I'm a reader. SERIOUSLY!

Being a student of Literature often means people expect you to read only that which is considered 'literary.' You know, things like Dostoevsky and Leon Uris and Dickens. These guys make you a 'serious' reader. Ok, so I read these guys. Like them a lot in most part. Maybe not Dostoevsky or Tolstoy...Russian writers are compulsively depressing and I guess you can't blame them. But I like the old-timey classics.

My grandfather would take me book-shopping on the condition that I bought only classics. And not just any classics, the REAL stuff. Catcher in the Rye didn't count. Jules Verne did. Luckily, so did P. G. Wodehouse.

The trouble is that when you're a reader and a Literature student, people assume you read ONLY the 'serious' stuff. Otherwise, you're not a REAL reader.

Now, I don't fit this mould at all. I love Meg Cabot. I squealed and jumped when the last book in the Princess Diaries series came out. I have read Twilight with bated breath and cried at the end of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince because Dumbledore had died and nothing would ever be the same again.

Once every two weeks or so, you'll find me squatting on the floor at Tanna Book Depot in Hong Kong Lane, snuffling my way through stacks of dusty Mills & Boon. My favourite pastime is to sit with a bunch of romance novels and a big bag of chips. And I'm very much a REAL reader, thank you!

A world without Dickens and Alcott and the Brontes would have been at a loss. A world without Austen would have been depressing indeed! But a world without impossible love stories and magic?! Not my kind of place either.