Ruth Rendell’s Chief Inspector Wexford series started in 1964 and is ongoing to this day with 23 books at present, the last one having been published just last year. I’ve been reading this series for may years now but only recently did I find some of the books I was missing so I decided to start from the beginning all over again. It’s not a requirement to read them in order because each is a stand-alone mystery novel, but the characters do evolve and there is the occasional mention of a previous case on some of the books. I decided to read them again because i don’t remember many of them anymore and also because, to me, the best thing about the books is the description of the two main characters – Wexford and Burden. They are flawed and not always nice but I can’t help liking them and admire their dedication to job and family.

Because it is an on-going series and the books I remember best are her latest, it was a shock to read those earlier novels again. The social mindset about women – response to a suspect washing his clothes: ‘you washed them? What d’you have a wife for?’ or how a young girl feels she’s not good enough to marry because her father was a murderer – freaked me out at times. The value of money has also changed so much that it was hard to understand why it was such a big deal for someone to have 100 pounds in their wallet. Not until you realize the average worker made about 20 pounds a week.

Ruth Rendell is a British mystery writer so there is some common ground with other authors in the genre but she has some very unique characteristics as well. The similarities are obvious: the stories are set in a fairly small town and there’s the class element, but, as seen in the previous paragraph, for books written by a woman before or around 1970, it’s quite odd and refreshing to find out the killer is actually a jilted lesbian or a sexual sadist with a fetish for cutting up his bed partners rather than the typical jealous husband or the vicar. That’s what Ruth Rendell is so good at: the shock value. Also, if there’s a romantic story somewhere in the book you KNOW it’s going to end badly. It’s a sure thing. And even though I like romantic novels and like happy endings, Rendell’s unhappy endings are done in such a way that you feel it really couldn’t work out any other way.

Another great thing about these books is that Ruth Rendell is obviously a smart and well educated woman and her books are filled with poetry quotes and unusual words so you can actually expand your vocabulary as you’re enjoying your murder mystery

The only negative note I’ve made is that there seem to be way too many observations on the weather, a British obsession, that sometimes goes on for pages. The point of these descriptions is to set the atmosphere and to give extra insight into the characters but late at night it sometimes makes me doze off a bit.

I’m now on the fifth book – a new one – and have 18 more to go, ending with ‘The Vault’ that I have never read. It’s a completely different mindset from the previous books I’ve been reading and it took me a bit to get into it but by now I’m completely immersed in this world and loving it once more.

In the last two years I’ve read a number of vampire and other paranormal-themed series. It’s hard to explain why I like paranormal romance but I’ll try.

The romance part is easy enough. Life is hard and has enough drama. If I have some time to relax with a book, a cup of tea and a blanket, I don’t want to get stressed out or depressed by what I’m reading. I’d rather have something light, fun and predictable that makes me smile or gives me butterflies. I’m a girl, after all. I do read other stuff when I’m in the right mood for it but romance is the perfect escapist genre for me. I describe it as bubble gum in book form. You chew it, spit it out when the flavor is gone and it requires little brain power.

As for the paranormal element, I don’t know exactly why I like it. Part of it is because it’s not real so anything is possible. I’ve always liked horror movies but can’t stand war movies. War is real and I can’t help thinking about the suffering all those people go through. Monsters are not real and I can detach myself from the violence a lot more. Plus, people with super powers are always cool and it’s fun to be able to see through the eyes of someone with abilities you’ll never have. It’s all about experiencing for a moment something that’s different from me.

OK, so let’s start the list. I’m not reviewing the books, just making a few notes on each series. I’ll go by author rather than theme because that’s how I usually read them.

Stephenie Meyer: Twilight series

As I mentioned in my previous post, I started with the Twilight series. I know everyone hates it because there’s so much hype and the actors are everywhere but I don’t care about that. If you look at the story and even the movies for what they are – teen romance – it’s precisely what it’s supposed to be. You may not like the genre but that’s a whole other issue. The one thing that bothered me was the forth book with Bella getting pregnant right away. I already disliked the preachy aspect of the ‘no sex before marriage’ angle that is way too American Christian for my taste, so the ‘sex leads to pregnancy, even with a vampires, girls beware’ thing gave me a bitter taste. The fact that the girl spends the book dying from the pregnancy may also have tapped into the horrible experience I had with my first pregnancy and I reacted badly.

