The Books I've Read

A Life of Reading


My Beautiful Signed Books

As a child, nearly every book I read was about horses: The Black Stallion series, My Friend Flicka, Black Beauty, and the books by Marguerite Henry come to mind. I lived very dreamily in those books until I got my own horses. I rarely read anything but Arabian horse and animal husbandry books from my teens through my thirties. All that changed when a friend recommended this novel to me in 1992. I enjoyed reading it so much my predilection for fiction was born. I bought, read, and then donated hundreds of print novels before discovering the perfect format for me—eBooks, which I read on my Kindle Paperwhite. I've kept an electronic book database of the books I've read since 1996, and my current database contains over 4,200 books. 

While no one read to me as a child, I began reading to my daughter before she was born. I continued reading to her until she was old enough to read to me! 

I am happily (and almost exclusively) ensconced in the romance genre, although I do enjoy others. While I can't seem to help getting all dreamy over happily-ever-after endings I'm too much of a pragmatist to believe they exist anywhere other than in books. And even though I read novels featuring alpha males, erotica, and BDSM, I will always favor the respectful guys.

My favorite categories in fiction are romantic suspense, contemporary romance, erotic romance, mysteries, suspense, thrillers, and historical. I also delve a little out of my fiction comfort zone to read select fantasy/paranormal books. When it comes to non-fiction I am most interested in history, maritime history, and biographies. Those must-read classics and some literature, that I somehow avoided earlier in life, are finally getting my attention. Better late than never, right?
 
My Book Preferences
  • Life's too short to read books I don't like. Those one-star reads always end up as DNF (did not finish).
  • A five-star rating doesn't mean I think the book is perfect. It means I think it's amazing despite any "imperfections."
  • I enjoy dual timeline stories but have a strong aversion to extensive flashbacks.
  • I will stop reading a book if there are too many characters introduced right away. 
  • I prefer snappy dialogue and little to no rambling inner monologues.
  • As in real life, I absolutely deplore excessive SMS shorthand!
  • While I can accept a certain amount of the "eye dialect" style of writing, I get irritated when it goes to the extreme.
  • I always favor the "good guys" and don't want to spend much time in the point of view of the "bad guys." If the book ends in favor of the bad guys...I WILL HATE IT!
  • While I find great writing inspiring, I genuinely enjoy a good read purely for entertaining escapism.
  • Real life is tough. I need those happy endings! 
Featured Book Reviews
Featured Entries
My Years in Review
Related Items
 Indie Book Stores I've Ordered Signed Books From
 (rev. 09/15/2022)

Comments
https://www.valeehill.net/p/the-books-ive-read.html
www.valeehill.net
crawl=CC-MAIN-2022-40
145399
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:2BGMOVGK4TJMNOL5TXB6GP2MJ2T27DLS
<urn:uuid:a08cacd9-197a-444d-ba95-915d51642764>
2022-09-28T22:46:44Z
142.250.65.83
application/xhtml+xml
sha1:6GTPSBI7ERSRSUZ324SQLOB52KSU4VST
<urn:uuid:e8c41497-4831-4f04-bfb6-775b7b365805>
https://www.valeehill.net/p/the-books-ive-read.html
response
<urn:uuid:a6f3cb5a-e554-47f4-85dd-36f3d44e55d7>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2022-40
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for September/October 2022
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-120
software: Apache Nutch 1.19 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.4-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/