It’s the first Whatcha Reading of 2023! How are we all starting off? Strong? A big of a slump?
Shana: I just glommed I Like You Like That by Kayla Grosse ( A ) in a day. I don’t read a lot of bodyguard romances, but this hit the spot for me.
Next up on my TBR is Asia Monique’s Flower Sisters series ( A ) . Each book is themed around a heroine’s love language. I’m starting with the “words of affirmation” sister. (edited)
Sarah: I am currently reading Rest is Resistance, alongside An Unseen Attraction by KJ Charles. ( A | BN | K | AB ) I had meant to read Rest is Resistance over winter vacation but it was Not a Restful Time (we flew Southwest). So I am catching up.
Oh hold on. The library must have bought a LOT of copies of Spare ( A | BN | K ) because I was 70+ on the wait list but the audiobook is ready for me to borrow. Wow, thank you librarians!
Carrie: Rest is Resistance blew my mind
Elyse: I’m reading The Fraud Squad by Kyla Zhao ( A | BN | K | AB ) and I’m loving it.
Also totally waiting for my copy of Spare to show up today
Claudia: I read Nights of the Plague (non romance) over our winter break and decided that I can read about a pandemic as long as it takes place on a fictional island 100 years ago, but that’s about it. I’m still sort of trying to decide what to read next!
Kiki: I have been largely unable to focus on physically reading for several months now and have essentially only been using audiobooks (which is wonderful but also limiting on what I can access) so I’m attempting to force myself to slow my brain down enough to read words on a page by spending some time with my very cherished first edition of The Secret by Julie Garwood. ( A )
Also I think it’s very possible that the last time I gave a reading update I was also reading The Secret which is both delightful and awkward so I’ll also share that I recently finished listening to The Facemaker by Lindsey Fitzharris which details the career of a WWI plastic surgeon and how he revolutionized facial reconstruction. It was spectacular and read by the subject’s great, great nephew.
Elyse: My husband has been listening to the Murderbot series ( A | BN | K | AB ) on audio so I’m catching it periodically and it’s delightful
Maya: Audiobooks are the best!! I’m listening to Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez ( A | BN | K ) and the three narrators, Almarie Guerra, Armando Riesco, and Ines del Castillo, are fantastic.
Sneezy: I’m so excited for my turn at Rest is Resistance at the library!
Go Away Romeo by Paintword just got upgraded to an original webtoon. Congratulations Paintword! It’s the story of Romeo and Juliet told from the perspective of Rosaline, who had gotten pregnant by Romeo. So far the art looks great, and I’m looking forward to seeing where the story goes.
So whatcha reading? Tell us below!
Boy, it’s been a minute. Let’s see, I continued my “I think I’ll just read another Harlan Coben” moment with Fool Me Once. That one was interesting and twisty, as is his wont, and the main character had an intriguing edge of anti-heroine to her. Then I reached into the spoils of my NetGalley queue and read The Portrait of a Duchess by Scarlett Peckham, the second in her Society of Sirens series. I had some mixed feelings. I liked the concept of it being the guy who always falls super-hard and gets too attached too quickly, but by the end of the book, the heroine’s treatment of him became just this side of mean. After that, it was more NetGalley spoils with A Long Stretch of Bad Days by Mindy McGinnis. She is writing some of the meanest YA out there, and I am HERE FOR IT. When my husband asked me about what I was reading, I told him about her and described her writing as “METAL AF”. This one has two small-town girls that get screwed out of some high school credits due to a negligent guidance counselor, and make a work-study project of a podcast about their town’s history to make up those credits, particularly the aftermath of a catastrophic tornado, and an unsolved murder and disappearance that took place during that aftermath. One of the girls is the smart, ambitious town sweetheart that is fully willing to step on people to get what she wants, and the other is the wrong side of the tracks punk girl that no one thinks has a good future ahead of her, even though as time goes on, it’s very apparent that she is every bit as smart and ambitious as her town sweetheart counterpart. Their developing friendship is lovely, and the ways that they develop the podcast and go about solving some town mysteries is well done. After that, it was time for The Stolen Heir by Holly Black. It’s a follow-up duology with characters from The Cruel Prince series. Oak and Wren, our main characters, were children during those books, and are now young adults (17 and 18 respectively), and are going on the dangerous faerie quests and playing the dangerous faerie politics. Going back to Elfhame watered my crops, cleared my skin, and folded my laundry. I love, love, love those books. They are lush and treacherous, as good faerie tales should be. Which brings us to now, in which I am on some dark academia shit with Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo. LOVED Ninth House, and loving that Hell Bent has continued building the mythology, as Alex tries to figure out how to rescue her friend and mentor Darlington from Hell (capital H) itself. It’s a chonky read, and fairly perfect for being on a trip, because again, chonky. So until next time, folks, don’t make deals with the fey. Just a tip.
