Tag: romance

Good lord, is it the end of April already? Time does fly the older one gets. I’ve been meaning to post this reading list up for a good long while now and am finally doing it because if I don’t, I will blink and it’ll be next year. Anyway, better late than never is my ninja way, so here are my book reads of the past two years. It’s a paltry list for 24 months (grad school aside)… I’ve really got to get back on the book wagon. As usual, skip to the end for the standouts!

Disclaimer: you’ll notice a definite uptick in the romance genre, which was intentional. It really would’ve been more, if I hadn’t read a certain Booktok-favoured title that was SO bad, I gave up on my quest to read only romance for the rest of 2023. Booktok is a lie. It’s a lie. *cries*

Thrills and Chills
Six Four – Hideo Yokoyama
The Final Girl Support Group – Grady Hendrix
Notes on a Scandal – Zoë Heller

Sweet Sweet Fantasies Baby
My Name is Morgan – Sophie Keetch
Tress of the Emerald Sea – Brandon Sanderson
Uprooted / Spinning Silver – Naomi Novik
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow – Gabrielle Zevin

Loveswept
The Prince of Broadway – Joanna Shupe
The Governess Affair / The Duchess War – Courtney Milan
You Had Me At Hola – Alexis Daria
A Worthy Opponent – Katee Robert
Enchanted – Elizabeth Lowell
Daring and the Duke – Sarah MacLean
For My Lady’s Heart / Shadowheart / Flowers From the Storm – Laura Kinsale
Icebreaker – Hannah Grace

History Re-imagined
The Forbidden Queen – Anne O’Brien
The Wedding Portrait – Maggie O’Farrell
The Secret Life of Josephine: Napoleon’s Bird of Paradise – Carolly Erickson

Memoirs, Memories and Me
I Feel Bad About My Neck – Nora Ephron
Paul at Home – Michel Rabagliati
Persepolis 1 / Persepolis 2- Marjane Satrapi
I’m Glad My Mother Died – Jennette McCurdy

Behind the Scenes
The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt: the History of a Civilisation from 3000 BC to Cleopatra – Toby Wilkinson
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Won’t Stop Talking – Susan Cain
Missing From the Village – Justin Ling
Little Girl Blue: The Life of Karen Carpenter – Randy L. Schmidt
All of the Marvels – Douglas Wolk
The Bad-ass Librarians of Timbuktu – Joshua Hammer
The Madness of Queen Maria: The Remarkable Life of Maria I of Portugal – Jennifer Roberts
Young and Damned and Fair – Gareth Russell
Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon – James Hibberd
Pandora’s Jar – Natalie Haynes
The Last Mrs. Astor : A New York Story – Frances Kiernan

I Don’t Care What You Say, Re-reads Still Count
A Stranger in the Mirror – Sydney Sheldon
Tapestry – Karen Ranney
Warrior’s Woman / Keeper of the Heart / Heart of a Warrior – Johanna Lindsey
The Prize – Julie Garwood
A Knight in Shining Armor – Jude Devereaux

The 2022-2023 Standouts

2022
Brazen and the Beast – Sarah MacLean
He’s a Covent Garden gangster who rules the dockyards, speaks in grunts, and only gets verbose in the throes of passion. She’s an intelligent spinster whose elder brother is running the family’s shipping business into the ground, and can’t (or won’t) shut up until she’s physically teased to the point of incoherence. They’re made for each other! Barring a few, clunkily obvious signs that this regency romance was written in the age of must-have consent and equality, this is witty, fast-paced and ridiculously horny. Read if you like bodice-ripping, heavy-breathing, smutty romance.

The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books – Edward Wilson-Lee
Fernando Columbus is not the first name that comes to mind when one thinks of the Renaissance, and Wilson-Lee makes the argument that he really should be. This professional courtier and illegitimate second son of Christopher Columbus revolutionized indexing, cataloguing, arranging, mapping, research, and building libraries. If not for the circumstances of his birth, it is very likely that he would’ve been the heir to Columbus’ fortune instead of his useless excuse for a half-brother. This is one of the best biographies I’ve read in a long time, and touched many of the things I enjoy – biographies, relatively obscure Renaissance figures, obsessive-compulsive list making, and a love of books. I enjoyed it so much, I used it as the subject for a book talk assignment, which I like to think went over quite well – if not with the class, then at least with my instructor 🙂

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers – Mary Roach
Do not read Stiff if you are eating. Do not read Stiff if you are squeamish. Do not read Stiff if you do not want to know how bodies decompose when they are left on their own without the benefit of embalming. Definitely read Stiff if you are interested in knowing how cadavers prove their usefulness: as crash test dummies, as anatomical models, and as guinea pigs for experiments. And definitely read Stiff if you would like to know how fearless Filipinos, probably hopped up on whatever goes into anting-antings, defied a hailstorm of bullets in the Spanish-American War and in doing so, became the impetus for ballistic research and the concept of “stopping power”.

2023
Yellowface – R.F. Kuang
No one in Yellowface is likeable. None of the characters are reliable narrators. When your main character is a caricature of an entitled white woman (terminally insecure, petty, selfish, self-aggrandizing, narcissistic, delusional) jealous of a “perfect’ Asian author who turns out to be cold, fake, pretentious, and fond of mining the trauma of others for her art, reading becomes a challenge, because we are wired to like leading characters, even when they’re terrible people making terrible choices (plagiarism is never a good idea!). I’m not a fan of the sanctimoniousness that comes with race politics, so if the author’s intent is to make you feel something, she succeeds wonderfully. Yellowface is a good read, not only because it makes you feel, but also because this single-white-female x cancel culture x appropriation story has Twitter exchanges, references to real life personas, and a disdain for the behaviour of publicists, agents and suck ups that seem too sharp to be made up. The scenes so sharply specific, it made me wonder how much of a roman a clef this book really is (juicy!). Read if you like trainwrecks, good writing, and are prepared to feel uncomfortable.

All the Murmuring Bones – A.G. Slater
All the Murmuring Bones is an atmospheric, mesmerizing tale about one family’s ill-gotten gains. It’s a gothic fantasy that marries Hans Christian Andersen with Mermaid Forest. One thing about the heroine though: she doesn’t seem able to feel very much. Even when she says she’s scared or terrified, she keeps a level head at all times, outwitting murderous ghosts and menacing kelpies. Read if you like haunting fairy tales and don’t enjoy weeping, anxiety ridden heroines.