I've been an avid reader for as long as I can remember. My earliest memories of reading were of me working my way through a tiny book on the Smurfs when I was a kid. My earliest memory of buying books was begging my Dad to let me get a box set of Sweet Valley High Books at a Barnes and Noble. All throughout grade school I remember looking forward to the Scholastic Book Sales and those newsprint flyers where we'd get to circle whatever we wanted and it would be delivered to your classroom weeks later (those days always felt like Christmas).
What I'm trying to emphasize is that books have played such an important role in my life for a long time....the better part of my years, long enough for me to not really be able to remember a time where I didn't have a book in my hands. They're a crutch for me, a way to lose myself, a way to find myself, who I thought I could be, and who I wished I was. I remember important events in my life and the books I was reading at the time - struggling while I adjusted to a new school in a new state (Interview with the Vampire); sleeping on my grandma's couch after my parents split and we didn't have a home for almost a year (Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone); sitting at my father's bedside after he suffered a stroke, waiting for him to wake up and realize who I was again. (A Court of Silver Flames). He didn't, by the way. He passed away on March 8th, 2021, and I'll never forget the book I stopped reading when he first suffered that stroke and I visited him in the hospital every single day for a month and reading just didn't seem that important anymore (Wolf Gone Wild, and it was crap).
I keep a little bit of all of those books with me, even the bad ones, and I consider the characters in my favorites my friends, and people I like to visit with again, every now and then.
So now that you have a little bit of an idea as to just how big a role books have played in my life, I thought it would be interesting to not just go through a list of favorite books and characters, but my favorite book boyfriends (or husbands, as it were). I'm not ashamed to admit that I tend towards self-inserting when I read books (part of that whole imaginary life and exploring unseen worlds and living vicariously thing with them), so I like to read stories about characters that are either like me, characters that I'd like to be with, or maybe both. Without further ado, my top book boyfriends:
