Hoohoo, friends of the blade.
The weather turns cooler outside, rain is falling and what could be better than to curl up with a book and read? I don’t know about you, but I love reading about other people who like books. Wether that may be other readers or writers or booksellers. I enjoy a good story about bookish people. So I thought I’d make a little list of people who enjoy books as much as I do. I’m sure I forgot a lot of books so feel free to add your favourites in the comments, I’d always love to discover more!
Readers
A Novel Love Story by Ashley Poston
Eileen Merriweather loves to get lost in a good happily-ever-after. The fictional kind, anyway. Because at least imaginary men don’t leave you at the altar. She feels safe in a book. At home. Which might be why she’s so set on going to her annual book club retreat this year—she needs good friends, cheap wine, and grand romantic gestures—no matter what.
But when her car unexpectedly breaks down on the way, she finds herself stranded in a quaint town that feels like it’s right out of a novel…
Because it is.
This place can’t be real, and yet… she’s here, in Eloraton, the town of her favorite romance series, where the candy store’s honey taffy is always sweet, the local bar’s burgers are always a little burnt, and rain always comes in the afternoon. It feels like home. It’s perfect—and perfectly frozen, trapped in the late author’s last unfinished story.
Elsy is sure that’s why she must be here: to help bring the town to its storybook ending.
Except there is a character in Eloraton that she can’t place—a grumpy bookstore owner with mint-green eyes, an irritatingly sexy mouth and impeccable taste in novels. And he does not want her finishing this book.
Which is a problem because Elsy is beginning to think the town’s happily-ever-after might just be intertwined with her own.
Even though Elsy is also a literature professor, that she is a reader is the most important aspect when it comes to the bookish themes. Elsy absolutely adores this book series and manages to get into the story itself by accident, learning a lot about the author, the characters and mostly, herself. Read a quick review of A Novel Love Story here.
In the Silences by Rachel Gold
When did life get so dangerous? Kaz Adams just wants to read comic books with her best friend, Aisha Warren. And maybe get up the nerve to ask her out, if Kaz turns out to be a gender that Aisha’s into.
Kaz figured she’d be the target of violence for her gender nonconformity, but a fatal police shooting thirty miles from their town opens her eyes to the realities of racism. She watches as pressures at school and in their social group mount against Aisha. Kaz would try to stop a bullet for Aisha if she had to, but she has no idea how to stop the waves of soul-crushing disapproval and judgment. When she talks to the other white students and adults in her area, they don’t seem to understand what she’s talking about.
Aisha has helped Kaz find a place in the world, but that was about Kaz’s gender expression. Kaz can’t magically change the world for Aisha, but something has to change in their school system or she’ll lose the girl she loves.
This book follows two best friends who enjoy comics a lot but the older they get, the more apparent their struggles get. Aisha is Black and Kaz is nonbinary, they struggle with how their identitites are used against them and how they can accept themselves and each other, and help each other out. It’s a story of grief and acceptance, hope for more but also staying true to your roots and yourself. Read my full review of In the Silences here.
A Not So Fictional Fall by Savannah Scott
I live for happily ever afters.
And I’m finally meeting my favorite romance author in person!
Only, all this time, I thought author, Amelie De Pierre, was a woman.
It turns out, Pierre Toussaint is the man behind the books that make me weak in the knees.
He could be the consummate book boyfriend with his dreamy hazel eyes, strong jawline, and those black-rimmed glasses. Not to mention that accent. Oh, that French accent. When Pierre speaks, I feel like I’m curled in his arms on a riverbank being fed chocolate-dipped strawberries.
Not Pierre’s arms, of course. We barely just met. And I’m just me. And he’s Pierre, internationally renowned romance author.
Seeing Pierre in person has me stammering and blushing—two things I don’t usually do.
Imagine my surprise when I receive a call a few weeks after meeting Pierre—from his agent—proposing marriage. Not that I’d marry his agent.
They want me to marry Pierre.
This has a reader x favourite author romance that was very cute and it also has book conventions and lovely friendships.
The Bromance Book Club by Lyssa Kay Adams
Nashville Legends second baseman Gavin Scott’s marriage is in major league trouble. He’s recently discovered a humiliating secret: his wife Thea has always faked the Big O. When he loses his cool at the revelation, it’s the final straw on their already strained relationship. Thea asks for a divorce, and Gavin realizes he’s let his pride and fear get the better of him.
Distraught and desperate, Gavin finds help from an unlikely source: a secret romance book club made up of Nashville’s top alpha men. With the help of their current read, a steamy Regency titled Courting the Countess, the guys coach Gavin on saving his marriage. But it’ll take a lot more than flowery words and grand gestures for this hapless Romeo to find his inner hero and win back the trust of his wife.
