Tag: favorites

Top 5 Reads of 2022

~ EMM ~ 3 Comments

We’re a few days into the new year, and it’s time to talk about which of the books I read in 2022 were my favorites. In my last post, I narrowed my list down to twelve. After much consideration and one late addition, I’ve narrowed that list down to my top five.

Here are my top five reads of 2022:

  • Legendborn by Tracy Deonn — This one took me a bit by surprise, but I really love this modern twist on the Arthurian legend. I just got Bloodmarked on my Kindle, and I am very excited to continue with this series.
  • Son of the Storm by Suyi Davies Okungbowa — I was expecting to like this one because I know the author, and I got to read an early version of the first chapter in a workshop we were in together. But this really blew me away. Seriously, adult epic fantasy at its best. I am SO excited to get Warrior of the Wind when it comes out next year.
  • She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan — I hadn’t even heard of this until I pulled the list of Hugo nominees for that reading project I did in the first half of 2022. I don’t think I ever did a follow-up post on that, but this was my favorite of all the novels I read.
  • The Misfit Soldier by Michael Mammay — I feel like this is the book I most frequently recommended in 2022. Mammay has become an auto-buy author for me. I love his military sci-fi, and in addition to featuring a really fun and funny main character, this one had the added bonus of having a romantic sub-plot which was really well done. I need more books set in this world with these characters.
  • Ocean’s Echo by Everina Maxwell — This was the last book I read in 2022, and I LOVED it. I loved it even more than Winter’s Orbit, which made it into my top five books read last year. It features a chaos muppet and an order muppet who are forced to work together (twist on forced proximity trope). This is a main character and trope combo that I forgot is one of my absolute favorites.

I think the common theme with these was that I went into reading them with neutral to high expectations, and they all exceeded those expectations and left me wanting more. So yeah. Good thing there will be more to read from almost all of these authors in 2023! I am ready for it.

What was the best book you read in 2022?

Favorite books read in 2022 — the first cut

~ EMM

It’s the end of the year, and everyone seems to be doing their “best of” and favorites lists. But I’m over here still reading and getting FOMO. So, I looked at the books I’ve read so far this year and narrowed the list down from 60+ books to my top twelve favorites.

What’s on my short list:

  • Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki — contemporary fantasy with a side of violin prodigy
  • Paladin’s Grace by T. Kingfisher — fantasy mystery romance with fresh world-building
  • Payback’s a Witch by Lana Harper — my fave of the small town witch romances I read this year
  • The Misfit Soldier by Michael Mammay — fun military sci-fi caper with an excellent rivals to lovers romance sub-plot
  • Son of the Storm by Suyi Davies Okungbowa — the first epic fantasy that has captured my attention in a long time
  • Legendborn by Tracy Deonn — contemporary fantasy based on the King Arthur mythology
  • The Galaxy and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers — cozy alien anthropology with a side of infrastructure collapse
  • She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker Chan — historical fiction with a dash of fantasy
  • The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy by Megan Bannen — swoony fantasy romance with chaotic but charming worldbuilding
  • Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree — cozy fantasy that will make you want to visit your local coffee shop
  • Kamila Knows Best by Farah Heron — best contemporary romance retelling of Jane Austen’s Emma since Clueless, IMO
  • Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn — contemporary mystery novel featuring four retired female assassins

I still have a stack of books I plan to read before the end of the year, and a couple of those have “five star” expectations from me. So, I may have to modify this list a bit before I start stack ranking to determine my final “top five favorites” of the books I’ve read in 2022. But, I thought I’d post a preview of my short list in case you have one of these on your TBR and have been waffling about reading it before the end of the year.

Top five favorite movies

~ EMM

Years ago, I used to have this list of top five favorite comfort food movies on the about page of my blog. I took it down at some point, but I save the list. Well… there are actually two lists. I’ll get to that in a minute.

