Memory Lane

I've been listening to Johanna Lindsey's The Devil Who Tamed Her lately. There's a very boring saga that leads up to the reason why I selected this book from the library, but suffice to say, I'm relatively stuck with it at the moment. I'm also almost all the way done with it, so it wasn't bad enough for me to turn it off and seek other means of entertainment to relieve the tedium of my work. I never would have made it this far, however, if this was a book being read solely for pleasure.

I used to adore Lindsey. In fact, I collected everything she wrote. She was one of the first romance authors I found. I loved her characters, the era, the problems her characters faced. Listening to this one, I believe I realize why now: they dealt with issues I was facing as a teenager—fitting in, finding love—while being exotic enough in regency England to be an escape from my life. Plus, they had sex, which is always cool.

And now, I find myself laughing more often than not over the plight of the main character (she's positively too beautiful, and therefore no one gets to know the real her and all they see is her beauty). I wonder if I would have scoffed at this book even in my teen days.

This novel did take me back a bit though, to all those authors, like Lindsey, who I recently purged from my shelves. Lindsey (and Catherine Coulter and Judith McNaught) were my romance-reading foundation. I'm glad they were there for me when I was into those books, and I'm equally as glad that I've graduated into different authors now.