Guilty Pleasures

    I read a lot of different types of books.  Plenty are thought provoking literature.  Many are classics.  But I have a confession to make.  I am a hopeless romantic. Okay, that might not come as a surprise to those who know me, and I actually prefer the way Kathleen Turner phrases it in Romancing the Stone.  She calls herself  a "hopeful romantic."  I love a good romance novel.  The cheesier the better.  In fact my favorites are the ones that actually make you laugh out loud at how over the top they are.  The one I just finished was one of the Pink Carnation Series by Lauren Willig, and the hero was actually contemplating "how much agony there is in a fingernail."  I prefer the Regency romances that don't have quite as many bodice ripping and throbbing manhood scenes.  Just good old fashioned seething passion and pent up frustration.  The Pink Carnation books are doubly fun because they're also spy novels. And that's what I read them for.  Fun.  I'll get back to broadening my horizons eventually, but for now bring on the duels at dawn and heart fluttering moonlight trysts.  What's your literary guilty pleasure?

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Groupie Alert

    

     Well, I was finally able to tear myself away from the woods long enough to finish a book!  I tend to binge read, reading one author or genre till I reach the saturation point and switch to something else.  This time I was on a T.A. Barron kick and just finished The Ancient One.  For those of you not familiar with T.A. Barron he is most well known for his best selling The Lost Years of Merlin Saga.  I read the 12 books in that series in 4 weeks!  Yes, they're that good. They're middle grade fantasy, one of my very favorite genres.  The book I just finished was one of his earlier novels. The second in the Heartlight trilogy.  I liked it a lot, especially the Native American mythology and nuances that permeated the story.
     I met T.A. Barron once at a writer's conference, shortly after reading all the Merlin books and I gushed like a groupie.  I tend to do that when I meet favorite authors. The time I met Jane Yolen I practically fell at the poor woman's feet. T.A. Barron was a truly lovely man. He was warm and charming and an inspiration to other writer's. It was such a pleasure to meet him and I highly recommend his books. There is a positive, love fueled message in all of them that children need to hear and characters that are easy to fall in love with.
     Now I've changed tracks slightly and I'm reading one of the Pink Carnation books by Lauren Willig, a Regency, spy romance, that is mostly fluff and completely over the top and I'm enjoying it thoroughly.

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