Have You Ever Had An Emotional Reaction To A Book?

When I was a teenager I started out reading Horror and couldn't get enough of it for a time. I loved being scared, being so scared that I had to leave the light on when I went to sleep. I remember reading Silence of the Lambs and having to stop because my heart was pounding out of my chest. I put the book in my lap for a few minutes and was actually shaking.

But it's not just Horror books that get an emotional reaction from me. I remember going through a Historical Romance phase where I gobbled up every Historical Romance I could find and I don't remember the title of the book but the supposed hero had me so mad at him, I wanted to throw the book against the wall and scratch his eyes out.

In some books there's the attraction first, the betrayal in the middle of the book where the hero is acting like a real jerk and the heroine gets her feelings hurt and then the ending of the book where they make up, find out there was a miscommunication and if they had just talked and told each other the truth things wouldn't have been so bad.

Now we as readers can see all of this but the characters in the book don't see it until the end and when the hero really does something awful to the heroine like lock her in the dungeon while she is pregnant *which is what happened in the book I cannot for the life of me remember the title of* and he tells her that as soon as she gives birth he is going to take the baby and raise it himself and she'll never see the child again. That made me so mad, I wanted to stop reading the book but I also didn't want to leave without seeing for myself that things didn't end up like that...and of course they didn't. They lived happily ever after, even though he was such a jerk.

The other obvious emotions I've had during reading a book were crying or laughing. To read a particularly funny book like from Kristan Higgins and laugh my butt off because some of her books are hilarious, I just love that.

When an author can write a scene so touching that I actually start crying, that's just amazing because I'm not usually an emotional person. But it does happen at times.

Here recently I've been reading Paranormal Romance and there are some hot, erotic, double teaming type M/M- M/M/F paranormals out there and you can guess what type of emotional response most who read those are going to get, can't you?

Oh and don't even get me started on cliffhanger endings. When I read a book, I want there to be a start, middle and end. Not a start, middle and I'll just leave it open to your own personal imagination on how this ended. What the hell kind of BS is that? You better write an ending to the book and I better be able to say you answered all the questions you had in the book. Especially when it comes to a long series that had all sorts of questions left open during the reading of the different books, when that series ends, I better be able to answer all the questions that I had. Don't tell me that you are working on a follow up series about the kids in the series I just read, or the secondary characters or the serial killer who never got caught...but you'll answer all those questions in the new series based on the series I read and you just ended. No, that will just piss me off and I won't read the new series.

I will say, the one thing I have a hard time reading are books that make me disgusted and there are a few of them out there. I don't mean small gross things like someone having a puss filled sore, no I mean really disgusting things in a book that are there solely for the shock value and nothing more because the book really has nothing more than that in it and if you took the shocking part away you would be left with a book that no one wanted to read anyway.

Let's say for example an author wrote a vampire story about strange alien vampires who could only live off the blood of aborted fetuses...that's the type of disgusting I'm talking about. I'm not going to read something like that. I think the best emotion to have after finishing a book is to be sad because you feel like you really knew the characters and you want to know more about them and read more about their lives and now you're going to have to wait months before you can visit your friends again.