Best Books
by Michelle Carroll, November 8, 2023 10:58 AM
As a person who tries to avoid spoiler alerts, romance surprised me a little bit — knowing that a happily ever after is most likely at the end of the story should annoy me. But it turns out that I really, really want to know how these crazy kids figure it out, even if their love is broadcast on the first page. These books contain a lot of twists and turns and surprises — secret exes turning up out of the blue! overcoming generational trauma! vampires! — and knowing everything ends up okay makes the journey...
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Lists
by Michelle Carroll, December 9, 2022 12:13 PM
Do you hear what I hear? It's the sound of every streaming service and cable channel releasing the new crop of festive, formulaic, friendly holiday rom-com movies.
I've talked about this before: I love holiday rom-coms. I need to watch a grumpy no-nonsense business-type get taken over by the magic of Christmas, I need to watch a very unlikely coincidence play out in the most jingle-bells-jangling manner, I need a love of festive holiday puns to bring two people together under the mistletoe. I need two people to kiss and/or dance in a gazebo in the snow.
While I love watching these movies while wrapping presents, baking cookies, or decking the halls, I think this form really shines in romance novels. These stories are worth your undivided attention. Read on to enjoy the 12 books of kiss-mas!...
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Lists
by Kelsey Ford, Michelle Carroll, and Sarah Reif, August 10, 2022 8:54 AM
Do we love books? Yes, of course, obviously! We’re obsessed with them. But that doesn’t mean we’re not just as obsessed with so many of the great movies and television shows being released today, especially when they’re adaptations that do right by books we’ve read and loved. We had so much fun pulling together our previous two lists of book-to-screen adaptations we couldn't stop talking about (Part One and Part Two), so we thought: who doesn't love a good trilogy?
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Lists
by Michelle Carroll, December 8, 2021 8:35 AM
I can’t get enough of the overtly seasonal romantic comedies. I will watch every variation of people meeting implausibly (especially if a big city business person needs to learn how to slow it down in a snowy small town); somehow getting into a cookie-decorating fight or toppling a fully decorated tree; and kissing in a wintery gazebo after discovering the true meaning of the season. The wackier the holiday trappings, the better — As Mindy Kaling once put it, “I regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world operates according to different rules than my regular human world.”
Since I run out of the movies unsettlingly early in the season, I’m making a list (and checking it twice) of giggly, over-the-top, seasonally bright holiday romance novels. This is the only thing I’ll want to read while I’m waiting for the cookies to come out of the oven in two weeks...
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Lists
by Michelle Carroll, October 7, 2021 9:47 AM
We've started to get the big fall rains in Portland recently, which means we’ve started seeing mushrooms pop up everywhere. I’m a bit of a fungi novice — I love eating chanterelles, but haven’t yet embarked on the Pacific Northwest rite of passage of foraging for my own mushrooms. Luckily, there are some fantastic books to guide the next stage of my mushroom appreciation. Whether you’re just beginning to seek out sumptuous spores, looking to identify the new friends sprouting from a tree stump, or just searching for more fungus puns in your life, this list is for you...
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Lists
by Michelle Carroll, May 26, 2021 9:32 AM
Way back in April of 2020, I attended a virtual panel called The Asian American Experience. Cathy Park Hong, Kevin Nguyen, and Mira Jacob were phenomenal, and I’d highly recommend watching the recording of the event. Because it was the early days of all-virtual-everything, there were some technical difficulties as the event was kicking off, and a magical thing happened: the attendees started enthusiastically recommending books to each other.
This list is inspired by that excited energy, but a little more homegrown. These are the titles that keep popping up in my group chats, and that make my phone overheat because everyone wants to talk about them...
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Lists
by Michelle Carroll, September 15, 2020 11:20 AM
Like a fresh notebook or a back-to-school fashion experiment, campus novels are full of promise and possibility. And in a year when academic pursuits feel paused at best, fraught at worst, we’ve compiled some of our favorite novels that conjure the specific community norms a campus has to offer, and let you experience that first chill of the still-fresh school year, without having to move into a dorm.
Real Life
by Brandon Taylor
Taking place over a hazy August weekend, Real Life is a pitch-perfect capture of so many things: a Midwestern university town, frustrations and uncertainty in academia, and emotionally charged 30-something dinner parties, to name a few...
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