Just before lock down started here in Scotland, I was in a reading slump - nothing I had on my shelves or in my Kindle appealed, and I ended up reading almost nothing for weeks.
Then lock down started. I was supposed to be on holiday the first two weeks after lock down. I'd planned everything - book launches, events, starting writing the new book... everything - around those two weeks. And then the holiday was cancelled and here we are, however many weeks later, still pretty much in lock down. At the start of lock down, I wasn't even writing the new book - I was supposed to be taking a well-earned break after launching three books in four weeks.
An ideal time to read then?
Apparently not. My brain didn't know what it wanted, other than the holiday that I'd been looking forward to for months.
And then, out of the blue, I had a yen to read a cowboy romance.
What? Um? What???
Those of you who know me in real life will be scratching your heads over that one. So was I! But, I really, really wanted to read something, but nothing that I already had. So I downloaded a couple of free cowboy romances to my Kindle, fully expecting to read a few pages and remember that I'd never, in all my nearly 50 years of life, wanted to read many romances and nothing about cowboys. I fully expected to be back to fantasy or crime novels within minutes of reading a romance.
Well.
I've now read almost 20 romance novels since the start of lock down. A couple haven't been 'cowboy romances' - one was a vet, another was a time-slip novel with Vikings, and one was an artist - but it seems I am (at least at the moment) an incorrigible romantic who just wants a happy ever after ending. I'm less keen on explicit sex scenes (because most are pretty cringe-worthy to me, rather than sexy); I am keen on 'friends to lovers' books. Some of the books have been utter tosh (and there were some Did Not Finish in that 20), but some have been fantastic. I definitely need to connect with the characters more than care about the plot itself, but that's not a huge surprise as that has always been the case for me.
Two I would definitely recommend would be Sarah Fine's book "Only Between Us" (writing as Mila Ferrera), and Ashley Munoz's book "The Rest of Me". Both of these have incredibly strong characters and I was rooting for everyone. I've loved pretty much every Sarah Fine book I've ever read (and could read her Guardians of The Shadowlands books again and again) but I'd never heard of Ashley Munoz before. I'll certainly be looking for more from her.
Has anyone else suddenly discovered they're addicted to a new genre, out of the blue? If so, what genre do you usually read, and what have you suddenly discovered a love of?
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