[This is part one of a two part post on my relationship to my TBR pile.]
I’ve been thinking about the changes that my romance reading has wrought in my life. It’s no fun blogging about the obvious ones: I’m less dissatisfied with my life of drudgery now that I can escape into fantasy on a regular basis; I’m more likely to excuse bad male behavior because I understand how hard it is to be a man; I have a reliable way to satisfy various psychological needs created by a patriarchal culture that cannot fulfill them; I’ve lost several IQ points, considering that every minute of romance reading could have been spent with Chaucer or Dickens; and my ability to tolerate moral ambiguity has gone straight to “h-e-double-hockey sticks”, as we say round these parts. 
But none of those things really matter to me given a much more serious state of affairs:
