Ep 14: Top Ten Books of 2023, Pt. 1

Discussion:
Liz & Jerry share their top picks of 2023, an episode a year in the making. Laugh, cry, revolt about their picks, and send us your feedback!

Highlights:
Jerry shares that the biggest threat to love is monsters that steal your man.
Liz asks one of the great questions of our time
"What is love?
Baby, don't hurt me
Don't hurt me, no more"

Books Mentioned:
Honorable Mentions
Top Books of 2023

Transcript

Next time. you're feeling low, Just listen to our show We'll talk books and more. so much content to explore. SciFi, Thrillers, and Romance. Just give our show a chance, give a listen to our chat, you'll be saying I'd Read That!


and welcome to an extra, very incredibly special episode. We're going to be talking about our top 10 books of 2023 books. Our favorite books that we've read this year not necessarily come out in 2023. We have done this offline in person for a few years now and we always have a lot of fun doing it.


One of my favorite days of the year.


It's a good day, come along with us for our journey, and then send us feedback of why we're incorrect about our top 10 vote on whose top 10 is better, do what you like, come up with your own top 10, and send it to us. We'd love to see it. Love to see it. I'm all about it.

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But honestly, this is, this is, this is for us, this is just pretty much us recording a conversation that was going to happen anyway.


Correct. You can just listen to our conversation.


It's going to be a lot of fun. All right. So top 10 books that we have read in 2023. But first, we have to say, I don't know what you want to call it, Liz. What, what, what, what's an honorable mention for you this year?


So, an honorable mention for me is going to be The Changeling by Victor Lavalle. It is a horror that came out a while back. Great book, went in some unexpected directions. I've talked about it a little bit on the podcast before. I really enjoyed just the creativity of it, but I didn't enjoy it enough to make my top 10, unfortunately, but I highly recommend everyone read it.

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The Changeling by Victor Lavalle After I read this book had a mental note in my, in my head like, oh, this is a top 10 book.


And so, but I'm going through this process and I'm like, oh, no, you didn't make it. And that's Ninth House by Leah Bardo. We read that in our real-life book club. Enjoyed it a lot. A lot of fun. Alex, the main character, great, main character, great protagonist, the whole secret society of Yale Ivy League schools and the rituals and the ghosts and all
that, all stuff. I dug and enjoyed 10 point b 10.5. Pretty close. It was a, it was a close fight but sorry, sorry Ninth House. I hardly knew you. Any other honorable mentions?


Li Yeah. And also first I just want to mention, this is not the only time that Ninth House will be mentioned in this podcast. So, yeah. So the other honorable mention that I want to mention is the Gle by Steven Rowley. You know, what makes a top 10 book? I'm sure we'll discuss that along the way. The reason I loved this book is just how fun and funny and heartwarming it was.
And for some reason, that criteria wasn't on my top 10 list. So still recommend it. It's a great book. It's very, very, very funny. It leaves you feeling very warm about life in the world. I mean, it deals with some serious topics. But yeah, it's just, it's a good time and I would definitely recommend it. It's just so it was missing something to make it on that top 10 list.


My last album I'll mention was a book I mentioned earlier in a different podcast and said, hey, I think this is going to make a top 10 same story. I think this is good. I enjoy it. And then was going through the process like, ah, well, poop. And that's a spindled splintered by Alex E Harrow, The Sleeping Beauty Story. I read the sequel to it and I don't know if that kind of tampered the score just a little bit because I, you know, I enjoyed the sequel, but not as much as I enjoyed the first one.
And so did that. Just nudge it in the wrong direction. and, and, and, and that story is also a very short story even for a novella. It's pretty short. So I there's just not enough meat in the bone to get, to satisfy my book tummy to get to the top 10. So that's a spindled splintered by Harold. But again, recommend it, you know, these, these books that didn't make it, please go read them top 1023. It's time, it's time, Liz.

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I give you the honor of going first and I assume we're starting with our number 10.


Yes, we are going to crawl from 10 to 1. Why give you the good stuff at the beginning? It's called a tease. I want you to listen to the whole thing.


