The Best of 2020 – Kristen’s List
This year was feast or famine for my reading life. I could barely pick up a book for most of the spring – instead losing myself in repeats of Top Chef and my umpteenth playthrough of Stardew Valley. I then spent July binging every happily ever after I could get my hands on, and when August hit it was back to video games. This lead to a shorter list of favorites, but no less robust, than in previous years. But there is definitely no pattern beyond “and they all lived happily ever after”. […]
For my professional life, I travel about forty weeks a year. It’s… a lot. My husband and I joke that I should just perpetually forward my mail to various Hiltons around the world. And I’ll be honest, hours upon hours of hotel TV is not my jam. There is only so much Investigation Discovery I can watch before the commercials just do my nut in. Thus, I read. There are days, however, where I am too professionally fried to keep my eyes open. Thus, I have become an audiobook fiend.
Here we are, heading into the back end of the year with our regular monthly look at the books we’re most excited about reading over the coming weeks. As usual, this is just a small selection of the books released every month – we can’t include them all, so please drop by and let us know if you’re looking forward to something you think we should know about! 
A few weeks ago, I selected a book to review that admitted it was a novella, but pretended it was a stand-alone. When I opened it up, the book was fifty seven pages and was about the farthest thing from a stand-alone I could think of. Instead, I think it’s a few chapters the author cut from another book and just… embellished. There was no time to invest in the characters, and instead I was expected to believe they were obsessed enough with each other to go from dreaming of having sex with one another to marriage – in fifty seven pages.
uld read on the plane. This means nothing that was shortlisted for the Man Booker, and nothing that requires a lexicon to decipher. Plane reads, people.
A new book from Tessa Dare is obviously a big event for many romance fans, and the AAR staffers are no different, with many of us choosing The Governess Game as one of the titles we’re most looking forward to reading in August. In fact, we’re looking forward to quite a few historicals this month – Caroline Linden, Kerrigan Byrne and Virginia Heath all have new books coming out, Bec McMaster continues her Blue-Blood Conspiracy series and there’s a long-awaited new book from Susanna Kearsley, too.
