The Reluctant Romance Reader

I'm picky about romance novels--but also predictable. As I've binge-read romance novels, I've noticed certain patterns in my reading. I don't have any strict rules about what I read,**  per se . But I have noticed that I am more likely to be drawn to, engaged by, and finish romance novels, not to mention emerge satisfied, if they meet certain criteria. Some of these criteria are not easy to pin down. For example, they have to be "smart." Now, what do I mean by "smart"? I haven't a clue. Not self-consciously smart. Not necessarily anything that pushes boundaries. And not really something that makes a point of challenging the norms of the times in which they were written--or at least, not in a way that is implausible. But written in a way that respects my intelligence as a reader, and written by an author who is deliberate about the craft of writing and researching (without making it sound like a research paper with smooching, because research can ...

Romance novels aren't for everyone. They were certainly for my 10th grade English teacher. She was lending paperbacks to a classmate when I decided to give one a try. I think I read two that year: one involved pirates, I'm almost certain. The second had the respectable daughter of a petty nobleman who was accidentally raped in a stable ("Is this part of kissing, too?") by the new groom who was actually a prince in disguise, and couldn't understand why her father was overjoyed to hand her over to someone lower than her. I wasn't easily hooked. Harlequins and romance novels were cheap and tawdry, and I was devoted to real  literature. The next year might have been when I read The Mists of Avalon  about 6 times. So it wasn't the sex or seduction that I didn't like. Far from it. Also a sub-genre, and a popular one at that, but fantasy seems to have more legitimacy, somehow. In college I sought out some erotica that felt more transgressive--the diary of Joe...