Number 10, we're starting with number 10 on my list is The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay. So when talking about these top 10 lists, you know, sometimes what makes a book make my top 10 is that it fits a certain category or, I don't know a certain criteria that I'm looking for. And so in this case, I, well, it's not the only horror that I have in my top 10, but, I definitely want my top 10 to represent what I like, which is a lot of horror.
So, yeah, so this was one that I read earlier this year. I've talked about it on the podcast before. It is basically about a family who is faced with a decision to sacrifice one of their own in order to save the world or is it, it's a little unclear throughout the book, what's really happening? And that's one of my favorite things about it. First of all, I really like Paul Tremblay as an author by now, I've read some other books of his and I think he's phenomenal, but this book in
particular made my top 10 because it was so ambiguous and it left so much to the reader to really pick apart. And I really like that. I like it when an author respects the reader enough to kind of let them come to their own conclusions and doesn't force a message on you, but lets you kind of absorb and come to your own conclusions. So I also thought it had fantastic character development. It created a very eerie, wonderful atmosphere that I really enjoyed.

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So, yeah, this makes my top 10 and if you have trust issues, man, talk about a situation where that's going to be a problem.


Absolutely. And it's a good adaptation. I did like the movie as well. I'm not mad that they took liberties and changed it because the movie just feels like something different for me. So, yeah, I definitely recommend it. So that's my number 10, the Cabin at the end of the World by Paul Tremblay.


Wonderful. So my top 10 I think is painted by an event that happened to me this year. And I'll talk about that. When I get to a certain book, I think I relied a lot on novellas this year. So there's a few on this list. One that I have for my number 10, I would say may qualify as cozy. I love how it's also been described as a philosophical debate about what it is to be you. And that is a pal for the Wild Bill by Becky Chambers. I believe you have read this.


I have not actually I own it but I have not read it yet.


It's the same thing, owning it and reading it. Go ahead and take credit for it. It is about sibling Dex, a tea monk and he's struggling to find purpose and what's interesting about this is, but they basically live in a utopia. The world that gets described, they're kind of done with problems. But yet this person is having struggles trying to find what is, you know, like, why, but why is he not satisfied?
I'm sorry, why are they not satisfied with, their, their lot in life? And because they describe what they do, it's like they're a tea mon, they go from town to town making tea for people and people come up, he sets up little pillows and they tell them their problems and he's like, oh, here's a tea for that. Ultimately, they're starting to become dissatisfied with it.
this is more of a character book. There's not a whole lot of, not a whole lot happens, but there was a quote that I did really love. You're an animal. Sibling, Dex, you are not separate or other, all animals have no purpose, nothing has a purpose. The world simply is, if you want to do things that are meaningful to others, that's fine. That's good. But if I wanted to crawl into a cave and watch that stalagmites for the remainder of my days, that would also be fine and good. You keep asking
why the work is not enough. I don't know how to answer that because it is enough to exist in this world and marvel at it. You don't need to justify that. You don't need to earn it. You're just allowed to, you're allowed to just live. That's what most animals do. And so it's kind of in our busy lives. We're trying to do a lot and try to get things done. But you can also just take a break, take a breath, and just appreciate the wonder. That is the world. So that is my number 10.


I love that. Yeah, this is one that I've thought about picking up. I'm surprised it's on your top 10 for some reason, I thought when we talked about it before, it wasn't really something you were loving, you were liking it but not loving it. Maybe, or maybe I just misinterpreted what you said again.


I think as I went through the exercise of picking my top 10 and I think this is one that, you know, kind of lingers in the brain a little bit when, once you're done with it, that's what I was going to ask because again, not a whole lot happens, nothing is happening. And so there's just a lot of dialogue and debate about like, what is this?
And they, and the person they meet wants to learn about the world. But again, as I thought more about it and I was going through this process, I was like, you done good some for the Wild Belt.

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So I was, yeah, that was my thought process is, I wonder if this is one of those books that you like it as you read it.


But the more you think about it after you finish it, the more you relate that it really leaves a lasting impression. Whereas sometimes you'll read a book, you the collective, you read the book and it seems so great while you're reading it and you think, oh, this is going to be my top 10. This is so great. And then a month later you're like, oh, did I read that? And you can't remember what happened and it's not, it doesn't leave an impression.
And so, yeah, I wondered if that was part of the rationale here and I think that's really interesting and the quote you read is beautiful. So I definitely see why it stuck with you. So my number nine is going to be the only one left by Riley Sager. Riley Sager is kind of, we both kind of feel about Riley Sager the same way.