I am going to go ahead and pat myself on the back. I finished 68 books in 2022 – not too bad with two toddlers (my little girl turns 2 tomorrow!) and the fact that I am in a perpetual state of exhaustion.
Excellent:
The Heir Apparent’s Rejected Mate by Cate C. Wells: Second in the Five Packs series, I put off reading this after absolutely loving the first in the series, but reading comments here that maybe this was too NA (the hero and heroine are basically in high school although they are both 18+ and would be college-age in our world). And I will admit, it took me a bit to get over the high school-like setting at the beginning. BUT I shouldn’t have worried – I absolutely adore this series and this book. You could feel the pressure the hero felt (as the titular heir apparent) and why he could see no choices for himself other than the path proscribed for him and why the heroine thought he was an asshole. The characters are so deeply drawn that I really bought into the growth and change and HEA.
The Lone Wolf’s Rejected Mate by Cate C. Wells: Third in the same series, I was thrown a bit because this story took a hard left turn as the hero and heroine are put in danger outside of “pack land” and I wasn’t expecting the change towards what read a lot like romantic suspense (complete with MILD SPOILER danger boning). But again, the story is so deep and so complex that I loved it too. Both the heroine and hero are fully realized and fully sympathetic characters. CW for suicide, abduction, child abuse,
Very Good:
Endless Night by Agatha Christie: A standalone written in first-person about a piece of land with a supposed curse on it, the people who buy and build a house on it and their fate. I read this for my mystery book club. The sense of danger and foreboding absolutely saturates the book (and in that sense the only thing I can compare it to is The Woman in White). Christie can be a very dark writer and this is a dark book. After finishing I felt I should have seen the ending coming, but I didn’t at all. CW there are numerous references to Roma people in offensive language and terms.
Good:
Full Dark House by Christopher Fowler: First in a mystery series, this is set in both the present and then in flashbacks to London during the Blitz. At times, I couldn’t put it down and was totally invested in trying to figure out the mystery. BUT the writing style was so odd and what made it worse for me is I couldn’t tell if that style was on purpose or not. For example, 2 people will be having a conversation and from the preceding text it seems to be a private conversation, but then out of the blue a third or fourth person will join in. Then you are left wondering if the third and fourth characters had been there for the whole conversation or just joined and then you are just confused. That could really take you out of the story. (CW for short but very graphic on-page depictions of murder)
Meh:
None
The Bad:
None
Three literary fiction and one fantasy novel but no romances read so far in 2023. While I generally don’t read m/m romances, I have read several novels with gay protagonists recently.
GROUNDSKEEPING, but Lee Cole. Owen, an aspiring writer, moves back to Kentucky to live with his grandfather. Eager to clean up his act after wasting time and potential in his early twenties, Owen, now 28, takes a job as a groundskeeper at Ashby, a small local college in exchange for the chance to take a course a semester toward his masters degree. Here he meets Alma Hadzic, a writer in residence who seems to have everything Owen lacks: a prestigious position, an Ivy League degree, success as a writer. They begin a secret relationship, and as they grow closer, Alma struggles to understand Owen’s fraught relationship with family and home. Her famiy is middle class (father a dentist, mother a doctor), but they are Muslim immigrants from Bosnia who have been through hell. Liked the book till the end, when *** spoiler alert *** in the last 2 pages Owen basically sabotages everything in his life and all I could think was WTF?
KINGS OF THE WYLD by Nicholas Eames. This has been discussed elsewhere on SBTB, and let’s just say opinions differ (although I’m in the liked it camp).
LESS IS LOST by Andrew Sean Greer. A follow-up to the earlier book, Less, about Arthur Less, a moderately successful novelist who once again sets out on a picaresque series of adventures, although this time he’s traveling through the US and not Europe and north Africa. I enjoyed the mix of poignance and humor, and Greer is good at portraying the various characters (including the dog, Dolly) Less meets along the way. Arthur tries hard and is often better than he thinks he is, although he does worry about being a “bad gay”.
