Before the Slump
I was always the kid who had a book with her. Siblings’ sports practices, doctor’s appointments, long road trips, etc. No matter the situation, you could find me nose deep in a minimum inch-thick chapter book. I would walk out of libraries with a stack of books a foot high, and return them before they were due.
Then I turned fourteen. Along with puberty came a years-long reading slump. Books felt boring, or worse, like work. It felt like a waste of my free time to sit down and do something as exciting as watching paint dry. I was too advanced for my usual comfort books, but still a little too young to really comprehend the books that my older siblings and cousins enjoyed.
A few years into this slump, I found myself in the local library during my junior year of high school. I was procrastinating the math homework I definitely should’ve been doing, instead choosing to go for a walk in the adult fiction section. This was a leap for me, as I usually stayed put in the young-adult novels, rarely reading anything besides Divergent, Twilight, and The Hunger Games. I picked up a book purely because of the cover (sue me, I know). It was a non-descript romance you’d find sold in any airport terminal. I read it in less than twelve hours. That book itself didn’t teach me any life-changing moral lessons. But better yet, it reminded me that reading could actually be fun.
Romance Books Did What Nothing Else Could
It wasn’t just that I finished that first book so quickly; I was no stranger to pulling all-nighters just to finish a book I liked. Rather, it was that I didn’t have to convince myself to read it. I wanted to.
Romance novels, especially the kind people love to label as “cheesy”, felt safe in a way I didn’t realize I needed. They were predictable, yes, but in a comforting way. I knew the ending would be a happy one. I knew I would probably like it. There was no pressure to analyze every page or push through something that felt like homework.
For the first time in a long time, reading felt like a hobby again. I could pick up a book and trust that it wouldn’t waste my time or leave me frustrated or sad. That feeling mattered more than I expected it to. I needed something I could rely upon. Romance gave me that. Over time, I reached for the TV remote less and less, and used my library card more and more.
And yes, some of them are cheesy. Formulaic, even. I won’t pretend otherwise. But here’s the thing about “cheesy”: it’s only a negative if you let it be. Romance novels are bringing people back to reading in a massive way, and they deserve all the credit. I own being a romance-novel nerd. There is no use in being embarrassed about something that makes you happy.
What I valued most, I came to notice, wasn’t even the romance itself. It was the humor, the character development, and the female leads who knew exactly who they were and didn’t shrink down for anyone. I never cared much for the whole damsel-in-distress thing. Give me a woman who can handle her own problems and ALSO get her fairytale-ending romance. That’s the story I want to read.
My Lifelong Relationship with Reading
Let me back up. Even before my romance novel era, reading had been a part of my life in ways I didn’t fully appreciate at the time.
I used to bring books with me everywhere, including St. Louis Cardinals baseball games. I think there is a photo of me reading in the green seats with a bag of peanuts on my lap (why the tickets were wasted on me is a mystery). Sure, we were on track to win the World Series that year, but I’m just getting to the good part!
Reading also showed up in more unexpected ways. I took so much pride in how much I absorbed from books. I always won the classroom spelling bee, and when my parents and grandparents would show up to watch me at the school-wide bee, it meant the world to me. Small moments like those gave me proof that books were doing something for me, even when I wasn’t directly acknowledging it.
One of the strongest memories I have surrounding reading is a cross-country RV trip I took with my dad and siblings when I was around eleven. Turns out, when you’re in the back of an RV for hours a day with no cell service, you go through books pretty fast. We would stop to stock up, but it was no match for me. I had no choice but to pick up whatever my siblings were done reading (I guess I could’ve gone outside, but that wasn’t remotely as interesting to me). I was a strong enough reader that the words themselves were no issue. What I didn’t realize at the time was how foreign the concepts in those books were to an incoming sixth-grader. I didn’t understand the nuance and depth of everything I was reading, but I was completely immersed anyway. Yikes, the questions I probably asked my sister. Sorry sis!
Looking back, those times feel like early signs of the same thing I would later rediscover. Reading wasn’t just a fun hobby; it was how I grew to understand and discover the world, even when I didn’t recognize that at the time.