I'm going to say one thing right now. I am jealous that you are going through more Riley Sager books than I am right now because to your point, I do enjoy them. But you know, I was just like, oh, you got to that book. I want to get to that one and I haven't read it.

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It's just a fun time, just a fun time.


So, yeah, this one, in particular, is, I believe in the eighties. And it's about a young woman who kind of had a trauma happened to her recently and she's a home caregiver, that's her occupation and she gets assigned, her job is a little bit like on the line. And so they basically give her like the worst assignment they can, which is to take care of this old woman who is essentially Lizzie Borden.
She supposedly killed her entire family a long, long time ago. And so she lives in this house with, there's a few, there's like a groundskeeper and a few servants that live in the house. But it's really this old woman who probably killed her entire family. And then this young woman who's the main character of the book is her caregiver. And so the, woman the Lizzie Borden type character.
She can't speak due to having several strokes. And so she, but she is able to use a finger to type out things and offers to share her story with her caregiver. And it's wild. It's full of twists and turns and you know, some people like the twist, some people don't. But I thought that it was a lot of fun. And my favorite thing about this book was, again, it just gets into the atmosphere.
This is something that I really value in a book. Something that can push a book to a top 10 list is the atmosphere that it creates. And so in this book, the setting is a really big deal and it really helps create the atmosphere. So they're, they're in this mansion that's kind of on a hill and the mansion is sliding down the hill over time and it's almost like any moment this is going to go tumbling into the ocean and they're right on the edge of the ocean.
And, it's like, oh, gosh, is this going to happen while the caregivers are in the house? I mean, she's living there. So is this going to happen while she's there? What's happening? There are scenes where she's taking a bath and the water level is uneven. And so even as a reader, it's like, I almost had a sense of vertigo as I was reading it because I was in this uneven house, the
whole time. So it really created a very cool atmosphere and I think that really went to how much I enjoyed the book. So, yeah, it's a good one. My second favorite Riley Sager.


That one. The way you describe it, of the situation with the house, it sounds like it. There's already like a natural clock or like a countdown to the story just because like, hey, by the way, this house is on a hill and Spence sliding, I'm like, oh, I'm sure that will never come up ever again, but I assume it does. You'll have to read it to find out. I have to read it to find out. Quick question about the character. Does anyone make a really bad decision or poor decision in that? Yes.


Classic R S Yeah. Yeah. All right. What is your number nine?


So for my number nine and I need to emphasize this. This is my number nine, Liz. Calm down. Don't get mad. Don't get defensive. You're already getting upset. This is my number nine. How to sell a haunted house by Grady Hendrix. Still a five-star book. Screw this book. But it's a five-star book. Number nine. There's puppets in it that basically disqualify it from being a top-three book.
You know, my skin is a little crawling right now. I feel just like these goosebumps all over me just thinking about the things that happened. A lot of, a lot of things happen. There is a funeral scene early on and it is bonkers because it's puppets. What is happening? It was a lot of process. I had to talk to a therapist about it. It was wild.


It was a very interesting book.


I even would go as far as to say it's almost worth doing an entire episode dedicated to it.


I'm down, I just feel like, you know, you can't talk about it too much. You can't talk about greedy Hendrix too much. We may have a little more to say about that book, but I'm happy to hear it. Major.

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Top 10 and I will go on record and this is the record because it's recorded.


Best Friend's Exorcism is my favorite Grady Hendrix book. This one. Put up a good fight. OK? All right, Liz, you have a number eight for us.


I do Dead Silence by S A Barnes made my number eight. I was surprised I didn't think it was going to make my top 10.


It beat out a different horror book, your own top 10.


It did, it did. So here's the thing about Dead Silence and we've talked the plot to death, although I really like that bonus episode.

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So if you have not listened to that bonus episode about hit pause, read the book, listen to that one laugh, cry, come back to this and listen to what Liz is about to say.


It was a lot of fun. So I don't want to get too much into the plot, but I do want to talk about why I loved it so much. And there are a few reasons one is that it was a little bit outside of my comfort zone or maybe not my comfort zone, but outside of what I normally read. And so I think that it was such a pleasant surprise for me. Second of all, when I was in fifth grade, Titanic came out and, you know, fifth grade is a very important time in your life.
That's kind of a time when you're really becoming who you are. And so Titanic really helped shape who I am. So a book that is loosely based on the Titanic. I love it and it's in space. I love it. So, yeah, I was a Titanic girl and just, yeah, the idea of having something kind of based on this idea of in space and then let's make it haunted so fun, so fun.


