Again and again, friends would respond with a suggestion, only to see someone else chime in and point out that, actually, Watership Down and East of Eden do have romantic and sexual themes, you simply forgot. Romance is so taken for granted that we often don’t register it, the way we rarely register if all the characters in a novel are white. This message affects our values and our hopes, all while fading so cleanly into the background that it’s barely even evident.