This was a fun second chance romance that features reluctant friends and a group of men who just want to be their best selves. It’s sweet and I genuinely liked the characters.
Writers
Only and Forever by Chloe Liese
Bergman Brothers #7
Viggo Bergman, hopeless romantic, is thoroughly weary of waiting for his happily ever after. But between opening a romance bookstore, running a romance book club, coaching kids’ soccer, and adopting a household of pets—just maybe, he’s overcommitted himself?—Viggo’s chaotic life has made finding his forever love seem downright improbable.
Enter Tallulah Clarke, chilly cynic with a massive case of writer’s block. Tallulah needs help with her thriller’s romantic subplot. Viggo needs another pair of hands to keep his store afloat. So they agree to swap skills and cohabitate for convenience—his romance expertise to revive her book, her organizational prowess to salvage his store. They hardly get along, and they couldn’t be more different, but who says roommate-coworkers need to be friends?
As they share a home and life, Tallulah and Viggo discover a connection that challenges everything they believe about love, and reveals the plot twist they never saw happily ever after is here already, right under their roof.
I love the focus on books and writing and what impact stories have on our lives in Only and Forever! Viggo is an avid romance reader fulfilling his dream of opening his own bookshop with a heavy focus on romance while falling for a thriller writer who moves in with him.
A Not So Fictional Fall by Savannah Scott
I live for happily ever afters.
And I’m finally meeting my favorite romance author in person!
Only, all this time, I thought author, Amelie De Pierre, was a woman.
It turns out, Pierre Toussaint is the man behind the books that make me weak in the knees.
He could be the consummate book boyfriend with his dreamy hazel eyes, strong jawline, and those black-rimmed glasses. Not to mention that accent. Oh, that French accent. When Pierre speaks, I feel like I’m curled in his arms on a riverbank being fed chocolate-dipped strawberries.
Not Pierre’s arms, of course. We barely just met. And I’m just me. And he’s Pierre, internationally renowned romance author.
Seeing Pierre in person has me stammering and blushing—two things I don’t usually do.
Imagine my surprise when I receive a call a few weeks after meeting Pierre—from his agent—proposing marriage. Not that I’d marry his agent.
They want me to marry Pierre.
This has a reader x favourite author romance that was very cute and it also has book conventions and lovely friendships.
Business or Pleasure by Rachel Lynn Solomon
Chandler Cohen lies for a living.
When she accepts her next ghostwriting gig penning a memoir for cult actor Finnegan Walsh, it should be a dream job.
However, Chandler knows him best as something her worst-ever one-night stand . . .
She’s determined to keep things professional. But when she finally admits to Finn that their night together wasn’t as mind-blowing as he thought, he’s mortified, and determined to make amends.
So, they strike a deal. During the day, they’ll work on the book, and at night, she’ll school him in the art of satisfaction.
As they grow closer, the line between business and pleasure starts to blur.
Can Chandler and Finn have both, or will they have to choose?
I really liked this romance which has an annoyance (it’s not quite enemies, is it?) to lovers romance, sex ed and poring over words together. It was steamy and fun and I loved the romance!
The Dead Romantics by Ashley Poston
Florence Day is the ghostwriter for one of the most prolific romance authors in the industry, and she has a problem—after a terrible breakup, she no longer believes in love. It’s as good as dead.
When her new editor, a too-handsome mountain of a man, won’t give her an extension on her book deadline, Florence prepares to kiss her career goodbye. But then she gets a phone call she never wanted to receive, and she must return home for the first time in a decade to help her family bury her beloved father.
For ten years, she’s run from the town that never understood her, and even though she misses the sound of a warm Southern night and her eccentric, loving family and their funeral parlor, she can’t bring herself to stay. Even with her father gone, it feels like nothing in this town has changed. And she hates it.
Until she finds a ghost standing at the funeral parlor’s front door, just as broad and infuriatingly handsome as ever, and he’s just as confused about why he’s there as she is.
Romance is most certainly dead… but so is her new editor, and his unfinished business will have her second-guessing everything she’s ever known about love stories.
Oh, another book featuring a ghostwriter… and actual ghosts. I simply love what Ashley Poston does with slightly magical and paranormal things in her books and how she weaves a story. I also enjoy that she always features stories within her stories that impact her characters in some way. This is a ghostwriter x editor romance.
Just for December by Laura Jane Williams
Evie Bird is a romance writer whose latest bestseller is being made into a Christmas movie.
