My Personal 100 Books To Read List - Part Two of Four

I was intending to get to this a little sooner, but now that The Problem with Witches is done and ready for its June 30 release, I’m hoping I can get on a better schedule with this four-part series about my personal 100-book list. So thanks for your patience, and on to Part Two!

In Stand by Me, Stephen King says the friendships we have when we’re 12 have a depth and tone like no other friendships we have in our life, making their impact on our lives unforgettable. I think the books you discover in your teens, the feelings you have when you first read them, are like that. While romance and fantasy have always been my lifelong passions, my teen years were an exploration of many different ways of telling a wonderful story, including romance. So let’s call this second part of my 100 Book List blog series:

The Age of Harlequin, Pern and Cosmopolitan Magazine

First, the Romance

Many of the books I read before age 10 were love stories, but my introduction to love stories framed by the glorious elements of romance happened in my early teens, and they were those formulaic little books known as “category romance.” Harlequin, Circle of Love, Candlelight Ecstasy, Silhouettes… Silhouettes were my favorites. They quickly replaced Harlequin for me, because they were steamier, and were willing to break formula a bit, go deeper into the relationship. Many of our greats in the romance world were breakout stars from the category romance world, where they first gave voice to their inimitable writing styles.

If you’re shaking your head, think about this. We forget what the passage of time does to us. What was so wondrous to us twenty or thirty years ago often looks cheesy or simplistic when held up to the light of our sophisticated tastes today. We recognize a good story in the context of the times in which we live, and at that time, I couldn’t get enough of those little romances. My friend and I devoured them, traded them back and forth, and scoured the library and used bookstores for more.

Plus, this was a pivotal moment for my writing career. We were creative girls, who loved those stories so much that we’d act out our favorite storylines. Figuring out where we’d go next with them, we started putting them down on paper. We’d pass them back and forth during class. Eventually, I was thinking about them all the time, such that I would work on new characters and storylines at home and bring the pages to school. My friends would review and pass me written encouragement in notes under our desks. “Wow! That works! That’s so awesome! You need to publish these!” God/dess bless wonderful friends, lol.

Those stories became my first romance novels. I think I’d written at least half a dozen before high school. I wish I’d kept them. I have no doubt they were overly dramatic teenage scribblings, full of weak craft, but they were the earliest, unfiltered evidence of my deep craving to write love stories.

During this time another key moment occurred. On the annual family summer vacation, I noticed my older cousin and her friend huddled over a book on the beach. They were giggling over the “dirty part.” The book was a much thicker romance than my category romances. When they tired of it, I picked it up. Yes, of course, I read that dog-eared section (I was younger, but close enough to that hormone-driven episode of teen life to be curious), but then I started on page one. I read it from cover to cover, and for the first time in my life, a romance made me cry.

That book was Ashes in the Wind by Kathleen Woodiwiss. It was a significant step closer to what I ultimately would strive to write; an intense, well-written love story with strong romance and erotic elements. I didn’t want to stop at the bedroom door. I wanted that intensity and emotion to happen there, too. And the sex shouldn’t be a rote Slot A in Tab B titillation scene before the “real story” could resume.

So category romances were left behind as I migrated over to a mix of what this “behind the bedroom door” romance genre offered. Pretty much all of Woodiwiss, but also classic bodice rippers like Bold, Breathless Love by Valerie Sherwood. That book stuck in my head, because the heroine is torn between her first love and a dashing pirate captain. A pirate captain who, when she thinks her first love is dead, makes love to her over and over, to give her the will to live. Yep, total forced seduction scene, and my teen self mulled over that one quite a bit. But at this point, I wasn’t experienced enough to understand why that premise was catching my attention so thoroughly. So, let’s put a pin in that until Part three of this discussion (grin).[But I will note that the dog-eared portion of Ashes in the Wind that so captivated my cousin and her friend was also the forced seduction scene in that book.]

There were lighter-handed romances which still made an impression, like Bride of the MacHugh (which resulted in my reading a LOT of Sottish romances, all leading to my forever love, Jamie Fraser in Outlander), and the Dawn of Desire trilogy, set in ancient Egypt. Then came LaVyrle Spencer. Sigh. In the same class as Kathleen Woodiwiss, this was a woman who knew how to write a LOVE STORY. She’d weave in those classic romance elements I loved, but that core love story was something that made me think, “Yes, this is how it should be done.” I am not a Western romance reader, yet The Gamble is my favorite of all her wonderful books. Another lesson learned – it’s not the genre/setting that matters. It’s the characters and the nature of their love story.

