the ask@AAR: Do you read self-help books?
Peeps–I’ve been a bit blue lately. I’m on crutches for six weeks–months after that with a cane–due to a soft tissue hip repair. Covid continues to threaten so many things. I have a neighbor who is as nasty as he can be and that just bums me out. My lovely sister-in-law suggested I read one of her favorite self-help books and I am considering it. But… I’ve never read a self-help book. When I first had kids, people gave me several parenting books and I just decided that they weren’t for me–I used this book instead–probably because I hate to be told what to do. (It’s a failing.) […]
Covers in romance come up again and again and, usually, readers are complaining. Whether it’s the Fabio-licious covers of the 1990s or the cartoon covers all over the place today, there’s always a contingent who just doesn’t like them. And, to be candid, one of the reasons I felt comfortable reading, after a thirty year absence, romance was because I had a Kindle and no one could mock me because of how the books I was reading looked. 
There is chatter in Romancelandia about Helen Hoang’s
This is an experience we’ve all had. There are romances we loved back in the day that now make us shudder or, at the very least, wonder what on earth we were thinking.
Earlier this year, I tried and failed to reread Devil’s Bride by Stephanie Laurens. The prose was absurdly purple, Devil is kind of a dick, and Honoria is just plain silly a great deal of the time. Today, it is a hard pass and yet, when I look at Goodreads, I see that in 2013 I gave it four stars which, for me, […]