Charlaine Harris: Sookie Stackhouse, Aurora Teagarden, Harper Connelly, Lily Bard series

Charlaine Harris and the Sookie series came next. I liked the mystery angle of the series and the fact that the characters have a sex life rather than spending their time fighting their natural urges seemed refreshing for a change. I couldn’t relate to Sookie much but the Viking vampire Erik is one of my favorite book characters (I always did have a thing for blonds). It goes from vampires to wherewolves, as all vampire series seem to, and then to fairies, and that I don’t get. Fairies? Seriously? Come on!

Still, the books aren’t bad so I decided to read the other series by the author. The Aurora Teagarden series is a muder mystery series rather than PR. Aurora is a librarian who keeps getting involved in murders. There’s a romantic element at some point but does not end well at all.

The Harper Connelly series has a paranormal element since the woman can speak to the spirit of the dead. The background to both main characters is pretty dark and so is the plot to a lot of the books and the series can get a little depressing at times. The romantic element is also a bit creepy since the characters are adoptive brother and sister, though not related by blood.

The Lily Bard series has no paranormal element but the character does pop up on a couple of Sookie’s books later on. This series is also very dark and brutal. Lily survived a brutal kidnapping and we eventually get to know in full detail exactly what she went though and it’s not pretty. If I hadn’t read American Psycho it might have bothered me a bit more than it did but I guess I’ve toughened up over the years. Once you get past the violence thing, the series has some interesting elements. It’s a mystery series as well but the character is different from other mysteries I’ve read because she’s a cleaning lady with no particular interest in crime except for not wanting to be a victim ever again. She ends up getting mixed up in lots of weird situations that tend to end badly for her, meets a private detective and figures that being a detective might be a good career change and at least does have a happy ending.

Laurell K. Hamilton: Anita Blake, Meredith Gentry series

Anita Blake raises zombies for a living. She lives in a world where vampires werewolves, zombies and other weird creatures are perfectly normal, day to day things. The books also fall under the mystery category and then there’s a romance angle when Anita finds herself interested in a werewolf while a vampire wants her for himself. I hated the werewolf, Richard, with a passion. He was the most arrogant, obnoxious character ever and I really couldn’t figure out why she kept wasting time on the guy. The vampire wasn’t much better but for different reasons – he was to effeminate. Still, the books start out pretty cool despite a tendency to over-describe to annoying detail lots of things that don’t really matter like what each and every single character is wearing in every scene. After a few volumes the tone changes a lot and it becomes about sex all the time to the point where you can’t see the plot anymore. In the second part of the series my favorite character was Nathaniel, who’s the sweetest guy, but I think the main character lost too much of her power. And to go from uptight virgin to ‘I must have sex once an hour or I die’ seems like a weird twist for the series and I lost interest.

The Meredith Gentry series is all about sex and violence from the beginning. It’s a fairy series. Meredith is the fairy princess forced to leave faerie to escape her sadistic aunt. She’s found and brought back and given the task to procreate to insure the next heir to the throne. It’s all very brutal and way over the top and it bored me quickly. There’s some BDSM and she has a harem of men and it’s different from other series because she falls in love not with one but two of them. Still, way too weird for me.

Sherrilyn Kenyon: Dark Hunter series

This was the first typical PNR series I read. Each book is the story of a different couple but they’re all set in the same world and lots of characters show up in each others books. Some stories are darker than others, some are better some are worse. They all end happily and the series leads up to the book about Acheron, the mysterious leader of the Dark Hunters. The series mixes vampires and Greek mythology with lots of sex. It’s not great but it’s actually pretty fun. I like the fact that she doesn’t pull punches when it comes to the darker stuff. Some of the other books I’ve read since seem too sugary by comparison when it comes to tortured characters with a supposed traumatic past.

Mari Mancusi: Blood Coven series

This series is as far from Dark Hunter as you can get. It’s a young teen vampire series, completely high school with sugar on top. The main characters are twins called Shunshine and Rayne and the wrong one gets turned into a vampire by accident. It’s funny at times and kinda sweet but maybe a bit young for me.