I read so many books in the same vein of Woodiwiss and Spencer during this time that they should be crowded into my 100-book list like nested files, but these were the frontrunners. And though I’ll expand on it more in Part 3, this is where the essential seeds were being planted for my love of erotic romance. Because the books I most loved were the ones where the erotic moments took the relationship between the characters to a deeper, even more intense level—and often had strong D/s undercurrents to them.

Next, Other Books

You’ve probably heard a lot of us author types say that reading diverse genres is important, drawing upon different styles and approaches to develop your own unique voice. Genre fiction focuses on telling a good, entertaining story, and the greatest authors in their respective genres include unforgettable content that inspires, elevates and enlightens. Around the time I was reading lots of romance, there were other books, not romances, that made an impact on my idea of what a good story contains. The wondrous thing about books is they’re a house with endless rooms, and we can spend time in all of them.

So, here’s where Cosmopolitan magazine enters the picture. Right about the time I discovered Woodiwiss, I was petsitting for a lady who had a subscription to Cosmopolitan. They used to do LONG book excerpts (maybe they still do), which is where I discovered a generous excerpt from The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum. I went on a major binge with him, with The Holcroft Covenant, Materese Circle and Parsifal Mosaic becoming favorites. It led me to other male suspense writers, including Sidney Sheldon and Harold Robbins, specifically The Adventurers and books like Shibumi by Trevanian (with a brief though memorable Tantric sex scene). I’ve never been a great suspense writer, but these books did show me how you can integrate strong characterization into a complicated story arc, which I think helped me substantially with my more action/politically heavy books like Vampire Queen series. I’m sure they aided the suspense elements of books like Natural Law.

You also may be wondering, did assigned school reading provide me any direction in my development as a writer? For the benefit and reinforcement of English teachers everywhere, I am happy to say that it did. As I wrote this section, I realized I overlooked a very important entry on my first post, my pre-teen book reading, so if you don’t mind, I’ll include a note of it here. Forgive me, but going back 40-50 years to recall what books inspired me when was a bit of a challenge. I have trouble with timelines in my books – it shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that I have the same trouble in my own life, lol.

Anyhow, in 5th grade Junior Great Books club I discovered Les Miserables, thanks to a dramatic reading of several scenes from the book. I was caught up in Eponine’s broken-heartedness, because of how much she loved Marius, though he barely noticed her. I read the whole book and it was my enduring favorite for years. The real stories in Les Mis have nothing to do with Marius and Cosette. Eponine’s unrequited love for Marius, the self-sacrificing love of Fantine for her daughter, the main figure of Jean Valjean, doing his best for those around him while being a fugitive – those are the truly memorable stories in the book, whereas Marius and Cosette’s love, so clueless and untested, cushioned as they were by everyone else’s sacrifices around them, held no real substance. VERY important writing lesson for me there.

Now, fast forward a couple years. I had a remarkable English teacher in high school. While I’m not a big fan of teachers who try to impose their religious or political viewpoints on their students, she had a passion for Native American spirituality, and spent the first three weeks of her class on it. (She VERY loosely tied it to Native American storytelling forms to justify teaching it in English, lol.) I think those three weeks helped open me up to the Wiccan faith I eventually embraced (which has a strong foundation in shamanic principles). When I was working on what would eventually be my first published book, an epic fantasy called Guardians of the Continuum, I explored that faith more deeply, because it intersected with the magical elements of the book.

She also had us read Self Reliance by Emerson and Walden Pond by Thoreau. I think those (along with my mother’s unflagging practicality, no matter the crisis) helped me understand the line between dramatic angst, that has us rooting for a character to overcome emotional obstacles, find love and happiness, and whiny wallowing self-indulgence. Hence, no whiny vampires for me, beating their breasts over being “monsters.”

