Reading Binge....

I've been on a serious reading binge lately...reading stuff totally outside my normal reading habits, and, surprisingly enough, really enjoying it. I've discovered several new (to me) authors in the process, and that's always exciting.

This is how it started--my elderly cat started having seizures a few weeks ago. Her favorite place to sit is up on the window sills. They're not narrow little sills, but very wide ones, actually part of the radiator box, I guess. So it's nice and warm and sunny and a great place for watching the birds and squirrels in the yard. But a couple of times, she's started having a seizure while up there, and fallen off. It's a long way down to the hardwood floors below, so until we got her medication right, I really needed to keep her off them.

So, being the bibliophile that I am, I stacked books all over the window ledges in my room (because hey, nothing says 'decor' more than piles of books, right?!). They were mostly books I had received for free at conferences but never read, because they just weren't the type of book I normally go for (some were just extra copies of my own books that happened to be lying around the room).

But then one night I decided I needed something to read before bed, and, being too lazy to go downstairs to my office (where most of my books are), I started eyeing the stacks of books in the windows. My gaze landed on Kristin Higgans' TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE (contemporary romance), and the back blurb sounded interesting, so I cracked it open and gave it a try. I stayed up till 3 a.m. finishing that book that night--I couldn't put it down!

That one went back to the window sill when I was done, and I picked up Barbara Freethy's SUDDENLY ONE SUMMER, the first book in the Angel's Cove series (I don't even know how to classify this one--romantic suspense lite, I guess? Women's fiction with suspense?). Read it in two sittings, and now I can't wait for the next book in the series.

Then I picked up and older, hardcover book--Lisa Gardner's THE KILLING HOUR (romantic suspense, I guess?). Suffice it to say that I'm now a big Lisa Gardner fan, and have since ordered/read another of her titles (THE NEIGHBOR) on my Kindle.

Another pleasant surprise was Joyce Maynard's LABOR DAY (just plain fiction, I guess?).

I swear, I look at those stacks of books with fresh eyes, now. Instead of "books I got for free that aren't the type I read," they're now "fresh possibilities" or "new (to me) authors just waiting to be discovered." How exciting!

Have you ever read something outside the box of what you normally read and found that you enjoyed it?