Duke Carlisle is a world-famous actor who has landed the role of leading man.
When Evie and Duke meet on set, it’s a frosty encounter – even icier than the cobbled Bavarian streets they’re filming on.
But after images of them arguing leak to the press and put the movie in jeopardy, they are left with no choice but to fake date until the cameras stop rolling.
As the pair start to put their differences aside, their feelings gradually begin to thaw… But can sparks ever really fly in a snowstorm?
A romance writer x the actor playing the main role in the adaption, there is a lot of drama and fake dating, some wintery German scenery and a romance with a frosty start but the feelings soon thaw…
Beach Read by Emily Henry
January is a hopeless romantic who likes narrating her life as if she’s the heroine in a blockbuster movie.
Augustus is a serious literary type who thinks true love is a fairy-tale.
January and Augustus are not going to get on.
But they actually have more in common than you’d think:
They’re both broke.
They’ve got crippling writer’s block.
They need to write bestsellers before the end of the summer.
The result? A bet to see who can get their book published first.
The catch? They have to swap genres.
The risk? In telling each other’s stories, their worlds might be changed entirely…
This was my first Emily Henry book and will forever have a very speacial place in my heart. I simply love when opposites attract. And when Emily Henry writes her characters with so much love for the details, wonderfully and with just a dash of silliness. Here for it.
Jobs in Publishing
The Seven Year Slip by Ashley Poston
Sometimes, the worst day of your life happens, and you have to figure out how to live after it.
So Clementine forms a plan to keep her heart safe: work hard, find someone decent to love, and try to remember to chase the moon. The last one is silly and obviously metaphorical, but her aunt always told her that you needed at least one big dream to keep going. And for the last year, that plan has gone off without a hitch. Mostly. The love part is hard because she doesn’t want to get too close to anyone—she isn’t sure her heart can take it.
And then she finds a strange man standing in the kitchen of her late aunt’s apartment. A man with kind eyes and a Southern drawl and a taste for lemon pies. The kind of man that, before it all, she would’ve fallen head-over-heels for. And she might again.
Except, he exists in the past. Seven years ago, to be exact. And she, quite literally, lives seven years in his future.
Her aunt always said the apartment was a pinch in time, a place where moments blended together like watercolors. And Clementine knows that if she lets her heart fall, she’ll be doomed.
After all, love is never a matter of time—but a matter of timing.
This book features a book publicist and a chef writing a cooking book. It has time travelling, a beautiful and heartbreaking romance, grief and hope and is generally, in my humble opinion, a masterpiece. I love all of Ashley Poston’s books but this is by far my favourite. Read my full review for The Seven Year Slip here.
Book Lovers by Emily Henry
Nora is a cut-throat literary agent at the top of her game. Her whole life is books.
Charlie is an editor with a gift for creating bestsellers. And he’s Nora’s work nemesis.
Nora has been through enough break-ups to know she’s the woman men date before they find their happy-ever-after. That’s why Nora’s sister has persuaded her to swap her desk in the city for a month’s holiday in Sunshine Falls, North Carolina. It’s a small town straight out of a romance novel, but instead of meeting sexy lumberjacks, handsome doctors or cute bartenders, Nora keeps bumping into…Charlie.
I love this book to pieces. I love the whitty, sharp dialogues and comebacks, I love the chemistry between Nora and Charlie and their bookish discussions. Book Lovers is so much fun to read from start to finish.
Librarians & Booksellers
Only and Forever by Chloe Liese
Bergman Brothers #7
Viggo Bergman, hopeless romantic, is thoroughly weary of waiting for his happily ever after. But between opening a romance bookstore, running a romance book club, coaching kids’ soccer, and adopting a household of pets—just maybe, he’s overcommitted himself?—Viggo’s chaotic life has made finding his forever love seem downright improbable.
Enter Tallulah Clarke, chilly cynic with a massive case of writer’s block. Tallulah needs help with her thriller’s romantic subplot. Viggo needs another pair of hands to keep his store afloat. So they agree to swap skills and cohabitate for convenience—his romance expertise to revive her book, her organizational prowess to salvage his store. They hardly get along, and they couldn’t be more different, but who says roommate-coworkers need to be friends?
As they share a home and life, Tallulah and Viggo discover a connection that challenges everything they believe about love, and reveals the plot twist they never saw happily ever after is here already, right under their roof.
I love the focus on books and writing and what impact stories have on our lives in Only and Forever! Viggo is an avid romance reader fulfilling his dream of opening his own bookshop with a heavy focus on romance while falling for a thriller writer who moves in with him.
