So it’s Valentine’s Day again. How does this keep happening?

Based on the fact that I handle a number of romance novels, it’s clear that I enjoy a good love story. But I’ll note here that I really flip for love stories that are a bit…unusual.

Last summer, I lost my mind over Brady Udall’s The Lonely Polygamist. A novel about a husband of four who has an affair with a married woman, it had all the drama of five love stories packed into one book. But what I most admired about it was how realistic the emotions felt, how relatable this unlikely family was, and how thoroughly non-judgmental Udall was about his characters. It’s a brilliantly rendered novel, and I highly recommend it for those of you looking for something a little less expected on this particular Valentine’s Day.

Or maybe you’re so totally over this holiday that you want to see love partnered with bloodshed. Happily, there are some dark minds out there willing to accommodate you. Donald Ray Pollock’s sprawling The Devil All the Time features a serial killing couple that picks up hitchhikers so that the husband can photograph the wife in flagrante delicto with them…and murder them. And the husband is impotent! I mean…it’s pretty much all things for all people. That doesn’t even begin to cover how deeply twisted the novel is. It’s one of the most brutal, unflinching works of fiction I’ve read in some time, and I’ll just say it: it’s bloody fantastic. (Bad pun alert!)

Before I swing back to sweeter love stories, let’s also mention The Silence of the Lambs because you know Clarice had a thing for Lecter, J. G. Ballard’s sex among the car wrecks in Crash, and the excruciating horrors of bloodlust, pedophilia, incest, and love-gone-wrong of Dennis Cooper’s (I think it’s amazing, but I can’t recommend it because I’m scared you’ll judge me) Try.

Let’s get back to the more romantic (though still unusual) side of things, for those of you who don’t feel violent when V-Day comes around! You could read my all-time favorite novel as of this exact moment (it rotates between three or four): The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The ultimate story of falling for someone out of your league, Quasimodo’s passionate tumble for Esmeralda destroys me every time. If you can find a last paragraph that makes me cry any harder, I might actually end up institutionalized.

Or, dive into Elizabeth McCracken’s The Giant’s House and feel free to swoon over Peggy and James, the spinster librarian and 8’7” younger man who find mutual understanding in this beautifully compassionate, heartfelt novel.

Also, if you want to watch a movie instead of reading today, it’s okay. I won’t tell. Harold and Maude, anyone?

So tell me: what are your favorite love stories, be they dark, depressing, beautiful, sweet, or otherwise?

Lastly, I mentioned in my last blog post that I intended to read all 16 books in the Tournament of Books before it kicks off this year. Four to go! One of them is still 1Q84… Whether I make it or not is a total coin toss, but I also wanted to recommend the most unexpected surprise of the event so far: the intense pleasure of reading Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers. Talk about a writer to watch!

There are plenty of people who tell me that once they start a book, they can’t put it down until they finish it even if they absolutely hate it. Being an agent, I find this unfathomable. But if I’m being honest, even before I entered the dazzling world of publishing, I was never the sort of person who felt compelled to finish something just because I had started.

Reading for a living, though, and knowing that there’s always more work to be done, has only made me more impatient with titles I pick up for pleasure reading. My apartment is littered with books I’ve abandoned after 20 pages because I’m convinced that there’s something better to be found elsewhere on my own overstuffed shelves.

That said, I can think of books that I know I would have abandoned if I weren’t driven for a specific reason to finish them, and I think of what I would have lost by not reading them. What if I had given up on The Corrections because of the talking poop scene? It didn’t matter that I had loved the novel until that point. I was convinced in one scene that the book was about to shatter wide open, and I only kept going because other people told me to. Or what if The Crimson Petal and the White wasn’t something I was reading for office book club? There was about a 100-page stretch in the middle there that I thought was kind of a snooze. Without being obligated to, would I have kept going for the 500 or so pages I still had ahead of me?

When I start to look at the books I haven’t finished in this way, I do start to worry about material I’ve passed on. I like to think that I’ve mastered a way of reading differently when considering for work–after all, if I just hate 20 pages, isn’t that what editing is for? But those doubts will sneak up on you every time. And that’s my dirty secret—the deep internal fear that I will have missed something amazing because I abandoned it too soon.

Of course, there isn’t time to read every page of every submission. That would literally be impossible. And certainly some submissions, strung together in a poor facsimile of English, don’t merit greater consideration. Others very well may.

And that’s something I’ve been giving a lot of thought to lately—giving people who might have something there a little more benefit of the doubt. Instead of reading until I think something is a no, I can read 10 more pages. Or 20. These are manageable numbers. It comes back to The Corrections for me. Even the best authors go a little wonky sometimes. So I probably owe it to everyone to see if they get beyond their talking poop moment.

Of course, with pleasure reading, sometimes I don’t so much “give up” on books as fall away from them. I was reading (and enjoying) Swamplandia when I left for vacation last summer and forgot to pack it and never picked it back up. The same exact thing happened with The Marriage Plot over Christmas. Interestingly, both show up on the Tournament of Books list for this year. http://www.themorningnews.org/article/here-comes-the-rooster Longtime readers might remember that I adore the ToB. This year, I’m going to use it as a motivator to get back into those books that I was enjoying but didn’t finish. And because there is a whisper of OCD about me, I’m going to attempt to actually complete all 16 books on the list. I’ll give up if it gets in the way of reading for work, but I need a silly goal to give myself, and this fits.

So far, I’ve completed five. My biggest roadblock (literally) will be Murakami’s 1Q84. If anyone wants to join me on the road to attempt to read them before the bracket kicks off in March, I welcome the company on the reading road! Maybe drop me a line on Twitter @jimmccarthy528 to let me know where you’re at! If you’re looking for a starting place, might I recommend Donald Ray Pollock’s viscerally thrilling (if brutal) The Devil All the Time or the one I’m working on now: Ann Patchett’s so-far-so-stunning State of Wonder?

I was at lunch with an editor today who noted, “I can’t imagine what you read for fun is the sort of stuff you represent.” It took me aback, and a sort of generic, “I’m an omnivorous reader…” response was at the tip of my tongue until I actually took a moment to think about it. (Bonus points to me for thinking before speaking!)

I represent a lot of paranormal fiction, young adult novels, the occasional narrative nonfiction, cozy mysteries, and contemporary romance. The last few books I’ve read? Chad Harbach’s literary debut The Art of Fielding, Danielle Evans’ story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (can we agree this is the best title of the year?), and Justin Torres’ stunning novella We the Animals. And I’m currently toting around the new Jeffrey Eugenides.

Sure, if you go back another few weeks, you’ll also find Marie Lu’s YA debut Legend and urban fantasist Karen Marie Moning’s Shadowfever, but as much as I enjoyed those books, when I read them, I kept thinking about them as signposts in the marketplace. “Oh, so this is what the competition is doing.” Awareness of the market is important, of course, and I’m glad I read both. That said, I don’t know that my motive for reading either was purely  pleasure.

For me, there is a healthy level of awareness of the market that needs to be maintained—not just knowing what the competition is, but also actually reading said competition. On the flip side, if that was all I read, I suspect I might actually lose my mind.  I need to read great books that aren’t at all related to what I do because I put a lot of importance on the ability to bring a fresh mind and an energetic eye to new material. The best way I personally know to do that is to recharge periodically by getting lost in a good book. And how lost can you get when your reading experience is spent analyzing a novel in comparison to other novels.

So my question for you, dear readers, is what your own approach to reading is while you’re writing. Do you exclusively read in the categories you write in? Do you also need to “turn off” and recharge with a great book from a totally different genre from time to time? Or (gods forbid), do you not read at all while you’re writing?