Catherine Coulter wrote the first romances I ever read, and I was pretty horrified by them on a recent re-read. Like, there's some seriously not-okay full-on rape in some of those books. I guess a lot of old school romance was rape-y, from what I've heard from other romance readers.

The Jayne Ann Krentz/etcs. are reliable enjoyable, but really run together. I do like that the heroines after have glasses, and they are (like Loretta Chase and Julia Quinn) sex-positive.

I read one Mary Balogh that I didn't like, and I think it was because the hero was...not intelligent. As in, a feature of his character was that he wasn't super-smart. I get trying to have a greater diversity of types of people in romance, but a dude who's described as not very smart isn't going to be of interest to me.

I'm so glad you have so many contemporaries, because I often don't read them!