What is a genre or author you wish you read more of? Why haven't you read more of this genre or author?
This is a somewhat timely question.
The truth is that I do my best to read a bit of everything. Most of what I read is science fiction or fantasy, because those are my favorite genres. And once you get embedded in something, it's easy to keep finding more good things to read in that genre. But I make an effort to read widely. I pick up memoirs and young adult contemporaries. I read pop science and family sagas and thrillers. I'm not as familiar with any of these genres as I am with SFF, but when something grabs my interest, I happily throw it on my stack of books to read.
The genre I've been circling for a while is romance. I never read any of it growing up. And even as I matured as a reader and understood that it's not just trashy chick-lit (and as I embraced my own love for romantic comedies and soap operas, and specifically Jane the Virgin), I never quite found time to try it out.
The thing is, it's overwhelming to leap into a new genre. Where do you start? How do you determine whether a book will be a good fit for you? How do you handle the enormous backlog of books?
I started with Book Riot, where I get most of my book recommendations. And that led me to a handful of individual bloggers who reviewed books against various criteria. I started seeing a few names pop up frequently: Sarah MacLean, Courtney Milan, Tessa Dare, Alisha Rai. And then the next time I was in a book store, I picked up the first book I found by one of them.
I loved it. I bought another one, and I loved that one, too. I'm not sure I'm quite ready to tackle the romance section at the used book store, but I think I'm getting there. And in the meantime, the mass market paperbacks are so affordable that I've made it my mission to buy one every time I go into a bookstore for something else. It will help fold this genre into my existing to read list gradually.
The next one on my list is actually a bit of a departure: it's a choose your own adventure romance with ten possible happy endings with ten possible partners. I'm looking forward to it for the novelty of an adult choose-your-own adventure. But I'm also looking forward to what I expect will be a bit of an overview of different tropes. I want to see what I'll be drawn to and what will turn me off. I expect it will help me hone in on what I like when I'm picking future books.
There is one other rule that I'm applying to my forays into romance which is that I'm sticking to contemporaries. Normally I loved digging into the classics and seeing how the genre has changed and where various tropes got their start. And maybe I will eventually work up to a place where I want to do that exploration. But the culture has changed dramatically in the past decade. The way we talk about consent and gender roles and rape culture has changed. The fact that we talk about some of these things at all has changed. That's going to be reflected in (most of) the literature, and it's also going to color my enjoyment of the books. So until I'm a bit more submerged, I'm sticking to the books that are less likely to offend my modern sensibilities. It's not like there's any shortage of them.
And maybe in a few more years I'll be willing to give Danielle Steele a try. If only for context.
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