Books
- anxiety
- depression
- gang conflict
- family illness
- chronic illness
- homophobia
- truly awful parenting
- arranged marriage
- transphobia
- top surgery (difficult because of medical processes described in detail)
- war
- anti-Muslim harassment
- well-meaning people being casually super prejudiced
- the cost of a bad reputation
🔖📚📝 Read Mothering and Writing Are Both Undervalued Labor, so How Do Women Do Both? .
An excellent excerpt from the book The Mother Artist: Portraits of Ambition, Limitation, and Creativity.
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“…publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is.” Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
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“One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore.” Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Finished reading: The Master by Kresley Cole 📚
Finished reading: The Professional by Kresley Cole 📚
I finished this in just a couple of days. Definitely read the info on the author’s website before picking this one up.
Finished reading: Munro by Kresley Cole 📚
The heroine in this one is a time-traveling Transylvanian knife-throwing carnie so, you know, she’s awesome.
Finished reading: Wicked Abyss by Kresley Cole 📚
This is a banger of a Beauty and the Beast retelling, with an ending I radically prefer to the Disney version. Highly recommend.
Finished reading: Shadow’s Seduction by Kresley Cole 📚
It took me a long time to get into this one and it’s not as strong as a lot of the other Immortals After Dark books, but I still ended up liking it.
Finished reading: Shadow’s Claim by Kresley Cole 📚
I really liked this one, the way the main characters interact with each other is both sweet and hot. I’ve only got 4 books left before I’m caught up on the Immortals After Dark series.
Finished reading: Sweet Ruin by Kresley Cole 📚
“She’d thought there was no greater connection than destiny decreeing them joined. But there was—the choice they’d made to love each other.”
Loved it.
Finished reading: Dark Skye by Kresley Cole 📚
Other people seem to hate this one but I like it pretty well. Lanthe and Thronos’s story is epic, spanning years and continents. Lives ruined. Blood shed. Worth a try if you’re making your way through Immortals After Dark.
📚 When I’m catching up on a long-running series, I sometimes forget that there are people who, for example, couldn’t read 19 Immortals After Dark books in a row and, in fact, had to wait a year or more for the next one to come out, and that I, too, can wait.
Finished reading: Suddenly You by Lisa Kleypas 📚
A lovely historical about an author and a publisher who fall in lust and then love. Her body is described as voluptuous, bountiful, abundant, generous. It’s clear that these are attractive things for her to be. Quite spicy. Content warning: miscarriage.
Finished reading: The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang 📚
A lovely romance novel with an autistic heroine. I highlighted a lot.
Finished reading: Matilda by Roald Dahl 📚
We went to see Matilda the Musical and I loved it. I’d watched the Netflix movie of the musical and years ago the movie with Mara Wilson, but I’d never actually read the book. It’s a lovely book but I think the musical is even better.
Finished reading: MacRieve by Kresley Cole 📚
This one is beautifully done as always. There’s a traumatic backstory of childhood sexual abuse for the hero and the way it impacts his relationship with the protagonist broke my heart. But of course there’s a happy ending because romance. ♥️
Finished reading: Lothaire by Kresley Cole 📚
Of course if you’re reading Immortals After Dark you must read this one. You simply must.
📚 Baby’s First Author Event
Let me be clear, when I say “baby,” I mean “big kid.” We took M to his first author event a couple weeks ago. It was awesome. Adam Gidwitz has a new book out. It’s called Max in the House of Spies. It’s about a German Jewish kid whose parents send him to London in 1939 and he falls in with British spies while he’s there. Also a dybbuk lives on one of his shoulders and a kobold lives on the other.
We first encountered Adam Gidwitz because of his amazing podcast, Grim, Grimmer, Grimmest. (M’s favorite episode is Hans, My Hedgehog.) Gidwitz is a former teacher who now works as a storyteller and author. He’s written the A Tale Dark and Grimm series and the book The Inquisitor’s Tale, and he is the co-author of the Unicorn Rescue Society series. In that series, kids travel around the world saving different cryptids. For each book, Gidwitz teams up with an author who is a member of the culture that the kids are visiting. They’re super fun and a great way to learn about folklore around the world.
Gidwitz talked about a family friend who had been one of the children sent away from Germany ahead of World War II and how the story of that friend inspired him to write this book. He said he felt it was an important book to write now because he thinks it’s an important time to look at Germany before the Nazis came to power and ask, what is it that makes the people of a country vote for leadership they know is wrong? What makes them willing to sacrifice justice for the promise of security? I think he’s absolutely right that these are key questions for our time.
