67: The Romance Reader
So, after dinner today, my husband and I walked into the bookstore, and two things happened that has never or rarely (?) happened before:
1) my husband found a book to buy almost immediately, and I tried and tried and tried, but couldn't (!?) find one.
2) I talked romance books with stranger.
The first scenario wasn't so much of a "Oh, you go ahead and buy your book, honey, I don't have have anything to buy right now" scenario but more of a "I get 20% off on this book if I buy it with another book; go and find one." In other words, I had a free pass to buy a book--any book, and I just couldn't find one. The horror!
Part of it has to do with already having bought three books last month and they're still on my TBR; another part is that I had a few titles/author in mind, but I wasn't prepared to buy them yet unless I tried them (borrowing, etc.)
The funny part was that this circumstance led to the second thing that had never happened to me before.
I circled the romance shelves so often that finally someone--who I noticed was browsing with a book list (whoa) in her hands--came up to me and asked me if I had any recommendations. She explained that she was out of new books to try and the best way she'd found to discover new authors was to ask fellow browsers in the romance section, guessing that these browsers were also like her: readers who really like their romance.
We spent about ten minutes exchanging titles and authors, and talked about what we liked ("she writes really loveable characters") and what we didn't like ("after a while, it was like everything was the same thing over and over again"). I showed her the books on my iPad; she showed me her list. I tried to vary my suggestions as much as I could, since I'd only read half of the authors she shared with me--and some I loved, some I didn't-- so I hoped she liked the books I recommended.
She ended up getting a basket and filling it up, which was pretty awesome, and I picked up one of her recommendations, belatedly realizing that I had a similar problem that she could help with! I'm also going to try out another author she recommended--one I didn't like, but she said that another series by the same author was better.
In the end, though, I told her that this was the first time anyone's struck up a conversation before while at the romance section to talk about romance books, and I thought that was pretty cool. She explained that no one among her friends or family read romances (when they found out, they asked her, "So, what intelligent books do you read?" We both rolled our eyes.) and that people who browsed the romance sections were great sources of recommendations. She started to tell me where/who led her to discover which authors, which I thought was very, very cool.
We parted ways, promising to say hi to each other if we ended up seeing each other at the bookstores. ^_^ I hope so. It was really very nice to connect with someone who loves the genre, and more than that, I just remembered a whole bunch of other great authors I would have loved to recommend.