I have a secret.... When I was younger, one of the things that I remember about being on public buses was seeing women reading books with homemade quilted covers on the front. I would sit in my seat, watching them with a confused look on my face, wondering why they would make little handmade jackets for their paperback books. I remember thinking that I would never be caught dead with any covering on my books, I was proud to show the world what I was reading. Even when I went through my Danielle Steel faze as a teenager, I was never afraid for the world to see what I was reading. Things have changed. I have always had a really soft spot for cheesy romance novels...they are just feel good fluff for when you don't feel like using your brain. Plus, for singles like me, you get to live vicariously through the heroine for a couple of hours and pretend that the Perfect Man does really exist. But what I didn't realize was the stigma that some people place on the individuals who read them. If I were to be spotted somewhere in a public place with a book with half naked people on the cover, I would be insta-labeled as a woman of lesser intelligence. Which I don't think that I am, and I would hate for people to think that I was a woman of lesser intelligence, so sadly enters the homemade book cover. I now completely understand why those woman that I sneered at on the bus would cover their books with the quilted cover. I think that I now need a homemade quilted cover, just to save my sanity. But I think that there might be some hope for us closet romance novel readers, just last weekend, I was at a friend of a friend's house, and I was looking at the bookcase in the livingroom. You can always tell a lot about a person from their bookcase, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that this person we were visiting had trashy romance books in plain sight on her bookcase, complete with names like Heartbound and The Dangerous Stranger. And this girl was no idiot, she has a 96 average in university, which is a hell of a lot better than I ever did. I knew from that moment that this was a girl that I could really get along with. So, why are we all hiding our love of romance novels? Obviously, they are not reserved for people who can't spell their own name. Let us all read the books that we want to read without having to worry about getting Aunt Sadie to make you a nice book cover. With this in mind, yesterday I read Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie. It was a cute and funny romance novel that I loved, and I will likely pick up more of hers. Admitting that did not make me more silly or stupid. If anything it allowed me to get to know myself better! Let's hear it for romance novels!