I am thrilled to announce the first of a series of guest “If You Like” posts! Our first guest star is Christine, who has provided us with a list of “Books read based on Internet/TV/media peer pressure”. Without further ado, here’s Christine’s list of “Everyone else is reading this so you HAVE to!” 1. Twilight…

Today’s If You Like is about improbable plots. I realize that this is a loaded category. One can argue that pretty much any plot is to a greater or lesser degree probable or improbable. For example, my beloved “heroine inherits a castle from an unknown relative” sort of books. I put those in the probable…

Here’s hoping those of you in the U.S. are having a wonderful Monday off! “If You Like” will appear again as usual next week. In the meantime, for your entertainment on this holiday Monday, check out this Buzzfeed article on “21 Jokes Only History Nerds Will Understand“. I rather like #18…. Which one is your…

The topic of today’s post is “Better Together”. There are books I tend to read in pairs, simply because something in one makes me think of the other. Sometimes it’s theme, other times it’s location, and still other times it’s just personal association. Here are some of my reading pairings: — L.M. Montgomery’s The Blue…

There’s a running joke in Romance Land that if you add up all the dukes running around (and it is, of course, a truth universally acknowledged that a single duke must be in want of a duchess), you’ll come to a number greater than the actual population of the British Isles at the time. Add…

I’ve been thinking a lot about rakes recently. Romance Land is overrun with them, but they’re like cartoon bunnies: a softer, fuzzier version of the real thing. Without those sharp little teeth. Real rakes are something quite different: there’s an edge to them, something ruthless and more than a little bit dangerous. They have the…

I’ve been thinking a lot about beta heroes recently. It’s a difficult category to define– falling largely into the realm of “I know it when I see it”– but these are generally the more relaxed sub-species of hero. In romances, they often get their start as the best friend of a prior, more alpha hero.…

A weekend when the temperature dropped to ninety– after sundown– put me in mind of all those books set during sweltering summers. The ones that pop first to mind for me are mostly Barbara Michaels novels: Be Buried in the Rain, set in a remote and crumbling plantation house in the heat of a Virginia…

Okay, this is less an “if you like”, and more of a “books that fit together under a category that only makes sense in my head”: books I tried to read at the wrong time and then rediscovered later. Don’t you love the way books sometimes reappear at just the right time? I’ve had two…