My Literary Love Affairs

Disclaimer: I admit it, I’m a nerd. If you do not wish to have further proof of this fact, please, spare yourself.

I was never one to have a multitude of boyfriends, a following of admirers, or a long list of passionate romances to boast of. Growing up, I was the admirer rather than the admired; less the crush, and more the crusher. lol. However, (and what a lovely “however” it is), what follows is not a laundry list of real and unrequited loves, but rather a list of my literary loves (just the major ones). Yes, those poets, writers, genres, and literary movements I have had serious literary crushes on throughout the years:

Folklore and Mythology
In elementary school, I went through a stage where I devoured up every book in the library about fairy tales around the world and about the gods and goddesses who meddled with mortals as they ate ambrosia on top of Mount Olympus. Athena was my favorite. She was the most levelheaded. She never got jealous of other gods or mortals, and when she did intervene, it was always in a helpful way. She was the goddess of wisdom, after all.

Judy Blume
Next, I went through a Judy Blume phase where all of my heroines were adolescent girls coming of age, having crushes on boys and experiencing first kisses. My favorite book from that phase was Just as Long as We’re Together.

R.L. Stine
Then, R.L. Stine hit the YA Literature circuit, and I devoured book after book about obsessive behavior, eerie coincidences, and paranormal activity. The scariest ones were from his Fear Street series.

Choose Your Own Adventure
I also became obsessed with those “choose your own adventure” books—the ones where if you make a certain choice, then you turn to a certain page, and you either end up meeting a fate worse than death or becoming the mightiest hero (or heroine).

Edgar Allan Poe
Once junior high hit, and I read “The Cask of Amontillado” in 7th grade Language Arts class, I developed a serious literary crush on Edgar Allan Poe. I pined after him, trying to imitate his style. At that time, I just loved that dark, eerie, morbid, dramatically ending stuff; I even wrote a series of short stories trying to be a young, modern day, female EAP.

Historical Fiction
As the high school years rolled along, I took an interest in historical fiction. Any story set long ago and far away and surrounding some historical event or time piqued my interest. The most beloved book from this phase is entitled Wolf by the Ears. It tells the story of Harriet Hemmings, one of Thomas Jefferson’s daughters by his (now DNA proven) slave mistress, Sally Hemmings. Another was Of Nightingales That Weep, a story of the daughter of a samurai warrior in feudal Japan.

William Shakespeare
Though my crush on EAP subsided, I developed a new, quite passionate one on William Shakespeare. Though Romeo and Juliet was my introduction to him, I became obsessed with Julius Caesar. Mark Antony, with his uncanny ability to use the “power of speech to stir men’s blood,” enchanted me. My 11th grade research paper analyzed his funeral oration. “Honorable men.” Ha!

The Harlem Renaissance
Though I had an introduction to it in high school, during the beginnings of my college years, my African American Lit class plunged me into the hip, short-lived world of the Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes became my main man and my guide through the fast-paced world infused with and inspired by jazz and the blues, a place where the Negro was in vogue but still denied a piece of the American Pie, where rent parties were a daily event, and where “passing” was a not-so-new phenomenon.

Currently . . .
For a while there, I took a fiction hiatus and got into non-fiction. I read about Americans living in poverty, about the Enron scandal, about the opinions the rest of the world has about Americans, and the list goes on. The most recent non-fiction book that blew me completely away was Blink by Malcolm Gladwell—the power of thinking without thinking. Now I’m slowly opening back up to fiction . . . when I have time to read for pleasure, that is.