MY GOVERNMENT IS TRYING TO KILL ME by Rasheed Newson. It’s 1985, the height of the AIDS epidemic. Born into a wealthy Black Indianapolis family, Earl “Trey” Singleton III leaves his overbearing parents and their expectations behind by running away to NYC. This is a coming of age story that lends itself to a larger discussion about what it means for a young gay Black man to come to terms with his role in the midst of a political and social reckoning. Trey is 17 at the beginning of the book, 19 at the end, so very young. He has the arrogance of the young and its tendency to see the world in black and white, no shades of gray. He’s also something of a Mary Sue, in that almost every man in the book (and it is overwhelmingly male) wants to have sex with him and he somehow finds himself a pivotal character for much of the activism of the era. Book has a mix of fictional and actual (Bayard Rustin, Larry Kramer) characters, and I often wasn’t sure what was reporting vs what was fiction.
I think I need to read something lighter soon.
I’ve been in an urban fantasy mood. Jennifer Estep’s 2 Section 47 books, A Sense of Danger and Sugar Plum Spies were perfect travel books with magic, danger, and romance.
I also read and loved all 4 of Laura Laakso’s Wilde Investigation books — these are urban fantasy mysteries. The protagonist deals with chronic pain (I don’t see that often in a book) and there’s several excellent supporting characters (including a friendly hearth spirit) and an unusual magic system.
@Katie C. I love the Bryant and May books! That first one is a bit odd and he writes in strange style at times. He has said that each book is a “take” on some type of classic mystery (I don’t see it personally but I’m not an expert). I feel like the 2nd one (The Water Room) is one of my favorite mysteries of all time. Very spooky and creepy (he also writes horror). Around book 5 or 6, he really hits a groove and they’re very good. He likes to dig very deep into London history and the mystical.
Of course, my favorite thing about the books is the partnership between the two detectives. Sometimes, timelines and plot threads don’t make sense from book to book (he pokes fun of this in later books), but I’ve laughed and cried with Arthur and John quite a lot.
@Sarah, I just wanted to say that I love An Unseen Attraction, the fog, the jobs, the nightly cups of tea. I love Clem and Rowley. When I initially read it I gave it 4/5 stars, but its become my most reread K.J. Charles.
I started the year reading Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovich and now have the next two books from the series on hold at the library.
@catscatscats Thank you for mentioning Between by L.L. Starling. So far it’s super cozy, fluffy and funny. I’ve been checking r/cozyfantasy too but hadn’t seen this one.
It’s been an incredibly slow start to the year for me, waiting on library holds to come in.
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF DIXIE by Bruce Levine. A very good history at illustrating that Southern people were not a monolith in the years leading up to and during the Civil War, while still being very clear that the Confederacy was a moral failure and doomed. It would pair very well with a book I read a few years ago, NEW ENGLAND BOUND by Wendy Warren, which does a lot to dispel myths and ideas about the reality for Black Americans in the North, albeit covering an earlier period.
HIGHLY SUSPICIOUS AND UNFAIRLY CUTE by Talia Hibbert. I was so looking forward to this because her Brown Sisters series is my favorite contemporary romance at the moment, and this didn’t work for me. I enjoy plenty of YA but the twee levels were too high and as I’m rounding the bend to my late 30s, I just couldn’t connect with *Joe Pesci voice* ‘the yoots’ here.
@Morgan: I may read The Fall of the House of Dixie. I once read an account by a British traveler in I think it was Tennessee in the 1850s, and she described the extraordinary atmosphere of paranoia and pervasive violence (between whites also), and said it was the most unsettlingly strange society she’d ever visited.
I think last year’s YOU AND ME was a high-water mark for Tal Bauer. He’s had two books out since then and neither of them have worked for me particularly well, GRAVITY because of the expository dumps and general clunkiness, and his recent release THE REST OF THE STORY because of plot holes and general unbelievability. I was *so hopeful* after the first chapter: nice set up, smooth writing, I was settling in. But my enthusiasm took a full body check in chapter 2 and although I read till the end – and it is a fun ride if you can stop rolling your eyes – I never fully recovered. Any New Girl fans out there? Remember Winston and his over-the-top pranks? That’s Tal Bauer, who desperately needs beta readers to do subtlety checks for him. Will I keep checking out every new release in case he scores again? Yes, yes I will.