First, here are the lists:

Tonight I re-watched 10 Things I Hate About You. It wasn’t until after the movie was over that I realized my favorite scene in that movie… this one:

Was probably partly to blame for one of the scenes I wrote into Ash of the Fae. Maybe at some point I’ll talk about that whole “compost heap” of culture that feeds your story brain, but it’s getting late, and I can’t really use that scene as an example without giving spoilers for the book. So, put a pin in that topic for later.

Watching 10 Things reminded me of the top five movies list I made. Only, when I dug it up off my hard drive, I realized it was actually two lists, not one. And I remembered why I took it off my bio.

While I stand by the choices on these lists, I no longer call things I love “guilty pleasures.” I don’t buy into the concept of feeling guilty about stuff that brings me joy. And there was no way I was going to be able to condense this list down to a real top five list.

Even now, I’m realizing that there are a lot more movies that have left a lasting impression on me and that I re-watch whenever they become available to stream. (Unless they never are available to stream. Those I have on DVD.) There are two movies in particular that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately that I was kind of surprised to find don’t appear on either of these lists.

The first is a romantic comedy. But not just any romantic comedy. A Meg Ryan romantic comedy that, in my opinion, is the BEST romantic comedy: French Kiss. I just found and bought a copy of on DVD because it’s never available to stream, and I really wanted to re-watch it. The only copy I had was on VHS, which I got rid of a loooooonnng time ago.

So, I re-watched it last week, and damn that movie is good. It really should be on that “comfort food” movie list, but I don’t know what I would bump off in order to add it.

The other one I am reminded of every time I walk into my office because I have the (full size, massive) movie poster hanging on my office wall. I inherited this poster from someone we met here on the island shortly after we moved here. I mentioned that there was this one obscure favorite of mine that he’d probably never heard of… The Big Blue (aka Le Grande Bleu). Well, it turned out that he’d not only heard of it, he had the movie poster, and he gave it to me!

The Big Blue was a movie we watched in my French class in high school, and I don’t know what it was (the dolphins, I mean, of course it was the dolphins), but I just fell in love with this movie. It was only later that I figured out that the director of this movie is the same guy who did The Fifth Element and The Professional (aka Léon), both favorites of mine, as well as La Femme Nikita (the French version that was eventually remade into another of my all-time favorite movies, Point of No Return).

So, yeah. What are we up to now? Fourteen movies? All those movies should be on this list. There is no way I can narrow it down to five. Unless maybe I just re-watch all of them over the course of the next few weeks so they are all fresh in my mind?

Honestly, if I did that, I’d probably just come up with even MORE comfort food movies that I love to re-watch. But it sounds like a fun project… I should probably do it anyway. For science. Right? Not because I’m procrastinating on my editing. Definitely not that. 😉

What about you? What’s the last movie you re-watched? What’s your go-to comfort food movie?

February Reading Wrap-Up — #FaRoFeb and More

~ EMM

Fantasy Romance February is over, which is a little sad, but it was a good reading month for me. I ended up reading a total of seven books! Not bad for the shortest month of the year, right?

Since (like last month) I read both fiction and non-fiction books, but (unlike last month) I read more than one of each, I’ll start with my favorite fiction and favorite non-fiction that I read this month.

Fave fiction of the month goes to Paladin’s Grace by T. Kingfisher, which I already gushed about here.

Fave non-fiction of the month goes to Black Love Matters: Real Talk on Romance, Being Seen, and Happily Ever Afters by multiple authors, edited by Jessica P. Pryde. I highly recommend checking this out, especially if you are a writer or a romance reader. But really anyone who consumes stories in any format or genre could benefit from the light that these authors shine on the myriad issues around how Black relationships are portrayed in books, shows, and movies. It really was some of the best non-fiction reading I could have selected for any month, let alone the month that is dedicated to both Black History and all things love (due to the mid-month Gal/Pal/Val/entine’s Day holiday).

