I’ll talk about the book pictured above in a minute, but can we first talk about how it’s also a photo of a housewife reading a tawdry romance novel?
One of the hunks I’ve bitten off in the past year is shame. I want to look at how it’s showing up and how I’m dealing with it. One of the most recent examples is that I went from reading mostly historical fiction for much of my adult life, to this year reading a LOT of nonfiction, especially spirituality books.
I wasn’t giving myself a break from this type of reading and was feeling overwhelmed with my reading list and also a little burnt out. When I gave romance a try this spring as a way of giving my brain a break from the nonfiction, I felt a certain amount of shame.
I like to throw a little YA/Middle Grade lit into my reading diet every so often, and The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl, by Stacy McAnulty, fit the bill.
My twelve year old daughter actually got to the book first. She said “it was interesting. It was a good story.” Which isn’t very enthusiastic, but I interrupted her from doing something else to ask. She’ll tell me if she didn’t like a book.
I started it weeks after she’d finished it, when I was out of renewals at the library and was afraid I’d have to return it without reading it like I had to do with two other books sitting on my reading pile this month.
Appropriately, I read the first third sitting in a middle school/high school auditorium at one of my daughters’ stage rehearsals for a dance recital.
The image shows the paperback version of Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness, by Jon Kabat-Zinn, but I actually ended up listening to the audiobook. The Chaplain recommended this book to me a little while ago. He didn’t say much about it. I just remember him telling me, “you should read it.” Since he doesn’t recommend many books to me and our reading interests don’t intersect much, I took him seriously.
An Extraordinary Union: A Novel of the Civil War, by Alyssa Cole, is an intersectional work: historical fiction, romance, and Black History, all in one place. Bonus? It’s also written by a woman of color.
This spring, I read a blog post about romance novels, which led to another post, which led to another post. The gist of what I read is that more women should give romance a try: It’s written by women, for women, about women, and it’s about what women want. That’s pretty unique in the literary world, and the world in general.
I haven’t read a romance novel since high school, and the few I read then kind of shocked me. I didn’t make the genre part of my repertoire after that. After reading the articles, I felt perhaps I should give this underappreciated area of fiction another try.
