Open Book by Dave Dugdale

Here in the States, we’re trained by school calendars to think of the summer months as a time of freedom, as a time when we have so much more opportunity for leisure activities. So we see it every year: summer reading lists, beach reads, etc. But, really, once we’re adults and out of school (and working full-time), do we really have more time in the summer for reading?

Even though I work in the field of education, the program in which I work is online and runs 365 days/year. No spring or summer break, like the main campus gets. And even though the entire university closes for a week at Christmas, the students I advise and the students I teach are all still in class throughout the holidays.

For people with kids, I would imagine that summers are more busy, not less, what with the kids being home and needing to be supervised/entertained/driven places.

So that’s the question of the day (since I’ve been so busy today I didn’t have time to even think about writing a blog post until after 4:30 p.m.):

Do you have more or less time during the summer to read?

Open Book by Dave Dugdale

My favorite genre to read since I was eleven or twelve years old is historical romance. I’ve gone through different iterations of favorite tropes and authors over the years. Arranged Marriage/Marriage of Convenience stories are some of my favorites. I cut my teeth on American-set YA historical romances with the Sunfire books in the 1980s, and, at the same time, fell in love with the medieval setting by picking up my mom’s Jude Deveraux books around the same time. In the early 1990s, it was Regency and medieval, along with some American West. Beginning in the mid-1990s, there was a fair helping of Inspirational historical romance.

When I went to graduate school in the early/mid-2000s, I started reading contemporary inspirational romance, since that’s what I was writing. By the time I finished grad school, I was working full time as an editor, and because of my training in grad school of reading everything critically (analyzing and breaking down everything) and the editing I did eight or nine hours a day—in addition to writing—my reading ground to a full stop.

It’s only been in the last couple of years that I’ve been able to start reading for pleasure again. And for a while there, I fell in love with it and sometimes went to bed an hour of more early just to have more time to read.

But now, I’m experiencing a reading slump once more. I’ve started reading books that I should love, but I find myself getting a little bit into them and I want to move on to something else. So I have to ask: Is it me or is it the books I’m choosing?

I’m in the middle of re-listening to a book (Victorian-set historical romance) that I really enjoyed last year. I’m reading a new-to-me author whose book is set in a time period I’ve never read (mid-17th century/English Civil War). I downloaded a historical romance novella yesterday based on a review on one of my favorite blogs.

But I think I’m going to try to really shake things up with my next book choice. I’m really thinking about trading Stephen King’s novel Under the Dome before the TV series based on it starts (well, it starts next week, so if I do read it, I’ll wait to watch it until I finish). I’m not sold on this—after all, I’ve never read a Stephen King book. But is there anything more out of my reading comfort zone than that? 😉

Have you ever read anything completely out of your comfort zone? What was it and what did you think of it?