The Golden Darter
My Life Through Books
Middle School was a weird mix of classics and Star Wars. I was obsessed with The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux to the point of the book falling apart. I also discovered that while I love Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters can go hang. As for Star Wars... I've read almost every meta-verse book that was published up until the New Order cannon. I can still go into detail and recite storylines of a few beloved books. Hence, my nerd life began.
High school was very paranormal, vampire, scifi, etc. I would literally go online and search for book series that concerned vampires and read everything on the list. We are talking Anita Blake, Charline Harris, Anne Rice, Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Tanya Huff, Steven King, etc. This was before they sparkled, ya'll. Early college was philosophical and political theory for school, and mainstream fiction in my personal time. Wicked, Life of Pi, Memoirs of a Geisha. These are the 3 books that pushed me into my next phase, mostly because of how ambiguous I felt about them, and their questionable endings.
Late-mid college I was introduced to LaVyrle Spencer by way of Hummingbird courtesy of a gripe session with my Mom about how depressing the books I had been reading lately were. I've never looked back and have been hooked on the romance genre ever since. I've read and loved a ton of LaVyrle Spencer (who is a little hit and miss), Judith McNaught (of the rapetastic 80s era of romance), and Georgette Heyer (who writes in the vein of Austen). More recently I've discovered the joys of contemporary authors like Susan Elizabeth Phillips.
Lately I've been trying to read more non-fiction. I really do enjoy learning about subjects that interest me, but non-fiction can feel like work sometimes. So I fall back to romance. You just can't go wrong with knowing that there will almost always be a happy ending.
Currently reading
Riveted: A Novel of the Iron Seas
I can never say enough about the books in this series, so I'm just not going to say much, except that I pretty much loved this story. The last book was a little laggy for me, and though Meljeans ability to make the best laid plans go crazy haywire was definitely present, this one lagged a bit as well. I think it might be in part of the worldbuilding areas? Whatever, LOVED David and Annika. Both complex characters with issues that would seem hard to resolve... And they are. In fact, we don't even see the resolution for all of their problems, even though we know that they happen (thank you for not assuming your readers are idiots you have to handhold, Ms Brooks). The side characters were rich, and while I didn't like the setting due to my abhorrence of cold weather it was still vivid. There were no zombies in this one, which was an interesting change, ha! I think the next interesting place to go would be from the perspective of someone from Manhattan... A non-bugger dealing with the bugger world. But we'll see. For now, this was another wonderful installment in the best steam book series out there right now.