“It is love; love, the comfort of the human species, the preserver of the universe,

       the soul of all sentient beings, love, tender love.”

                                                                            ― Voltaire, Candide

In 2015, I continued my commitment to track my reading habits on GoodReads in order to see how much and what I actually read. Although the overall data didn’t differ significantly from 2014, I have begun to understand more about my story and style preferences. I stopped reading romance when I was eighteen, specifically when I became an English and journalism major at university; I only returned to reading romance near the end of 2010, when the pain of my mother’s death drove me toward what I thought would be mindless, escapist books. I discovered that romance had grown up and out into something far more interesting—and better written—than the oft maligned bodice-rippers of the 80s. If you peruse my favorite reads list below, you’ll see I’m still reading romance.

By and large, I read romance indiscriminatingly. I’ll read most stories as long as the writing is decent (can’t ever undo an English degree education). I transition rapidly, easily between different styles and voices—from cheerful and efficient prose to darkly introspective and lush poetry, from the subgenres contemporary to historical, erotic to speculative, western to paranormal. I tend to read impulsively and intuitively, whatever suits my mood. And I read insatiably.

So, until this past year, my main criteria for choosing a romance to read had been the writer’s competency. These last twelve months though, I became increasingly more selective with which stories I pick up to read. Living in a world where adolescent girls are kidnapped and made “child brides” by barbaric terrorists, where radicals shoot up innocent people dining at sidewalk cafes, where people in remote villages stone women to death for refusing to marry men others choose for them, and where small towns cultivate boys to become pimps who lure neighboring town’s girls into prostitution, I discovered that, yes, I can still “escape” the real world by reading romance, but I also need to use my reading to process the psychological trauma of living in a world where women are more often abused than loved by men.

Mainly, I discovered in 2015 that I crave gritty, realistic contemporary stories that reinforce the idea that the masculine half of humanity needs and craves love and intimacy too. It might surprise some non-romance readers to discover realism exists in romance, especially with the genre’s requisite HEA, but for me, the true-to-life struggles and challenges individual characters face, alone and together, make the coupled endings in rougher romances all the more intense and meaningful. Love discovered and nurtured in an unsentimental version of the world represents more than fantasy, it offers us a chance to see and believe in the selfless good humans—men in particular—are still capable of creating.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still angst-averse. Other readers can keep their soap opera dramas. I want tough characters who tough out tough situations without a lot of fanfare. Private, restrained pain resonates and moves me more than screaming and hair-pulling. Spare me high drama, which works fine in comedy, but sours quickly in serious stories, where narcissistic, whining characters more invested in being victims than survivors turn instantly exhausting for this reader. That kind of exaggerated self-importance on the part of characters in a romance might read okay in a world at peace, but never in one where thousands of women suffer far worse fates in the time it takes me to read one book. (Caveat: I don’t want explicit, predatory rape and gratuitous violence in my romances either. I get my fill of that on the news. Love and rape are the utter antithesis of each other. For me, though, dubious consent is acceptable when the protagonists are forming an authentic relationship and the writer knows what she is doing—hey, we all have our kinks).

In 2015, I wanted, needed stories that map how to live and love with grace and dignity, even as we helplessly watch tragedy unfold around us, beyond our control, every day. I want stories that reiterate Voltaire’s final analysis in Candide: “Let us cultivate our garden.” This year, I found and read stories with characters intent on cultivating their own gardens. And they were wonderful.

Some part of my soul inherently craves the shadow side of life in my fiction. By age seven, I’d discovered the original Grimm’s fairy tales, and the world shifted into focus. With their cruel indifference, stark poverty, and casual violence, Grimm’s versions read more honest to me than the pastel, sparkly Disney versions. I’d never met a soft, kindly fairy godmother; the women in my life were resilient survivors, hard women of the bitterly cold and unforgiving upper Midwest, who saved any softness for babies. Fiction is about more than escapism, it’s the telling of stories that shape our world view. Perhaps reading Joanna Wylde’s novel, Reaper’s Property, at the end of 2013 initially retriggered my desire for rougher, meaner stories. Two years ago, I read that book cover-to-cover, compulsively, the first week I had it, four times in seven days. According to my 2015 favorites reading list, my awakened need for stories that reflect the darker aspects of life have flared to a full blazing fire.

