Changing tastes

When I was a teen, I read a lot of romance novels. I’m in my forties now and I haven’t been a romance reader for about twenty years… until a couple of weeks ago when I was suddenly taken by the urge to read a particular author I remembered really liking. And now I’ve downloaded a couple more onto my Kindle and a full-scale reversion to romance reading appears to be imminent!

What genres or types of entertainment or authors have you loved then rejected, or vice versa? Did you drift in/out or was it a more dramatic start or end of your affection for something? Feel free to extend this beyond books.

I stopped reading comics nearly 20 years ago, when I was 11 or 12. Back in the spring, I started buying a graphic novel here and there on my Kindle. Now I’ve read nearly every X-Men title from 2001 until present.

I was very much into the alternative rock stuff in the 90s (being a teen at that time) until the genre really just turned to shit later in the decade and I couldn’t take it anymore. At least when it came to the radio. This was before MP3 players and I was tired of always listening to the same old CDs in order to avoid “modern” rock.

So I started listening to hip hop pretty exclusively for a while there, in the late 90s/early 2000s. It wasn’t a bad time to get into it - there was a lot of fun stuff. And the local hip hop radio station had great local live DJs.

I didn’t give up on my original alt rock collection but when I was in the car (I commuted to college) it was hip hop, and I bought a lot of hip hop and got hip hop from the Napster.

Now both genres live in perfect harmony on my devices, digitized for my enjoyment.

I am all over the place with music. I never really abandon a genre; I just add more and more and more.

I was an avid reader of series romance. I could (and often did) read two or three a day. Nowadays they are practically free on Kindle but they really are mostly terrible. I bought two sets of 4 books for 99 cents. In each set, one book was fun and the others were just plain awful.

Still. . . right now on Amazon there’s a bundle called Ten Christmas Brides . . . 10 books for 99 cents . . . I. . . I’m sorely tempted. . …

Ellipses inserted to celebrate the serials terrible, terrible form.

Gothic and regency romances from high school to my twenties. The tame stuff, Victoria Holt, Georgette Heyer, Joan Smith, Mary Balogh, that kind.

I still really enjoy Georgette Heyer once in a blue moon, but I haven’t read the others in many years.

There is a lot of classic rock that I still love listening to, but I’ve grown sick of a large percentage of it. I used to like almost every Eagles, Cars, Boston, and Bob Seger song that would come on the radio, but now I only like two or three songs from each. There’s no real reason I got tired of them; I started listening to classic rock stations in the early 90s and my tastes slowly changed.

Remember all that respect I had for you? Trust me, until a minute ago I respected you a lot, but now…PFFFFT…Right out the window. Ten Christmas Brides? Really? Don’t you get enough of that from the Hallmark Channel? Whenever I visit my wife in the hospital she has The Waltons on. She lost my respect, too. :wink:

ETA: But in this thread we should be mutually supportive of each other’s struggles with good taste. Kinda like an AA meeting. So I apologize, and offer this: After decades of not reading fiction, I’ve started again. Frederick Forsyth, to begin with, because it’s hard to tell where the facts end and the story begins, but it’s a slippery slope.

I’m on again, off again with comics. I’ll follow for awhile, but every time there is some big event with a thousand tie ins, I start to worry I’m missing something. Then I think “I’m doing this for leisure, why am I stressing.” and stop reading for awhile.

Time passes and I get the urge again.

I like top 40 pop music too. I am a woman of questionable tastes.

Even though I’ve loved Stephen King’s work since the beginning, I’m getting tired of reading novels and prefer short-story collections. Probably something to do with my attention spa…

THAT DOG HAS A POUFFY TAIL! HERE, POUF! HERE, POUF!

I’ve thought of another one for me. As a kid and teen I loved Star Trek. I read the novels and watched the shows and LOVED it.

Now I can watch TOS, but that’s about it.

I used to love science fiction novels, fantasy novels and Monty Python. Now I’m kind of lukewarm on those subjects.

Also, now I much prefer fruit in bite-sized chunks, so I always cut up watermelon and apples before eating them (for instance).

Up until my early 20s, I was the candy bar fiend of the universe. Since I hit my 40s, not so much. Don’t know if it’s my taste has dulled, or candy is crappier today, or some unknown factor.

If it wasn’t for women with questionable tastes, I’d never get tasted at all.

I used to enjoy watching hentai. But I didn’t change … hentai changed. The reason I enjoyed watching hentai was because it used to give me the most wondeful WHAT THE FUCK!!! moments ever. And it wasn’t just the tentacles. You never knew what you were going to run into in a hentai. “The women who got raped by the scaly lizard river men are having SPONTANEOUS ABORTIONS the next morning … that we get to WATCH??? WTF??? Who wants to see this?” (Magic Woman M). Or … “So the demoness gets captured by the angels who turn out to be … CHICKS WITH DICKS? Who try to RAPE the demoness to make her turn good? WTF!!!” (Viper GTS) Or “So the ending to the story about the little android sex bot who wanted a better life for herself is that she gets raped repeatedly by a gorilla in a factory full of discarded android sex bots that look just like her? WTF!!!” (Fragile Heart). And there’s more, lots more.

Understand, none of these scenes was the central point of the movie, they were just little side issues. Things that just casually happened that left your eyes bugged out.

Then hentai started being more like American internet porn, with nurses and moms and the usual fetishy suspects having sex but no really weird stuff going on other than whatever the weird fetish of the moment was. It got boring, so I stopped watching it, because standard cartoon porn is no match for live action porn.

But for a while there, the weird was going full throttle.

Thinking about it, my previous post is not appropriate for this thread: my tastes did not change, hentai did. So … nvm.