Richelle Mead: Vampire Academy, Georgina Kinkaid series

The vampire academy series is the closest I’ve read to the Twilight series, not in the plot but more in the target audience, the way the story has a beginning and end along five or six books, a mild love triangle at one point, a depressing middle and lots of fight scenes. I didn’t like the characters very much and had a hard time feeling enough empathy, but in the young adult PNR genre it’s a good enough series. There are good vampires, bad ones and half-vampires. The good vampires can turn bad and the setting is a school a bit like Harry Potter’s Hogwarts.

The Georgina Kinkaid series is very silly. She’s a succubus who wants to settle down and have a normal relationship. Unfortunately she sucks the life out of any man she sleeps with. It starts out kinda funny but soon enough all the character does is bitch about her life and it gets harder to care about what happens to her.

Ellen Schreiber: Vampire Kisses

Very light and bubbly teen vampire series with a perky goth girl and a teen vampire. I’d pair this with The Princess Diaries, the blood Coven series and other such young teen books.

L.J. Smith: The Vampire Diaries

I started reading this after watching a few episodes of the TV show. The show is far from great but Stefan is an interesting character. The two main leads, however, are not (the bad guys are always more fun, I guess). I got the books before I usually like them better than the screen adaptations – there’s more detail and character development. In this case that was not true. Elena is vain and shallow and Stefan didn’t seem any more likable than he does on TV. The second part of the series, written years after the first, is just plain weird and it makes me wonder what kind of drugs the author was taking at the time.

J.R.Ward: The Black Dagger Brotherhood

Now we’re talking! This is one of the best PNR series I’ve read. In style and theme it’s similar to Dark Hunters. It’s a vampire series, about a group of warrior vampires who protect their race from the Omega, an all-powerful evil. Each book is a couple’s story but there’s more stories developing in the background in all of them. I liked that a lot – not being limited to two main characters and being able to get to know the others bit by bit as the series progressed. The series is interesting also because it breaks some of the norms that romance novels tend to stick to, like the fact that the hero is not supposed to sleep with anyone else after he meets the girl. The names of the characters are kinda stupid (Zadist, Phury, Tohrment, Rhage, Vishous) but it does attempt to explain it at one point so I’m OK with that. What I didn’t like in the first few books was how much time was spent on the evil guys point of view. You know they’re going to die at some point so why waste time with their back-story and feelings? It should add another layer of interest but it just bored me most of the time.

Kresley Cole: Immortals after Dark

Another series in the same style as the BDB and DH. This one has all sorts of paranormal creatures, starting with Valkyries, females who feed on electricity. The relationships in these books are more about predestined couples than free will and the male tend to behave like cavemen with the whole ‘mine’ possessive thing toward the females that I don’t really find particularly attractive, but there are some really funny moments and dialogs that make up for it.

Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instruments

An adventure series about part-angels called Shadowhunters who protect humans from demons. It is a teen series but more serious and darker than Blood Coven or Vampire Kisses. It fits better alongside the Vampire Diaries but the characters are easier to like, especially the female lead, Clary. It’s a trilogy that ends well but apparently the author felt the need to ruin it by writing a forth book that I’ve heard nothing but bad things about and don’t plan to read.

Jeaniene Frost: Night Huntress series

Cat is a half-vampire vampire slayer. Weird, right? And then she’s imprisoned by a vampire she tries to kill who falls in love with her and teaches her how to be a better fighter before they team up and eventually become a couple. They fight all the time – each other and other vampires, ghouls, ghosts and zombies. The series developed to include romance novels featuring other characters in the same world. I like the series but Cat can be a very annoying character and the main couple has some serious trust issues that are the basis for a lot of angst throughout the series and have a on-again-off-again kind of relationship. It fits alongside the Vamp Academy series but it’s a bit more grown up and has more sex in it.

Larissa Ione: Demonica, Lords of Deliverance series

At this point I had pretty much run out of vampire books but a lot of people who had read the same series I did highly recomended Larissa Ione so I gave her a try. The Demonica series seemed a pretty stupid idea: a demon hospital and a relationship between a slayer and an incubus. It took me a while to get past the ‘yeah, right, that’s not going to suck at all’ vibe and actually start reading. Turns out I really liked it. The characters are interesting, there’s a lot of humour in it and the author manages to draw you in somehow.

The fifth Demonica book introduces the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the main characters in the Lords of Deliverance series. I found it just as enjoyable as the Demonica series and since it’s set in the same world, the characters from Demonica pop up from time to time (especially when someone gets badly hurt and needs medical attention, which happens a lot around these people.

