Tackling the backlog

I'm going to try and fight the temptation to re-read the Julie Garwood novels I have on my bookshelf. I've read so many of her novels that I could probably quote some scenes from her books. Besides, I need to start exposing myself to some other voices.

Right now I have Hannah Lowell's Highland Warrior, which is another historical. I grabbed it off of the bookshelf at Barnes and Noble on the recommendation of the woman standing next to me. I'd never done that before but I figured what the heck and went ahead and bought it. As the title suggests, it's set in Scotland, which always scores points for me as a reader.

But given that the last novel that I read was a historical, I think I'm going to change direction even further this time. I have Susan Sizemore's Master of Darkness up next in my queue, and I'll probably start on it this weekend. I'm not even sure when or why I bought this one. I probably thought the back cover blurb sounded intriguing, and for a while I really tried to seek out authors I'd never read before.

I like paranormals, but I've really lost interest in vampires in the past decade. I devoured Maggie Shayne's Born in Twilight from her Twilight Series. Despite this being the second one in the series, I managed to follow the storyline without feeling like I'd missed anything. Reading Born in Twilight started my love of Shayne's emotional depth in creating her characters. I prefered it to her immortal witches series.

Shayne set a pretty high bar, since her take on vampire novels was my first exposure to "vamps." I tried some other authors and I couldn't get into their books as easily as I did with Shayne's. I read as many of her vampire novels as I could in the countryside where I lived at the time.

Soon I developed a preference for witches, due to the first few seasons of Charmed before Prue turned descended from a competent auction house antiques expert into a bumbling photographer. Add in the success of the movie version of Alice Hoffman's Practical Magic, and I'd found some heroines that I could relate to. I admire Hoffman's ability to mix an ethereal set of powers with a sense of impending doom for the men in the Owen sisters' lives.

Before the bad fashion and overblown silliness, Charmed had potential to really explore the sisters' feelings of helplessness when faced with a charge they couldn't help or wondering what their place in the world once they became the Charmed Ones would really be. My favorite scene in the first few seasons of the show featured an apprehensive Piper worrying that being a witch would mean that she'd no longer be welcome in a Christian church. As she sat in the car, she worried that simply walking across the threshold of a Catholic church would lead to her being struck down with the proverbial bolt of lightning. Her relief when she entered and excited the church unscathed was wonderfully touching and obviously still stays with me today.

Well, now it's time to tackle the pile of books by the couch.