books. Which were probably dirtier than Leiber, now that I think about it.
I'm trying to remember what I read in junior high, other than the romances. Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes, Taylor Caldwell, some Michener (the school's Book Club had Chesapeake on the list), and lots of non-fiction--I would get into research jags that would last a month or two prompted by either a news story or something on TV. That's how I first read in-depth about the Holocaust, human origins, and the Revolutionary War, among other topics.
So far, I can nod in agreement with everything but the romances. There wasn't a lot else to do in Roswell, so I read and read and read. Lots of SF and dragon books. Classics, even. And Tom Robbins, obsessively.
I just couldn't read romances, though. I tried. I read the Flowers in the Attic series, some Mary Stewart, one that was a gift called The Lives of Rachel, and then when I was sick at camp, I read the books the nurse brought me. Romance novels, and the most boring thing ever, I thought. I opted to not read and just think.
Now, they weren't historical (except for being about 10 years out of date), but even the historical ones I wandered into, thinking they were fantasy, bored me.
I read the Flowers in the Attic series
Wait, are those considered romances? I thought they were ... something else. Modern wanna-be-gothic novels that were heavy on the smut, maybe?
They definitely had gothic overtones, which was probably why I could read them. Is there a genre for post-gothic? Neo-gothic? They've got the insular family, the house/family link, the secrets, and the decay and decadence, but the morality is skewed.
I don't know that I'd shelve them with The Monk or The Castle of Otranto, but I can see the connections.
I thought they were shelved with Horror, back when I was reading them.
They're not in Romance by any stretch, however.
Dad had all the Analog, Science Fiction and Science Fact magazines going back to the 50s. So I read a whole lot of SF. I got a bunch of fantasy from the library--the Dark is Rising series, some Xanth books (I went and bought the former a few years ago). I also picked up the occasional early Anne Rice. I don't remember reading YA romance--I just jumped head long into my folks Harlequin collection when I was 12. And then jumped right out again at around 18 when I realized that a heroine had been raped by a man, and yet it was ok because they were in love and engaged to marry by the end of the book. Ugh. It's taken 20 years and a careful reintroduction to Regency romances and Jennifer Cruisie to get me back into the romance genre.