Other than that, I’ve been reading tons of samples and DNF’ing lots. One standout is Jay Hogan’s FOXED – quite a delightful story about two mature men in their 50s, one out and one in the midst of a bisexual awakening. The writing is superb.
@Katie C: I love ENDLESS NIGHT–it’s the most atypical of Christie’s works and the closest thing to noir she ever wrote.
@Eliza: I just finished THE REST OF THE STORY today, so it didn’t get in with my WAYR post yesterday, but I agree with you. I think Bauer may have bit off more than he could chew, trying to cram three different storylines into one book (the previous abusive bully of a coach, the team’s slow ascent to a winning season, and the narrator falling in love with one of the rookie players). Plus, I’ve never seen so much virginity fetishism in an m/m romance. The emphasis on the love interest’s “untouched” status put me in mind of some of Cora Reilly’s earliest mafia romances.
I too love ENDLESS NIGHT. Last year, I read a ton of Agatha Christie, and exceeded my GR goal with 138 out of 100 books, mainly thanks to Christie!
This year my goal is 100. Thus far I have read:
US AGAINST YOU (Beartown 2)
UP A ROAD SLOWLY by Irene Hunt
DEENIE by Judy Blume (a reread, of course)
FOSTER by Claire Keegan
Of the four, DEENIE still holds up beautifully. FOSTER is beautifully written, but so short it feels like the beginning of a novel, rather than a full novella. UP A ROAD SLOWLY was heartwarming and very Anne of Green Gable-ish. I find the Beartown books exhausting and somewhat laboring to read, but oddly compelling. I love sports books.
Right now, I’m reading some lackluster mysteries and thrillers. (LAURELS ARE POISON & THE GIRL IN ICE.) They’re fine. And a fantasy (DEERSKIN) which I may DNF, reminding me why I don’t read fantasy.
Hello and HNY Smart Bitches. Here we are again…
So I have read A LOT over the last few weeks. However, not all of it is worth your time, so I will stick with the good stuff only:
Proper Scoundrels by Allie Therin was a joy. Very KJ Charles Will Darling Adventures, so if you like those, you’ll like this. Paranormal M/M, with elements of grumpy/sunshine and hurt/comfort but not committing fully to either. It’s a post-WW1 adventure with a cast of interesting characters. A spin-off from another series of hers but can be read as a standalone, although the history would have been useful. However that series is all priced over £7 and I expect an actual physical book for that sort of money, not an airy-fairy digital file. So I guess that’s me and Allie done for now. Shame.
And talking of KJ Charles, the Masters in this Hall novella was highly entertaining. Nominally a Christmas story and linked to the Lilywhite Boys universe. Sparkling.
Fire Season by KD Casey. M/M baseball romance. Nice chemistry, kindness, plenty of angst and heat. One character dealing with the day to day challenges of sobriety. A nice ‘deep’ read.
Their Marchioness by Jess Michaels. MMF and every combination thereof of the three main characters. Wall to wall smut but with a nice story. She writes this stuff so well. Short and very sweet.
Unmasked by the Marquess by Cat Sebastian. A woman posing as a man to help out a friend and the Marquess who falls for them. A delight.
Icebreaker by Hannah Grace. I enjoyed this with reservations. But I think the reservations are more me still learning what I like and don’t like in this genre. It’s a heartfelt book but the main characters are probably too young (college age) for me who begins with a six these days. However, it did make me think back to my own college years and relationships which were very real and important at the time, so I expect I am just looking through the wrong end of the telescope at a world I can’t really connect with. TMI probably…
I’ve also been hoovering up various billionaire/office romance stories, by authors such as
Olivia Hayle, Ivy Layne, Annika Martin, Pippa Grant, Nicole Snow, Ainsley Booth and Sierra Cartwright. These were the good ones. I have Also DNF’d a few others. And still my obsession persists.
Currently reading Vanora Lawless’s Imperfect Illusions. Will report back next time.
@Jill Q – I found Full Dark House compelling despite the problems I had with the writing so I plan to read The Water Room.
@DiscoDollyDeb – in some ways Endless Night reminded me of another Christie that I read last year, Crooked House – both very dark.
Just read The Facemaker based on the comments in the main post and IT WAS SO GOOD. I am so glad I read it. I kept reading excerpts to my husband. And that bit at the end where we learn just what a deeply good and respectful person Gillies is and how far ahead of his time just make my heart sing.