Halls of the Dark Muse

Both me and my boyfriend share a great love for reading. And we can often both be found reading in the evenings. We love talking about books with each other, and we both get excited about getting new books, but what we read tends to strongly differ from each other.

While we both have eclectic reading tastes and read a wide variety of different things, our personal preferences in what we normally read and are most partial to reading can be dramatically different. At times it seems when it comes to reading preferences we do a little bit of gender role reversal. What I mean by this is that I oft tend to read things which might be seen as stereotypically masculine, and were originally intended to appeal to a male audience and he reads things which can be seen as stereotypically feminine and had more of a female audience in mind.

One amusing occurrence is when I happened to be reading Moby Dick, and he was reading some Twilightesque book (being one of the books that became popular because of the Twilight series) Of course I do tease him a little bit about this, but it is just one of his endearing quirks.

He does often tend to enjoy reading things which fall in the paranormal romance category, though usually he reads books with a more adult audience in mind, as a lot of his reading is erotic, or semi-erotic in nature.

Such is something I myself never would really consider reading and really never felt a particular inclination to want to read. There is this one series that he really likes a lot, and frequently tells me about it, and he knows I do not share his particular reading preferences, but he told me that he thinks I might find this series interesting. And there was this other series he told me about because the books feature Artemis and he knows I do feel a close connection with the goddess Artemis.

So I agreed I would give these two series a chance. I found copies of the first book in each series which I could download onto my ipad. I have not started reading them yet, but the Artemis one I plan to read as part of my Summer vacation reading.

Music is also another one of those things in which we both share a love of music, and both have a strongly personal connection to music, but what we typically listen to tends to be very different. While I am open to music from all genres, if I am going to turn on the radio and when I am really in the mood to listen to some music, most frequently I will choose Hard Rock, which includes bands such as Tool, NIN, Godsmack, System of Down etc.. dark edgy music about rage, angst, rebellion.

My boyfriend tends to favor more sentimental music, and enjoys a lot of country, of which typically I am not a fan of. When the two of us were in the process of mending fences and working on reconnecting and reestablishing our relationship, it was actually very sweet, he sent my a playlist of songs, mostly romantic in nature, that he really enjoys listening to and really connect to him personally. A lot of the songs listed were music that normally I would not really listen to or consider. But coming from him I really enjoy listening to the music, and even though it is outside my usual some of the songs I have really come to like and will periodically be in the mood to play one of his songs.