Gidwitz shared the story of how he became a writer: he wanted to teach his students about ancient Egypt and couldn’t find a book to go with the lessons, so he started to write one. He’d write a chapter, share it with his students, and then they’d say, “Then what happened?” He’d tell them, “I don’t know!” and go home to write the next chapter. With a lot of positive reinforcement from his students, Gidwitz decided to quit teaching and write full-time. He didn’t get an agent with the Egyptian book. (He called it a “burner book,” explaining that many authors have at least one book they write and learn a lot from but don’t get to publish.) But he did when he started digging into Grimm’s fairytales.
Gidwitz is super entertaining and a great storyteller and doesn’t look anything like I imagined him. (I imagined him looking like Joshua Malina’s character, Jeremy, from Sports Night. I have no idea why.)
After he talked about his books and answered questions for an hour, there was a signing. When we got up there, he told M., “You’re a lot younger than most of the kids here and I wasn’t sure how you would do while I was talking, but you did great.” (M. is average height but tiny with giant eyes so it’s easy to mistake him for younger than he is.)
Finished reading: Preferential Treatment by Heather Guerre 📚
Read this billionaire romance because it’s the next Fated Mates read along. It’s very well done & deflates the billionaire fantasy without taking all of the fun out of it. Definitely check the content warnings before reading.
Finished reading: Dreams of a Dark Warrior by Kresley Cole 📚
This one took me a little while to get into but once I was in, I couldn’t put it down.
Finished reading: Demon From the Dark by Kresley Cole 📚
I really enjoyed this one and tore through it. Give me a sad, traumatized couple of people who find a new family in each other and I’m happy. 😍
Finished reading: Pleasure of a Dark Prince by Kresley Cole 📚
I really liked, maybe even loved this one. The back half is all adventure, super cinematic.
Finished reading: “Untouchable” in Deep Kiss of Winter by Kresley Cole 📚
📚 Why am I obsessed with romance fiction right now?
Last May, I read Mr. and Mrs. Witch by Gwenda Bond, and it made me so happy that I decided to try exclusively reading romance for a while. From May to October, I read 16 romance novels. In October I took a break to read some gothic but quickly came back to romance, finishing out the year having read 22 romance novels and one romance anthology. This year, I continued the pattern. So far, I’ve read 17 romance novels this year. I talk about romance and think about romance a lot of the time. So why?
First, social factors:
Last June, The Good Trade published an article called What Romance Novels Taught Me About Taking Pleasure More Seriously and then in December a follow-up, How to Get Started Reading Romance Novels. This led me to the podcast Fated Mates and I joined their Patreon and Discord because I needed people to talk to about romance besides two of my friends and W.
But that was after I’d already started to read romance more heavily. So why? Why romance?
The obvious reason is that it’s an optimistic genre. Even in dark romance, the author or publisher has, by virtue of calling the book or story romance, promised that the characters who fall in love will end the book either living happily ever after or happy for now. Any problems on the horizon at the end are problems you know they will solve together. (And if you read something that the author or publisher has called romance that doesn’t have this feature, please let everyone know, so they won’t pick that book up expecting a HEA or HFN.) The world is big and scary and full of bad, and it can be comforting to know that you are going into a story where the people will end up with someone(s) who will support them.
Another reason is that romance contains an immense variety of subgenres, which means if you’re a mood reader that you can probably find something you’re in the mood for. You’ve got contemporary, paranormal, historical (with its own subsubgenres based on period and geography), dark romance, fantasy romance, sci-fi romance, romantic suspense, romantic mystery, and many more. Likewise, romance is full of tropes that give books a flavor that make it easy to know if you’re likely to find it interesting: friends-to-lovers, enemies-to-lovers, billionaire, forced proximity, sibling’s best friend or best friend’s sibling, second chance, fated mates, fake dating, and again, many more.
It’s also because, like sci-fi and fantasy, romance lets you tackle difficult topics in a way where you know that characters will be supported in working through these. Here is an incomplete list of difficult topics the romance I’ve read since last year has touched on:
And I tend to read stuff on the lighter side.
And then there are things that are unique about romance: its focus on interiority and emotion, on women’s and non-binary people’s pleasure, the way it places relationships at the heart of stories.
I’m sure there are more reasons, too. Do you read romance? Why?
Finished reading: You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop by John Scalzi 📚
This was a re-read. A bit of a time capsule from the web of 2005-2007, a web I greatly miss.