Sydney Croft: ACRO series

This is the series I’m reading at the moment. Sydney Croft is actually a pseudonym for two authors – Larrissa Ione and Stephanie Tyler. The ACRO series is basically The X-Men with lots of sex. The characters all have some kind of special power – controlling storms, fire or ice, making earthquakes, super speed or strength, mind reading, etc. ACRO is a military organization that takes in, trains and protects these special people and then sends them on missions to save the world from ITOR, their evil rival. Apparently the agents seem to have a hard time separating business from pleasure and seem to come back with a mate pretty much all the time. It sounds pretty silly and it kinda is but it’s also funny at times. I don’t necessarily recommend reading them back to back, though, because I started falling asleep during the sex scenes after a while. There’s just so many of them and they’re so similar it gets a bit dull. But the books do have a plot (sometimes more than one) and they’ve made me laugh out loud a few times, so I can’t say they’re too bad.

I like to read books. I’ve only recently realized that’s not something I talk about much on my blog and I found it odd because reading is such a big part of my daily life. Since I try to be honest I felt it was time to give books their own little post (well, maybe not so little).

I read because I have fun doing it. From talking to people over the years I’ve come to realize that reading and fun are not always considered compatible and I don’t understand that. I know a lot of people have to read certain books for school or work, like I did, and reading as an obligation really is an terrible form of punishment, so I get that they’d rather do something else for fun after that – after all, between music, movies, TV and games there’s all sorts of shiny forms of entertainment to choose from, so a book may seem boring by comparison – but after a time, once the trauma is forgotten, to simply dismiss books as entertainment seems limiting, and I think these people may resent reading simply because they never found the right kind of book.

Other people think that if you read a lot you must be an intellectual. Why? Just because you know how to read? It makes no sense to me. There are all kinds of books. Some are classics, acknowledged by all as masterpieces of literature. Some are porn. Then there’s pretty much everything in between – comedy, drama, romance, mystery, horror, biography and anything else you can think of. You just have to find what kind of stuff you like and go with that.

I think the problem is that we’re influenced by each other and our culture and if everyone says something is good we feel we should like it. If we don’t we think maybe we’re stupid and don’t get what all the hype is about. Well, I’ve learned a long time ago that what is good and what I like are often very different things. Good is something that is well made (a book that’s well written, a painting with an amazing technique, a movie that’s visually stunning or has an interesting plot) but it may not reach me on an emotional level and I don’t like it. I can appreciate its quality and praise the work but it leaves me cold otherwise. And then I like things that I know are not that great – a sappy movie, a book with too many clichés – but something clicks into place inside me and it makes me happy, sad, whatever, and I can say that I liked it and possibly want to repeat the experience (a book you read again, a movie you watch over and over). So I think people should stop trying to read something just because everyone else is saying it’s amazing and find something that makes them happy, whatever that may be.

One of the reasons I don’t talk about books much is because I read a lot of crap. I know they’re not great and I don’t care. They make me laugh or tear up and I enjoy that and it’s enough. I wouldn’t recommend them to anyone but I’m not a book reviewer so that’s fine.

I tend to read more during the summer because I like natural light and the days are longer. It’s also something that was left from being a kid because for most of the year I was too busy with school to have much time to read for fun. It was only during the summer months that I would be able to pick what I wanted to read. Like I mentioned on a previous post, I started with Agatha Christie mystery novels. I’ve got an obsessive personality and love to read series with the same characters or set in the same world so I didn’t stop until I read all the Agatha Christie books I could find (my aunt had a huge collection so that was easy enough) and to this day I’m a huge fan of Miss Marple. After that I started reading what was available at home, mostly ScyFi and tried some Jules Verne but didn’t have the patience for it.

I read a couple of Enid Blyton’s famous five but didn’t have many – I need to get the full collection one of these days – and had my first book crush on the character Langelot in a French teen spy series by an author writing under the name of Lieutenant X (Vladimir Volkoff).

During my teen years I got into fantasy thanks to The Lord of the Rings and later into the paranormal with Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles. After reading an interview with Tori Amos I tried reading Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics and to this day he remains one of my favorite authors. From reading Good Omens (the funniest book ever) I also became a fan of  Terry Pratchett and read nearly all of his Discworld books plus a few others (did i mention how much I like series?).

