Mirroring that ubiquitous "Jerry Maguire" reference, I'm here to tell you: Erin McCarthy ‘had me at,' "Josie Adkins had to stop waving her hot little a** in Houston's face, or he was going to have to slide his hands across it and squeeze."
Given my penchant for a hot-n-joyful romance, you may infer why those opening lines of McCarthy's super-sexy and emotionally intimate, "Houston, We Have a Problem" help make it the book at the top of my "Just Ten More Minutes, Mom!" list of go-to re-reads I hit before tucking into what usually turns out to be sweet dreams, indeed.
There's just something mightily comforting about picking up an old favorite before we drift off. Maybe it harkens back to those dreamy days of childhood when reading was almost forbidden to those of us scolded for bringing books to the table, to family gatherings, to situations in which our sensitive-to-such-things parents were convinced we loved reading and learning enough, already, and probably could stand a little nurturing of the old social skills instead.
But at night, we snuck under the covers with our trusty penlights to read past bedtime, only to be woken bleary eyed the next morning and hustled off to camp or a day of Scooby-Doo watching by siblings who thought we were kind of goofy for reading
"Witch of Blackbird Pond" yet again, when we already knew how it turned out.
As one grows older, one realizes, perhaps, oh, I dunno, that girls who had
older sisters who read Jackie Collins and Harlequin Presents may have been
having more fun between the vellum sheets at bedtime. Surely their
escalating frustrated cries of ‘just one more minute, Mom!" added new meaning to the term "summer reading fun."
Since I didn't condescend to read romance till I hit my late 30s, I'm doing my
best to compensate for all that lost "reading in bed" time by devouring lots of
healthy little midnight snacks of sexy re-reads like McCarthy's "Houston, We Have a Problem ."
In "Houston," icy-cool,
sexy-hot surgeon Houston Hayes is dazed and confused whenever he's around
surgical resident Josie Adkins. Quirky, curvy Josie worships Houston and has a big ole puppy crush on him
to boot. Houston's
sure that one steamy night with Josie is all he needs to work her out of his
system. When tragedy visits his
regimented, precise life, Josie has other ideas about what Houston really needs.
As you can imagine, what Houston and Josie really need is likely to keep you up all night, many, many glorious nights. Since part of the fun of being a reader is the joy of being a re-reader, remember that those nights don't have to be all in a row. Here's to summer reading fun!
What's at the top of your ‘go-to' list of re-reads? Tell us about your childhood relationship with books...
Melissa_W
on
Michelle, I think you would really like Lizzie Skurnick's new book Shelf Discovery about all the YA books we all loved. 
And I've started re-reading several of my old favorites since I've got this crazy project to read all the Newbery Medal winners.
