Essays & Musings
What We’ve Been Thinking About
Thoughts on books, reading, culture, and the literary life.
Best looking on screen couple of all time?
October 4, 2021A friend came over this weekend and said he and his 22 year old daughter had been discussing this for fun and, no shock, had completely different answers to the…
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the ask@AAR: Is there a romance canon?
October 1, 2021According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a canon is a. Literary Criticism. A body of literary works traditionally regarded as the most important, significant, and worthy of study; those works…
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The Wayback on Wednesday: Riffs on Political Correctness
September 29, 2021originally published in August of 2000 This feature grew out of Laurie Gold’s 1997 review of a 1997 romance, A Well Pleasured Lady by Christina Dodd, and a subsequent column…
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the ask@AAR: How do you get your news?
September 24, 2021I do not watch and never have watched the news on TV. I’ve never watched 60 Minutes, The Daily Show, or the nightly news. This isn’t because I think it’s…
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The seemingly endless technical problems at AAR
September 20, 2021On Sunday, after two of the plugins we use for comments and the forums were updated, five months of forums vanished and the forums themselves wouldn’t function properly. I spent…
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the ask@AAR: Do you read self-help books?
September 17, 2021Peeps–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….
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Seen any covers you love lately?
September 13, 2021Covers 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,…
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the ask@AAR: What do you think about the current state of marketing in romance?
September 10, 2021There is chatter in Romancelandia about Helen Hoang’s The Heart Principle. Where her first two books were romances, this novel–and I haven’t read it so I’m just repeating what I’ve…
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the ask@AAR: What love stories DO NOT stand the test of time?
September 3, 2021Reader Kris recently commented that when she reread Lisa Kleypas’ Dreaming of You it DID NOT hold up at all. She wrote: From Sarah saying NO to Derek not listening…
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What are you reading?
September 1, 2021I’ve been on a rereading binge. After the AAR Good Time Book Club read the surprisingly unsatisfying Fool Me Twice by the usually great Meredith Duran, I was inspired to…
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the ask@AAR: Another side in the endless kerfuffle about accuracy in historical romance.
August 27, 2021This week on Twitter, a famous historical romance author made the point that there are good reasons authors of historical romance break with convention. She argued authors do so not…
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The AAR Good Time Book Club: Fool Me Twice by Meredith Duran
August 23, 2021Today we’re discussing Fool Me Twice by Meredith Duran. In her B+ review, Blythe said: Fool Me Twice is easily my favorite Duran book of the last few years. After…
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