Growing up poor, I owned no books that were not textbooks. During my high school years, as I traversed through the passages of puberty with hormones raging, I was not alone on that journey. My affluent classmates were on the trip too, but they could afford to purchase novels. Mills & Boon romance novels were our casual reading materials.
We devoured them, living romance vicariously through these novels as if they were the bread of life. The poorer classmates were permitted to borrow them and allotted two days to read and return them. I read about romance by lamplight until the wee hours in the mornings, making sure to return the books on time so that I could borrow the next purchase.
I can still smell the white gardenias of Sardinia and envision the winding staircase of a mansion in Somerset. Oh, to be young again! What is inexplicable today, is that I dislike romance novels, though they once opened up my imagination to the world as a teenager. I have remained an avid reader but am selective in the books I read. A few of my favourite books include In the Skin of a Lion, The Call of the Wild, Wide Sargasso Sea, and The Constant Gardener.
