Essays & Musings
What We’ve Been Thinking About
Thoughts on books, reading, culture, and the literary life.
the ask@AAR: Is romance over men?*
February 7, 2025Imagine: A brilliant, kind, and compassionate heroine—we’ll call her Avery—has just gotten home from an awful date. This time, the guy–we’ll call him Chandler–had the nerve to talk mostly about…
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the ask@AAR: Is it time to bring sexy back?
January 31, 2025In romance blurb after blurb, books with love scenes in them are referred to as spicy. Why? I suspect it’s because spicy sounds less sexual than sexy. Which, given that…
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the ask@AAR: Can you write a historical romance?
January 24, 2025Writing a historical romance is like throwing a Regency ball: you need the right setting, the right characters, and a scandal simmering just beneath the surface. But before you embark…
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the ask@AAR: What will romance look like this year?
January 17, 2025One of the perks of my job is access to upcoming releases before they’re released. Every day, I look at Edelweiss and NetGalley and check out what’s coming out in…
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the ask@AAR: Will you support AAR in 2025?
January 10, 2025It’s that time of the year when I look back at the previous year and assess how AAR is doing. The good news is we did slightly–very–better financially in 2024…
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The Best of 2024 – Dabney’s List
January 5, 20252024…. this was a year of reading to escape. I did a lot of rereading–it helps to put me to sleep at night–but still managed to read almost 70 books…
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the ask@AAR: What were your favorite TV shows of the year?
January 3, 2025This year I discovered TV Time, a well-designed app that makes it easy to keep track of the shows you’ve watched and want to watch. Thus, I can tell you…
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the ask@AAR: What were your favorite films of the year?
December 27, 2024Pre-Covid, I loved going to the movies. Post, not so much. In fact, not only am I not munching on popcorn and watching the credits roll on the big screen,…
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Merry Christmas!
December 25, 2024Merry Christmas to all. I wish you hope and joy, in darkness and in light. Here’s to grace, peace, and love. 2024 was a tumultuous and often tough year…
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the ask@AAR: What’s the perfect length for a novel?
December 20, 2024Increasingly, the short novel seems to me to be the ideal literary form for our tired, distracted but still story-hungry age. The above is from a recent column by Margaret…
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the ask@AAR: Are you ready to agree to disagree?
December 13, 2024Currently, I am working a joint review with another reviewer on a book I loved and she did not. Neither is going to change the other’s mind about this work….
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the ask@AAR: What’s your favorite film adaptation?
December 6, 2024It is the era of the recycled tale. So much so I often wonder whether or not any original stories are being filmed. Cape Fear, a story originally written by…
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