Reading + Talking Meme

the_rck asked: Looking back over the years, do you see changes in your preferences for reading material? That could be styles, genres, authors, whatever things seem to you to have changed. I'm not thinking so much of changing from picture books to chapter books to YA as you grew up (though that could be interesting, too, if that's where it takes you).

This is a really interesting question. I still love all the genres I liked as a child/adolescent (science fiction, mythology, fantasy) with the exception of romance. I read a looooot of Old Skool romance as a pre-teen/teen, some of it pretty hardcore (mostly het, but lots of Old Skool het romance novels have a surprising amount of lesbian content). I don't dislike romance now, but I don't seek it out, and I am fairly disinterested in reading explicit sexual content at this point.

I still love the authors that have been very important to me over the course of my reading life (like Margaret Atwood or A.S. Byatt) although some of the books I loved as a kid don't hold up as well on adult re-reads.

The one real shift I've seen in my reading is that when I was in high school I hated 19th century British literature. I found Great Expectations excruciating. I only liked A Tale of Two Cities marginally because it made me think of Star Trek. So what did I fall head over heels with in undergrad? Victorian lit by way of Austen. I took an Austen class, fell in love with her, and then segued into devouring all the Victorian lit I could get my hands on.

( Review of Art in Fashion; thanks to Executrix for sending this to me! )