During my college years I watched the now famous BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice starring Colin Firth and the wonderful Jennifer Ehle and became a fan of Jane Austen. I’ve read all her books several times and wish she’d written more.

After being mocked by my mother at an early age for reading a teen romance, I had spent years avoiding the genre until I fell in love with Austen’s books, the queen of romantic comedies. I finally admited to myself that I liked romances, especially the kind that ends well, but still felt a bit self-conscious about it to truly embrace it at this point. I read Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Our Mutual Friend, and some other classics (thanks to the cheap edition Penguin books that I started to collect) and I loved them all.

Among the classics I read, the other author that stands out is Oscar Wilde – the man certainly had a way with words and was funny as hell. I don’t particularly like the children’s stories because they’re too depressing but I love most of the plays and was fortunate enough to be able to go see ‘A Woman of no Importance’ starring Rupert Graves during a trip to London.

More recently I’ve come to love another author who is also a fan of Wilde and shares his taste and talent for wit and playful language  – Stephen Fry. His novels are a bit darker and more brutal than I expected but it’s a good kind of kick in the gut and also terribly funny. You can tell how much fun the man has in choosing his words and the end result flows like melted chocolate. I usually care more about the plot and characters than I do about the way a book is written but with Stephen Fry, as with Oscar Wilde, half the fun is in the writing itself.

I still have plans to read other authors I never got to – I hear Virginia Woolf is surprisingly funny, for example – but as life got more complex, thanks to two kids, and time got shorter, I opted for the easy way out and finally gave in to the pull of trashy romance novels. They’re easy to get through, predictable, fun, and there’s thousands to choose from. As I don’t care for stories where the heroes are soldiers, pirates or cowboys – and in the romance novel world you could not throw a pebble into a stadium covered in books without hitting one of those – so I went with what I’ve always liked – vampires, werewolves and other mythical creatures – and dived into the wonderful world of Paranormal Romance, commonly known as PNR.

It started with Twilight. I noticed a lot of people were trashing the first movie, so naturally I decided to watch it. I wanted in on the joke. And yes, vampires that glitter are just giving all vampires a bad name but otherwise I actually got into the story. Yes, it’s kinda creepy and the guy is a dangerous stalker and all that, but it’s fiction and danger is always welcome in romantic fiction. After that I bought the books and I liked them so much I read them twice (OK, the second time I may have jumped a few bits, but still). I couldn’t tell you why I liked it so much because there’s a lot in there that bugs me, like the whole preachy thing about no sex before marriage and so on. Still, the romantic aspects of the book work really well if you like that sort of thing and I seem to for some reason. Some people like soap operas or sports, I like this and I’m done apologizing for it.

Soon after, my brother lent me his collection of Sookie Stackhouse books. I had seen the first season of True Blood and didn’t like it much but I was in a vampire mood so I gave it a shot. I liked the books a lot more than the TV show and consumed them quickly. There’s more sex and violence than Twilight (the main difference between a teen novel and an adult novel is how much sex there is in the book) but once the fairies come into the plot  I started to lose interest. I love the character of Erik, however, and I was glad when Sookie began to agree with me. The book where he loses his memory is my favorite and I spent some time giggling uncontrollably at some of the scenes. I find it interesting that I don’t usually giggle at anything other than funny scenes in books.

Soon enough I started reading any PNR I could get my hands on and I’ve gone through several series in the last year. Some are OK, some are really fun and some are a bit on the dull side but I keep a book with me at all times (the kindle has made it so much easier), even if all I manage is a couple of lines in between changing diapers, getting juice or changing DVDs. Having a nice escapist fantasy world to go back to when I can keeps me sane and prevents resentment toward my kids for not giving me enough free time to even watch a 20 minute episode of a damn sitcom much less a whole movie.

I also read some erotica last year and it was fun for about a week, but the lack of plot and tendency towards threesomes and BDSM (stuff I’m not really into) made me laugh at times but otherwise just made me realize that’s it’s not entirely my cup of tea. I have no problem with sex in books and even find that it can make a relationship in a story more believable, but I’d rather have it in the middle of a story and something more emotionally involved that just plain porn. I did find it interesting to discover that women seem to prefer their porn in book form while men like the visual versions better. I guess women care enough about a guy’s face to want to picture in in their heads rather than have the whole fantasy collapse from the wrong casting

I may write another post about all the PNR series I’ve read so far even if it’s just to keep track of what I read and whether or not I liked them. Occasionally I write a review for one of the books on Goodreads but for me it makes more sense to talk about a whole series than a single book so I’ll do that here. Feel free to ignore my rants on the subject.

