Essays & Musings
What We’ve Been Thinking About
Thoughts on books, reading, culture, and the literary life.
The ask@AAR: What books do you feel should be on the 2024 AAR Top 100 Romances Poll?
April 12, 2024YOU MUST ADD YOUR CHOICES TO THE SURVEY. WE WILL NOT BE ADDING THEM FROM THE COMMENTS. We are slowly creating a list of books that will be on the…
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The Top 50 from your picks from the 2018 AAR Top 100 List
April 10, 2024For the past two weeks, we’ve been asking you for your choices for the top romances from the last AAR Top 100 Romances poll we ran in 2018. We plan…
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The ask@AAR: Are you excited for Bridgerton Season Three?
April 5, 2024I’m starting to see ads for the third season of Bridgerton and I’m not sure if I’m excited or not. I very much enjoyed Season One but struggled with the…
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the ask@AAR: Which books, currently on the Top 100 list, should we include in the new survey? Which should we not?
March 29, 2024As we begin creating the survey we’ll use to make a new AAR Top 100 list (2024), I thought we’d begin by assessing, in a survey, what current novels on…
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What’s–currently–your favorite movie?
March 25, 2024When I’m with someone I don’t know that well and the conversation lags, I love to ask them: What’s your favorite movie? Most of the time, people think a moment…
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the ask@AAR: What are the most polarizing romances?
March 22, 2024OK, I hate to trash another site but I found Book Riot’s article on 8 of the Most Polarizing Romance Novels Ever Written to be, um, a joke. Ravishing the…
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An interview with Lynn (also known as Jenna) about her new book!
March 18, 2024Dabney: What made you want to write a YA book? Lynn: I love that stage in life, at least on a fictional level. Real life young adulthood is so fraught…
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the ask@AAR: What’s your favorite romance, thus far, of 2024?
March 15, 2024AAR has given DIKs to twenty-three books in 2024. Of those, fifteen are 2024 releases. They are: Simply the Best by Susan Elizabeth Phillips A Wild and Heavenly Place by…
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the ask@AAR: What, now, do we want from love stories?
March 8, 2024The thing about romance novels, it was always said, they had to have a happily ever after ending (or, perhaps, a happy for now ending.) Romance Writers of America still…
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March releases! What are you excited about?
March 4, 2024Here are just a few of the March releases the world is chatting about. Are any of them on your radar? If not, what is?
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the ask@AAR: What’s popular at AAR?
March 1, 2024I recently ran a report at Google Analytics to look at what are the most read pages at AAR. It was somewhat surprising and very interesting. This report is from…
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A blast from the past: AAR–then it was likesbooks.com–in May 1998
February 26, 2024AAR published its first pages in 1996, started by the brilliant Laurie Gold. Many of the early pages–although not the reviews–are lost due to incompatible software, cost, and error. We…
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