Essays & Musings
What We’ve Been Thinking About
Thoughts on books, reading, culture, and the literary life.
my favorite ten romances
May 9, 2026books that bewitch me, body and soul
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My favorite mysteries, part three
May 3, 2026and then there were none… for now
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The 25 best novels of the 21st century
April 30, 2026a very subjective list
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My favorite mysteries: part two
April 15, 2026the women are killing it
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My favorite mysteries, part one
April 11, 2026no pat plots here
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The New Fear of Being Cut Off by Your Children
April 7, 2026the silencing of the rents
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Please, don’t feed the (feral) cats.
March 30, 2026save the birds
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Parsing the Polls
March 25, 2026I have been going over the data from all of AAR’s Top 100 Romance polls. My goal is to get a sense of what romances readers have most loved overy…
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Analyzing readers’ favorite romance novels over the past three decades
March 24, 2026parsing the data
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the AAR Top 100 Romances (2026)
March 20, 2026looks like a canon to me–more on that later
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The AAR Top 100 Romances Poll (2026)
March 20, 2026The votes are in and the romance novels AAR readers have chosen as the Top 100 Romances are set. This is a reader generated list. The list is in alphabetical…
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Reading poetry in bed
March 19, 2026it’s better than a gummy
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