I Needed Something New
For a good while, I was all about romance novels. I had a rhythm. I knew what I liked, I knew where to find it, and I never went anywhere without my Kindle. But gradually, without much notice, books began to blur together. I would finish one and immediately pick up another, and somewhere along the line I’d lose track of which story I was in. The plotlines started to feel familiar in a way that was more annoying than comforting. It wasn’t that I was over romance. I just needed a breath of fresh, book-scented air.
The drift from romance was slow and completely unplanned. I found myself picking up books that had romance mixed in, but weren’t entirely centered on it. A little bit of everything. Then I wandered into non-fiction entirely, which honestly surprised me. Autobiographies, PR and communications, self-empowerment, etc. The whole nine yards. The first one that really grabbed me was Michelle Obama’s memoir, Becoming. It was a game-changer, honestly. I realized I loved learning from real people’s stories and experiences just as much as I loved fictional ones. Something about reading a real person’s story, getting to experience it through their writing, felt more intimate than fiction. I’ll never get to truly walk in someone else’s shoes, but I’d argue a good author gets you pretty close.
I also started paying attention to what I actually valued in the romance novels I loved most, and it was not what I expected. The soulmate trope is fun and dreamy, sure. But what kept me turning pages was something else entirely: the wit, the humor, the bravery, the slow and satisfying process of watching a character figure herself out. Reading, I’ve come to understand, is a form of studying life. You practice empathy without realizing it. You absorb examples of healthy communication, boundary-setting, and problem-solving, all from sitting quietly with a book. The genre almost doesn’t matter. The learning happens anyway.
Where I Am Now
My reading life looks almost nothing like it did six years ago, and nothing like it did at the peak of my romance era either. It’s jumbled and unique, just like me, which I think is the whole point.
I rotate. Romance when I need comfort, when life feels heavy and overwhelming, and I just want a guaranteed happy ending and a character I can root for without doubt. Non-fiction when I want to feel inspired, or learn something new, or spend time in someone else’s head and get out of mine for a bit. Mysteries keep me on my toes when I want to be. A little bit of everything else, too. Except horror. Absolutely not.
I recently finished The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley and loved every page of it. Sunrise on the Reaping, the most recent Hunger Games installment, landed easily in my top five books of 2025 and brought me back to how much I love a dystopian young adult novel.
Reading looks a little different from how it used to. It is still a hobby, still something I do because I love it, but it’s also something more now. It’s a place for me to live in a perspective completely different than my own, and learn from it rather than judge it. I read because it makes me a more curious, more patient, more thoughtful person, and I genuinely believe that.
And yes, I still love a romance novel. It is a genre near and dear to my heart, and I do not see that changing. It was the genre that brought me back to myself as a reader, and I will always come back to it when I need a boost.
It’s Not That Deep, Just Read
I know this one was a long one. But if you read anything, read this part. This article isn’t about romance novels. It’s about what happens when you stop barring what kinds of media and art you let yourself consume, and instead just let yourself enjoy.
There is a person out there who’ll wrinkle their nose at a romance novel and call it cheap, or easy, or not real literature. I understand that impulse, even if I disagree with it wholeheartedly. We have all been conditioned to assign value and importance to difficulty, and to treat struggle as a sign that something is worth our attention. That logic quickly falls apart when applied to reading. Most people aren’t struggling to choose between picking up a cheesy romance or a difficult piece of classic literature. They’re struggling to pick up any book at all. If a book about falling in love with a prince, or a cowboy, or a football player gets you to sit down and turn a page, that book has done its job. No genre is beneath another if it brings you back to reading.
Romance did not just fill a slump for me. It rebuilt my relationship with reading from the ground up. It reminded me that books are something to look forward to, not something you grit your teeth through and endure. It gave me back a hobby I thought I had lost for good, and that hobby has since opened doors I never would have walked through otherwise.
That girl in the library, the one procrastinating her math homework and wandering out of the dedicated teen stacks for the first time, was just looking for an escape. Something to lift her spirits and give her a reason to look forward to the end of the day. That beat-up sports romance she grabbed off the shelf gave her more than she bargained for. It gave her a hobby. An identity. Something to talk about with people, to get excited over, to bond with strangers about in the way that only books can do.
If you are in a slump, I am not going to tell you to challenge yourself or read something deemed worthy. I am telling you to go find the book that feels like an escape, the one with the cover that catches your eye, the one some might roll their eyes at. Start there.