Aside from those two excellent reads, my buddy read book for the month was the series finale, Aurora’s End by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff. It was a solid culmination of this epic space adventure, but it wasn’t my favorite. I just wasn’t that into, and it nearly sent me into a reading slump. But then I jumped back into one of my favorite series and saved myself with Miss Moriarty, I Presume by Sherry Thomas. I cannot gush about her Lady Sherlock series enough. It’s so good, and it was exactly what I needed to pull me out of the looming reading funk.

I also read Newsletter Ninja 2 by Tammi Labrecque, which overwhelmed me with lots of excellent ideas (in a good way). Mentioning that book reminds me that I should probably say, if you like my blog posts, you might also like my monthly newsletter. Yes, shameless self-promo, but also, I’m not kidding. My newsletter is a lot like my blog posts, it just has different (newsletter exclusive) content, including updates on my writing projects and free stories. Like this one that you get in exchange for signing up.

Finally, I jumped back into fantasy romance because it was FaRoFeb, after all. I read Payback’s a Witch by Lana Harper, which was cute and fun. I was really into the magic competition (because I love competition stories), though I was a little disappointed that the main character wasn’t participating as one of the witches in the contest. The world-building is very “our world, but with magic” (which I like), and I loved the little town of Thistle Grove (not least of which because it sounds like the kind of town that wouldn’t have been that far from where I grew up).

Then I picked up a newsletter freebie (The Duchess: Tales of Kelnore) from a fellow FaRoFeb author (Hannah E. Carey) who also writes Celtic-inspired fantasy romance, except I don’t think her books have magic in them. At least this prequel story didn’t. When I looked it up on Goodreads, there was only one review and it was 2-stars, but the low rating was because that reviewer was disappointed that the heroine has sex before marriage. After I stopped laughing, I signed up for Hannah’s newsletter and hit download. I’m glad I did because I enjoyed this little prequel novella, even though it would not be considered a romance (because the pair of characters who are in love don’t live happily ever after). But the story did it’s job in introducing me to this world of Pern Coen and making me curious about what happens in the first full book in this series (The Hunter: Tales of Pern Coen).

Possibly the most fun I had this past week was adding these books, plus last month’s books, to my 2022 virtual shelf in my reading journal, which is looking pretty sweet, if I do say so myself.

How was your FaRoFeb? Did you read any good fantasy romance that you recommend? I would love to hear your faves and recommendations in the comments.

Top 5 Books I Read in 2020

~ EMM ~ 6 Comments

I’m working on my December reading wrap up, and calculating my 2020 reading stats. While I do that, I thought I’d share my top five favorite books I read in 2020.

My favorite books read in 2020 were (in no particular order):

I’ve already gushed about all of these in previous blog posts, so if you haven’t read those, go check out my monthly reading recaps.

Genre-wise, these books represent a little bit of everything that I like to read: contemporary (Such a Fun Age), contemporary fantasy (Sweep of the Blade), secondary world fantasy (Return of the Thief and Race the Sands), and sci-fi (Network Effect), but I think it’s a little unusual that they are all adult fiction. I have to go back and look, but I feel like previous years’ lists must have included at least one or two young adult books.

Another odd thing they have in common is that all but one of these books were published in 2020 (Sweep of the Blade was published in mid-2019). Technically, Such a Fun Age was published on the last day of 2019, but I’m counting it as a 2020 book. This was a little surprising, because I don’t usually read so many new releases.

And finally (and possibly most unusual for me), all of these books feature parent-child and/or caregiver-child relationships that play very important roles in these stories. Sweep of the Blade and Race the Sands both have badass mothers as main characters. The main character in Such a Fun Age is a nanny. Murderbot is put in charge of protecting a surly teen (Dr. Mensa’s daughter) in Network Effect. And The King of Attolia takes on a new, very young attendant in Return of the Thief.

Did any of these make it onto your favorites list? If not, what was your favorite read from 2020?