There’s a list of the books I remember reading here. It only goes  up to July 2011 because I started keeping track on Goodreads after that.

I grew up reading murder mysteries and especially Agatha Christie. My mother, instead of being happy to have a daughter that would bother to crack open a book, something that a lot of parents would find thrilling, and instead of encouraging my reading by getting me some age appropriate books, would only scold me for reading nothing but mystery novels and even openly teased me when I tried a teen romance novel, like it was the worst kind of trash – a genre I would not pick up again until I became an adult.

The book selection at home was not small but consisted mostly of science fiction, a genre I tried and didn’t take to, and some classics – Jules Verne, Tolstoi, Victor Hugo, some Dickens probably, and other stuff I just couldn’t stomach at 10 or 12. If there was some Jane Austen around I might have had better luck. I read a couple of Einlein books but the violence put me off – things like fairies with sharp teeth and claws in ‘The Girl from Mars’ or the main character in ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ being stoned to death were just not my idea of fun. I tried reading Jules Verne and found it utterly dull, so I just decided my mother had no idea what she was talking about and kept reading mystery novels. I borrowed them from my favorite aunt who had a large collection, since they were her chosen summer read, and I felt justified by having an adult I admired with the same taste in books as me. I liked Miss Marple more than Poirot because of the atmosphere of the small english town. It seemed pretty and peaceful, something I longed for even then, living as I did surrounded by constant bickering. Of the Poirot book, the one that sticks out the most is ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’ because the narrator turns out to be the murdered and you feel a complete fool to be taken in.

Books were a form of entertainment and a way to escape into a different world, so I didn’t see the point of reading something that felt like work. And since I’m a bit of a collector, when I like something I must have the whole set. Once I’m finished and there’s no more to read, watch, whatever, I will move on to the next thing, but until then I persevere.

Because of the nature of mystery books, I got used to finishing things – you don’t know who the murderer is until you get to the end, after all. This has been very helpful in some respects but detrimental in others. I get a little obsessive about finishing things, even if halfway through I already know I’m not going to like the result – in books, movies or work. Once or twice I’ve left a book unfinished and i can still name the titles because somewhere in my mind I feel almost duty bound to pick them up again some day. If it’s not finished I cannot put it completely out of my mind and move on. Maybe I should see a shrink about that.

Because of all this, for a long time, getting to the end was the whole point. I remember how a lot of books end but don’t remember much of the middle because I was in such a hurry to get past it. The ones I truly love I’ve gone back and read again, this time being able to enjoy the whole journey. As the years go by I’m learning to just go with it and not care so much how it ends.

But the tendency to remember the end of a story over the rest is something that I picked up from movies and TV shows as well. The ones I remeber most from when I was growing up have the famous ‘end twist’ that make it impossible to watch a second time in the same mind frame. To enjoy these you need complete ignorance of the story and a single sentence can change the whole thing. The best examples are ‘it’s a cook book’ (from the Twilight Zone’ episode ‘To serve man’) and, off course, ‘soylent green is people’. The other movie that made a mark was ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’. I watched the 1978 version, with Donald Sutherland and the end felt like such a betrayal

These days there is so much information it seems almost impossible to watch a movie with no previous knowledge so this kind of movie doesn’t get made as much. In recent years, Shyamalan is one director who seems to have enjoyed bringing back the end twist, but after a couple of movies people started expecting it and felt disappointed when there wasn’t one, which I find ridiculous. After all, if you expect a twist there is no point in having one.

I continue to read mysteries and have become a huge fan of Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford but I’ve also started reading other things – Jane Austen is a favorite in the non-mystery world and I read a lot more fantasy and romance. I still prefer female writers but have some favorite males as well, like Neil Gaiman and Stephen Fry. I still like to escape into other worlds, some better, some worse than the one I inhabit. I’ve learned to accept it when horrible things happen to the characters and not take it personally (I wanted to smack Peter Carey for a long time after reading Oscar and Lucinda) but prefer stories with a happy or at least hopeful end.

I have no idea what is the point of this post. I just felt like writing it. Sorry about that. I’m no good at endings.