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The Best Romance Novels

I picked up my first romance novel when I was 11 years old some may say that was a bit young to be reading about passion, but I was a rather introverted and mature 11 year old curious about too many things, and very independent. The novel was "Too Much Too Soon" by Jacqueline Briskin, and being honest I wouldn't have even thought about it were it not for the fact that searching my bookcase last week I uncovered it under a pile of college texts about Napoleon. I can actually remember going to the library with a note from my mother giving me permission to be loaned the more adult books, which led me into the world of authors like Judith Krantz, and Barbara Taylor Bradford.

In my teens I devoured books by Krantz, Bradford and the darker (and original) Virginia Andrews (though I am not sure her incestuous works could be considered to be romance in the traditional sense). For a few years I moved away from the romance in favour of the more serious works of literature such as Austen, Bronte, Shakespeare, and the like, all in the name of brain expansion. Once my determination to expand my brain was over (though I admittedly am still a mature student studying for a degree in English Literature), I returned to my original reading love, romance novels.

At aged 17 I started to go to all the second hand bookshops, bought up every single Johanna Lindsey and Jude Deveraux that I could find and read them as quickly as I could. I have ended up owning their entire back catalogues including the books that I only managed to read once because they were so dire. I picked up books like Shanna by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss and Lynda La Plante's only real romance The Legacy and read them through as though books were going out of fashion.

Over the years I have managed to build my collection from a pitiful single book (Too Much Too Soon) to a collection that includes everything by Johanna Lindsey, Judith McNaught, Julie Garwood, Jude Deveraux and Catherine Coulter, as well as a smaller collection of books by Kat Martin, Julia Quinn, and Amanda Quick, all pretty good historical romance authors though some have started to regurgitate their work a little and are becoming less than original.

Romance, unlike any other genre of novel, simply because of the reality that there is apparently romance in everything, has several sub-genres, among them are; horror, fantasy, sci-fi (including time-travel and futuristic), historical, contemporary, crime, chicklit, and erotica. Romance

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