Funny Story by Emily Henry
Daphne always loved the way her fiancé Peter told their story. How they met (on a blustery day), fell in love (over an errant hat), and moved back to his lakeside hometown to begin their life together. He really was good at telling it… right up until the moment he realized he was actually in love with his childhood best friend Petra.
Which is how Daphne begins her new story: Stranded in beautiful Waning Bay, Michigan, without friends or family but with a dream job as a children’s librarian (that barely pays the bills), and proposing to be roommates with the only person who could possibly understand her predicament: Petra’s ex, Miles Nowak.
Scruffy and chaotic – with a penchant for taking solace in the sounds of heart break love ballads – Miles is exactly the opposite of practical, buttoned up Daphne, whose coworkers know so little about her they have a running bet that she’s either FBI or in witness protection. The roommates mainly avoid one another, until one day, while drowning their sorrows, they form a tenuous friendship and a plan. If said plan also involves posting deliberately misleading photos of their summer adventures together, well, who could blame them?
But it’s all just for show, of course, because there’s no way Daphne would actually start her new chapter by falling in love with her ex-fiancé’s new fiancée’s ex… right?
Funny Story, my beloved. Daphne is a children’s librarian and I absolutely love how she is passionate about her work and making children happy and how she loves the library. And I also loved how much it gives back to her, how much love and sense of life and happiness.
Sorcery of Thorns by Margaret Rogerson
All sorcerers are evil. Elisabeth has known that as long as she has known anything. Raised as a foundling in one of Austermeer’s Great Libraries, Elisabeth has grown up among the tools of sorcery—magical grimoires that whisper on shelves and rattle beneath iron chains. If provoked, they transform into grotesque monsters of ink and leather. She hopes to become a warden, charged with protecting the kingdom from their power.
Then an act of sabotage releases the library’s most dangerous grimoire. Elisabeth’s desperate intervention implicates her in the crime, and she is torn from her home to face justice in the capital. With no one to turn to but her sworn enemy, the sorcerer Nathaniel Thorn, and his mysterious demonic servant, she finds herself entangled in a centuries-old conspiracy. Not only could the Great Libraries go up in flames, but the world along with them.
As her alliance with Nathaniel grows stronger, Elisabeth starts to question everything she’s been taught—about sorcerers, about the libraries she loves, even about herself. For Elisabeth has a power she has never guessed, and a future she could never have imagined.
A fierce librarian who knows how to use a sword and loves armour more than her dresses and a slightly chaotic bi sorcerer, magical books that *might* attack you, a beloved demon… This is one of my all time favourite books for sure! Read my full reviews of Sorcery of Thorns here.
The Little Bookshop of Lonely Hearts by Annie Darling
A quaint old bookshop, where happy ever after is only a page away…
Once upon a time in a crumbling bookshop, Posy Morland hid in the pages of romantic novels.
So when Bookend’s eccentric owner, Lavinia, dies and leaves the shop to Posy, she must put down her books and join the real world. Because Posy hasn’t just inherited an ailing business, but also the attentions of Lavinia’s grandson, Sebastian, AKA The Rudest Man In London™.
Posy has six months to transform Bookends into the shop of her dreams but as Posy and her friends fight to save the bookshop, she’s drawn into a battle of wills with Sebastian, about whom she’s started to have some rather feverish fantasies…
This was a sweet book about different people with struggles and broken hearts. It deals with grief but also with happiness and hope and has a healthy dose of banter.
Something Else With Books
The Someday Daughter by Ellen O’Clover
Years before Audrey St. Vrain was born, her mother, Camilla, shot to fame with Letters to My Someday Daughter, a self-help book encouraging women to treat themselves with the same love and care they’d treat their own daughters. While the world considers Audrey lucky to have Camilla for a mother, the truth is that Audrey knows a different side of being the someday daughter. Shipped off to boarding school when she was eleven, she feels more like a promotional tool than a member of Camilla’s family.
Audrey is determined to create her own identity aside from being Camilla’s daughter, and she’s looking forward to a prestigious summer premed program with her boyfriend before heading to college and finally breaking free from her mother’s world. But when Camilla asks Audrey to go on tour with her to promote the book’s anniversary, Audrey can’t help but think that this is the last, best chance to figure out how they fit into each other’s lives—not as the someday daughter and someday mother, but as themselves, just as they are.
What Audrey doesn’t know is that spending the summer with Camilla and her tour staff—including the disarmingly honest, distressingly cute video intern, Silas—will upset everything she’s so carefully planned for her life.
