When I was growing up, I could be called the queen of Mills & Boon. For those of you on this side of the pond, that translates to Harlequin romances. When I first came to the US aeons ago, to my dismay, I did not spot a single Mills & Boon book in book stores or libraries here. That’s when I discovered that the publisher here was Harlequin, and that there were thousands of those to be found. Whew!

My good friends in India can attest to my silly obsession. Remember when I would stow a book in my purse just so I could read it during the 10 minute movie interval? Talk about silly!

I was a voracious reader. This is a good quality to have. But I was also voraciously reading a lot of junk. This is not a good quality.

Thankfully, I have been evolving steadily and for some time now, my reading quality has gone up several notches. I couldn’t be more pleased with my selection of fiction and non-fiction books these days, nor with my wonderful companion and partner in crime, my kindle. It is more precious to me than my laptop and my iPhone. And that’s saying something!

Some months back, I discovered that my local library had a nice choice of kindle books that I could borrow. I decided to try a few new authors of fiction from their collection. One of them was this guy called, Lee Child. Honestly, I had never heard of him but the book was interestingly called The Affair, and it was available for borrowing.

And, lo and behold, a new addiction was born. 

First, it was a book here, a book there. Then, I started searching for all the ones that I had not read. I quickly exhausted the kindle supply at my local library. Now, I have the entire collection on my kindle.

In case you did not know, Lee Child invented an unlikely hero by the name of Jack Reacher. And he has spun tale after wonderful, gory tale with this hero.

Jack Reacher is an Army brat and ex-Military Police, voluntarily retiring from the U.S. Army at the age of 36 and then wandering around the country – a drifter in the true sense of the word – running into and solving crime after gory crime. There are more than 20 books and surely more to come. Surely!

Many of you may have never read a Jack Reacher book, but you might have seen Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher in the movie that he produced and starred in last year. It’s a very good movie but doesn’t hold a candle to the books. In my humble opinion.

Cruise did great in the movie – I was even able to think of him as Jack Reacher and not at all about Scientology while I watched. Kind of ironic though. Jack Reacher of the book fame is 6 foot 5 inches tall and nowhere near as handsome as Cruise. But it kinda worked.

Tom Cruise appears to have bought the movie rights to all the books and I hear that there’s another movie in the making. In any case, I’m not a fan of the movie as much as I’m a fan of the character and his stories. 

But I do hope I’m not getting addicted to these books. I regard the Mills & Boon days of my past with some horror and don’t want to get stuck in another such rut again. Not that these are anything like those sappy romances…

I’m trying to deliberately intersperse my Jack Reacher book readings with something else. My self-prescribed rule is to never follow one Jack Reacher novel with another (but I’ve cheated a couple of times).

And all the while I keep hoping that I don’t run out of Jack Reacher books to read. In my lifetime.

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