These more serious stories remind me of my favorite love poem, “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold. After musing on the beauty of the night sea, which prompts the speaker’s nostalgia, then melancholy, of darker past events, he exclaims:

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Some people might not see Arnold’s poem as romantic, but for me, it speaks to the power and necessity of intimate love between two individuals in a callous, often senseless, world. The truth is that few people—beyond our parents or children, if we have them—ever really love us or need us. Finding someone to love, wholly and completely? Finding someone to love us back unconditionally? That might be the only emotional experience that makes us accept or believe in our own worth, especially if, like me, you choose not to have children and both your parents have passed on. Romantic love can transform us from just another orphaned person (in world of 7.349 billion people) into someone important to someone important to us. It allows us to anchor someone in the same way he or she anchors us. I have plenty of friends who are content, well-adjusted singles, but I find something reassuring about forging through life with a faithful partner at my side.

I imagine my preference for reality in contemporary romance is why I’m not a huge fan of billionaire or second chance (with the same lover) stories. I read them occasionally, but they rarely end up becoming memorable books to me. My truth, my worldview, is that billionaire geniuses don’t fall in love with uneducated shop girls, and gorgeous six-foot tall, six-pack men don’t date dumpy, plain-looking women, no matter how wonderful anyone tries to be. And in my experience, failed relationships rarely overcome their failures. It’s easier to start fresh with someone new. Love requires trust, and after two people have effectively destroyed that trust in the past, it’s unlikely a second go at love will satisfy either. I can appreciate that other readers embrace these types of stories for personal reasons; but when a story ignores the way I see people behave in reality, I personally disconnect, the illusion disrupted by an egregious break in my suspension of disbelief. In 2015, I needed the world-building in the fiction to be as boring, as frustrating, as difficult, as lonely as real life, and the fantasy in that fiction had to have a sharper edge to it. And so it did.

In reviewing my 2015 GoodReads list:

Favorite New Authors/Books in 2015:

Anne Calhoun’s Liberating Lacey, Uncommon Passion

Jeffe Kennedy’s Falling Under Series Going Under, Under His Touch, Under Contract

Julianna Keyes’ Time Served, Just Once, Going the Distance, In Her Defense

Cara McKenna’s Willing Victim, After Hours, Unbound, Hard Time

Lila Pace’s Begging for It, Asking for It (parts I and II of the same story)

Favorite Familiar Authors’ New Books of 2015:

Tessa Bailey’s Broke and Beautiful Series: Chase Me, Need Me, Make Me

Molly Joseph (Annabel Joseph)’s Ironclad Bodyguards Series: Pawn

Joanna Wylde’s Reapers Motorcycle Club and Silver Valley Series: Silver Bastard,

Reaper’s Fall

Also Noteworthy (and somewhat less gritty) New-to-Me Authors/Series:

Mandy Baxter’s US Marshals Series

Ruby Dixon’s Ice Barbarians Series

Julie James’ FBI/US Attorney Series

Olivia Jaymes’ Cowboy Justice Series

Christina Lauren’s Wild Seasons series

I kept my 2015 reading goal to just 100 books, the same as the previous year. As of December 25, 2015, I’ve easily doubled my goal again, at 206 titles, and I’m likely to read several more by New Year’s Eve. Since I’m a confirmed bookworm, that outcome is not really a surprise. This year, though, I didn’t record books that I reread (there weren’t that many anyway), and like last year, I didn’t record books that I didn’t like and/or didn’t finish. Still, it means that I read far more new titles and authors this year.

Stats about my reading habits, provided by GoodReads:

Total titles read as of 12/25/15: 206 (vs. 224—including 40 rereads—in 2014)

Longest title read: The Collector by Nora Roberts (752 pages)

Total pages read (as of 12/25/2016): 52,469 or the equivalent of more than 17 million words. That’s about 1,000 pages a week, or 3-4 books a week. (vs. about 50,000 pages in 2014)

As I wind up my 2015 reading experience, I am also reviewing how well I completed my 2014 goals.  After all, I tell myself, what’s the point of collecting data and running a self-analysis, if not to do something useful with the results, right?

2014 Goal 1: Try to reread fewer familiar titles by my favorite authors (though I’m sure I’ll be buying and reading their latest novels) to instead discover more new-to-me authors.

I achieved this, I think. I reread a lot fewer books this past year, allowing me time to discover some amazing new writers who are now on my must-read list.

2014 Goal 2: End 2015 having experienced a mind-blowing, transformational, FIRECRACKER! read.

Okay—this definitely happened. And it was due to taking risks on some new authors. I’ve reread McKenna’s Intermix books several times each now. I’ve also added most of these new authors’ remaining titles to my TBR pile-up. I’m not sure I can name just one title as my absolute favorite, though I’ve certainly read Willing Victim and Liberating Lacey at least three or four times each. I anticipate with true pleasure rereading all of the books on my list above. It was a collective experience with all of the books—gritty, intense romance that satisfied some dark inner corner of my psyche.

2014 Goal 3: Read more full-length nonfiction.

I wasn’t as successful with this goal, though I am currently reading several books on Native American life, especially concerning what it’s like to grow up and live on a reservation. I am drafting a contemporary romance with a Native American hero (I’m not Native American and I understand the potential backlash, but this man arose in my imagination and he wants his story, and so I am doing my best to honor who he is by doing meaningful research. I so want to give him an HEA).

2014 Goal 4: Set aside reading time needed to catch up on whole series, especially by some of my favorite authors like Sabrina Jeffries and Elizabeth Hoyt.

Both a success and a fail on this one. I did read two popular, long-running paranormal series that I’d never read before: Jennifer Ashley’s Shifters Unbound series and Lynsay Sands’ Argeneau Vampire series. I thoroughly enjoyed many of the titles in both series. But, I’m still behind on Jeffries and Hoyt, mostly because I simply didn’t read as many historical romances this year. I’m not sure why, but I think I generally read historical romances to escape the pace of modern life into a simpler (at least in terms of technology) time, and I was far too plugged into the world this year, especially politically, to escape into titled Regency England, not that all historical romances are focused on the upper class. Increasingly, historical romance novelists are telling the stories of the working class and poor. Nonetheless, I craved stories that addressed the challenges of male-female relationships as they function today.

Ultimately, 2015 was a rewarding year for reading.

Bring on 2016!

Links to the authors mentioned above:

Jennifer Ashley’s Shifters Unbound Series

Tessa Bailey’s Broke and Beautiful Series: Chase Me, Need Me, Make Me

Mandy Baxter’s US Marshals Series

Anne Calhoun’s Liberating Lacey, Uncommon Passion

Ruby Dixon’s Ice Barbarians Series

Julie James’ FBI/US Attorney Series

Olivia Jaymes’ Cowboy Justice Series

Molly Joseph (Annabel Joseph)’s Ironclad Bodyguards Series: Pawn

Jeffe Kennedy’s Falling Under Series Going Under, Under His Touch, Under Contract

Julianna Keyes’ Time Served, Just Once, Going the Distance, In Her Defense

Christina Lauren’s Wild Seasons series

Cara McKenna’s Willing Victim, After Hours, Unbound, Hard Time

Lila Pace’s Begging for It, Asking for It (parts I and II of the same story)

Lynsay Sands’ Argeneau Vampire Series

Voltaire’s Candide

Joanna Wylde’s Reapers Motorcycle Club/Silver Valley Series: Silver Bastard,

Reaper’s Fall

[I also tracked my ebook purchases on Amazon. I clearly have an addiction to one-clicking whatever suits my fancy, especially when the book is on sale. Every morning, I have my coffee and read the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books’ new post. Several days a week, it highlights interesting books on sale, and I end up picking up lots of new romances this way. SBTB introduced me to most of the new-to-me authors on my list above. Despite buying twice as many books as I can actually read, I have no regrets. In 2015, I’ve downloaded 435 books, 90% of which were on sale. (Also, of the 206 books I recorded reading on GoodReads, 70 were checked out from my county library’s digital database—so those books cost me nothing.) And that leaves a lot of unread titles ahead, but I do plan to retire someday…]