I am thinking about books in my childhood home. My mother was a more voracious reader than my father when I was a kid. She read a lot of paperback mysteries - I think her bridge and mah-jongg friends traded with her. There were stacks of Earle Stanley Gardner in her sitting room, and there was loads of paperbacks in the basement. And I think some of them must have been my grandmother's too. Neither of them really read any romances. Although my grandmother had more middle-brow tastes -- she did introduce me, at a young-ish age, to Taylor Caldwell. Her favorite was Dear and Glorious Physician (a novel about St. Luke, and thus a very odd choice for a Jewish woman), but mine was A Pillar of Iron (about Cicero), which I read in 10th grade, when I started studying Latin.