The Someday Daughter is heartfelt and heartbreaking story of a mother-daughter relationship. Audrey’s relationship to her mother isn’t good, mostly thanks to the book her mother wrote and wants Audrey to help promote. I am very emotional over this book. Read my full review of The Someday Daughter here.
Babel by R.F. Kuang
Oxford, 1836.
The city of dreaming spires.
It is the centre of all knowledge and progress in the world.
And at its centre is Babel, the Royal Institute of Translation. The tower from which all the power of the Empire flows.
Orphaned in Canton and brought to England by a mysterious guardian, Babel seemed like paradise to Robin Swift.
Until it became a prison…
But can a student stand against an empire?
Babel is one of my favourite books of 2024 and definitely a new all time favourite. The way it plays with language(s) and uses it, the way culture and language are interwoven tightly, the struggles of the characters,… this book is brilliant, political and on a whole other level when it comes to the writing and the language aspect.
Books On My TBR
The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman
Irene is a professional spy for the mysterious Library, which harvests fiction from different realities. And along with her enigmatic assistant Kai, she’s posted to an alternative London. Their mission – to retrieve a dangerous book. But when they arrive, it’s already been stolen. London’s underground factions seem prepared to fight to the very death to find her book.
Adding to the jeopardy, this world is chaos-infested – the laws of nature bent to allow supernatural creatures and unpredictable magic. Irene’s new assistant is also hiding secrets of his own.
Soon, she’s up to her eyebrows in a heady mix of danger, clues and secret societies. Yet failure is not an option – the nature of reality itself is at stake.
The Archived by Victoria Schwab
Each body has a story to tell, a life seen in pictures only Librarians can read. The dead are called Histories, and the vast realm in which they rest is the Archive.
Da first brought Mackenzie Bishop here four years ago, when she was twelve years old, frightened but determined to prove herself. Now Da is dead, and Mac has grown into what he once was: a ruthless Keeper, tasked with stopping often violent Histories from waking up and getting out. Because of her job, she lies to the people she loves, and she knows fear for what it is: a useful tool for staying alive.
Being a Keeper isn’t just dangerous—it’s a constant reminder of those Mac has lost, Da’s death was hard enough, but now that her little brother is gone too, Mac starts to wonder about the boundary between living and dying, sleeping and waking. In the Archive, the dead must never be disturbed. And yet, someone is deliberately altering Histories, erasing essential chapters. Unless Mac can piece together what remains, the Archive itself may crumble and fall.
The Bookish Life of Nina Hill by Abbi Waxman
The only child of a single mother, Nina has her life just as she wants it: a job in a bookstore, a kick-butt trivia team, a world-class planner and a cat named Phil. If she sometimes suspects there might be more to life than reading, she just shrugs and picks up a new book.
When the father Nina never knew existed suddenly dies, leaving behind innumerable sisters, brothers, nieces, and nephews, Nina is horrified. They all live close by! They’re all–or mostly all–excited to meet her! She’ll have to Speak. To. Strangers. It’s a disaster! And as if that wasn’t enough, Tom, her trivia nemesis, has turned out to be cute, funny, and deeply interested in getting to know her. Doesn’t he realize what a terrible idea that is?
Nina considers her options.
1. Completely change her name and appearance. (Too drastic, plus she likes her hair.)
2. Flee to a deserted island. (Hard pass, see: coffee).
3. Hide in a corner of her apartment and rock back and forth. (Already doing it.)
It’s time for Nina to come out of her comfortable shell, but she isn’t convinced real life could ever live up to fiction. It’s going to take a brand-new family, a persistent suitor, and the combined effects of ice cream and trivia to make her turn her own fresh page.
The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell
Shaun Bythell owns The Bookshop, Wigtown – Scotland’s largest second-hand bookshop. It contains 100,000 books, spread over a mile of shelving, with twisting corridors and roaring fires, and all set in a beautiful, rural town by the edge of the sea. A book-lover’s paradise? Well, almost …
In these wry and hilarious diaries, Shaun provides an inside look at the trials and tribulations of life in the book trade, from struggles with eccentric customers to wrangles with his own staff, who include the ski-suit-wearing, bin-foraging Nicky. He takes us with him on buying trips to old estates and auction houses, recommends books (both lost classics and new discoveries), introduces us to the thrill of the unexpected find, and evokes the rhythms and charms of small-town life, always with a sharp and sympathetic eye.
What other books about bookish people do you know? Are there any upcoming releases you’re looking forward to? What other specific topics do you like to read about?
Until next time,
What can I say? More books to add to my mile-high TBR.
always a pleasure to grow someone’s tbr 🙂 🙂