This English teacher also introduced me to The Scarlet Letter. Here was another book that stuck with me, because it was about love and how it can be so sorely tested. One particular line has remained with me throughout the years: “And still they lingered,” referring to how Hester and John stayed in the woods a little longer after their fateful, sad meeting. I can remember the way my English teacher said that line, with such dramatic emphasis. As teens, of course we thought she was implying SEX happened, and maybe it did, but that wasn’t my takeaway from it. It was the power of subtle suggestion, which has such a vital place in every great love story, where sometimes the simplest touch can be more erotic than even the most passionate embrace. A very significant point for a burgeoning erotic romance writer (grin).

An important final note on “other genres.” One of my friends and I also discovered a dramatized biography, Mrs. Mike the true life love story of Sergeant Mike and Katherine Flannigan. That set me on the path of reading a lot of biography, which took me deeper into all the layers of a character’s personality.

Last but not Least – Fantasy

In my first blog about my earliest readings, I noted a love of fantasy was already there, with the Taran Wanderer series and other books. In my teen years, my already existing interest in fantasy literature gravitated me toward authors who brought together fantasy and romance, as well as drew in the deeper spiritual elements that can often be accessed through those channels of fantasy and love. If you’re not sure what I mean, think of the pivotal source of Harry Potter’s survival of Voldemort’s attack – his mother’s love.

My teen years were not my best years. High strung, creative and melodramatic (I am aware that melodramatic teen is pretty much an oxymoron, lol), I struggled a lot with depression and anxiety, and I hated school. Hated it with a passion that put me into therapy, where the verdict was that I was 14 going on 40, an accelerated maturity (in some respects) that made institutionalized education a suffocating, anxiety-inducing trap to me. So needless to say, I’m not one of those people who long to return to my school days. But what I do remember was all the time I had to read books. I would LOVE to have those long expanses of time to do that again. Books, the love of the story, helped me more than I realized at the time. I might be struggling, but the next story was always waiting to provide a respite. And authors who could mix love stories, remarkable characters and a fantasy world in ways that would make me long so much to be in them? Yeah, no brainer there on who became my favorites.

So along with the contemporary romances and spy novels came Anne McCaffrey with her Dragonriders of Pern. As did Mary Stewart with her Crystal Cave trilogy and Marion Zimmer Bradley with Mists of Avalon. At 15-16, I had a boyfriend who loved The Thomas Covenant Chronicles. Thomas was a tortured anti-hero (stricken with leprosy) catapulted from our world into a high fantasy world, a story driven very much by his character. This series and many others like it that I found afterward showed me the pleasure of telling a story about how someone facing so many personal obstacles could embrace the best in themselves.

Though I am not a classic sci-fi reader (due to my strong deficiency in the part of the brain that understands science), I dabbled in some Frank Herbert, specifically The Jesus Incident and White Plague, because they also had a focus on good characters and spiritualism.

So that’s a glimpse of my teen years. Whew. I think this was the hardest of the segments to write, because it was the most voracious reading time of my life. For every book I mentioned, I feel like I’ve probably left a hundred out. In Part Three, I’ll show how all the influences of Part One and Two joined the books I read on the threshold of my writing career to drive what I’d eventually write – BDSM Romance!

Here’s the “teen year” portion of my 100 book list:

Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (should be on Part One list, but forgot)

Self Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne

Walden Pond - Henry David Thoreau

Bride of the MacHugh by Jan Cox Speas

Dawn of Desire Trilogy by Joyce Verrette

The Gamble by LaVyrle Spencer

Bold, Breathless Love by Valerie Sherwood

Ashes in the Wind by Kathleen Woodiwiss

Mrs. Mike by Benedict and Ann Freeman

Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley

The Crystal Cave trilogy by Mary Stewart

Lion of Ireland by Morgan Llywelyn

Dragonriders of Pern (first trilogy) by Anne McCaffrey

Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen Donaldson (first trilogy)

The White Plague by Frank Herbert

Jesus Incident by Frank Herbert

Rage of Angels by Sidney Sheldon

Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ by Lew Wallace

Shibumi by Trevanian

Adventurers by Harold Robbins

The Holcroft Covenant by Robert Ludlum

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June 30 is almost here, and The Problem with Witches releases on that date! Click the title for all pre-order buy links. In the meantime, Chapter One is available at that link, if you want a preview of this crossover novel between my Knights of the Board Room and Arcane Shot series characters.