I did not think I would get the opportunity to ask you an intrusive question. How many times have you visited the Titanic Museum in Branson?


Actually zero. But I do enjoy driving by it and laughing at the fountain that makes it look like the ship is moving through Branson, Missouri. It's pretty hilarious. Yeah, by the time they built that museum, I was kind of past my Titanic stage at that point.


So they have props from the movie there, you can stand on the deck and hold on for dear life. You can stick your hand in like crazy cold water.


What I heard and this was a long time.

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If you want to, maybe they've changed it, but it used to be, they assigned you a person at the beginning and then at the end you find out if your person lived.


Yes. So when I went, it gives you the name and it gives you the where, where they're stationed on the ship.

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And once I saw that I'm like, I didn't make, are you surprised that made my top 10?


I think so.


And maybe this is kind of a theme of my top 10. I think that it's more entertaining than good. Probably so. Yeah, that's, that's kind of a theme of my top 10. Anyway, I think in 2023 I was really looking for books that I enjoyed. Maybe they weren't profound. Maybe they didn't make me think about life in a different way. But my God, were they a good time? All right. What's your next one?


Love a good versus evil? I love the dichotomy. I love ying and yang. Just balance. Just like, I don't know what it is about that. Maybe because I'm a Libra. It is Middlegame by Shannon McGuire. It is a 500-page slow burn of a character study. It starts with an alchemist who creates a being and this being creates other beings. in, in the form of sibling twins.
The main protagonists of this are Roger and Dodger. Roger being the epitome of language and Dodger being, you know, all about math and it's just, it's, it's, it's kind of bonkers and there's some time travel to it. There's, there's a scene where one of the characters talks to a past version of themselves and like the password to themselves.
Like, hey, by the way, something bad happened, like, why didn't you, if you have the ability to talk to me, why don't you tell me about that? It's like that thing needs to happen. So you can even believe the concept that this is possible to have that conversation because if I told you, you wouldn't, your mind couldn't, your mind would, would reject that reality and we couldn't do it.
So that terrible thing has to happen. Your mind has to be ready for it and now we can have this conversation, but we can't change that event. Like that's sorry, that's, that's already happened, but we can stop this new event. And so my mind is trying to do everything it can to hold itself together to process this book. It's hard for me to even put it in a box. It's a fantasy story, obviously, but there's just so many different characters in it and there's complaints sometimes about
like, I don't like this character and like, I don't like that character and I'm like, I freaking love that character, but that just might be me and my twist itself of how much I like evil things and the good people are good and the evil people are evil like a mustache to the evil. Like I have no good purpose at all. Like I am just here to be evil and I'm like, man, that's cartoonishly evil.


So this author was a big hit for you this year.


If I had a category for author of the year Sean mcguire would be on that list. And the winner of, you know what, I'm just doing it. Hey, hey, we're gonna interrupt your top 10 with a special category author of the year and my award goes to Shannon mcguire.


I love it. I love it. Yeah, I, I have read a few, a few of the Wayward Children series because of you and I definitely see the appeal and I love that you found this author that you really connected with. Was it hard to choose which of their books you were going to put into your top 10?


I'll answer that later.


Oh, ok. OK. So my number seven is The Hacienda by Isabel Canas. Great pick. Yeah. So we read this as part of our book club and talk about atmosphere again, just a really great atmosphere gets set up in this book. So, yeah, so it's about a young woman who is not from a particularly wealthy situation.
And in fact, recently her family has experienced a lot of trauma and so to save herself and get out of this, she marries a wealthy man in Mexico and they move out to his Hacienda. And so from there, some ominous things happen. So this is kind of a haunted house type story.


It's a big year for haunted houses. Yeah.


It is a big year for haunted houses. So, yeah. So it's a bit of a haunted house type story. It's a bit of a, I would even say there's some kind of murder mystery aspects to this book. Definitely, it's not just the house, that's the problem. There are some other ominous forces at play in this story. I think that it was, it was almost one thing I really loved about.
It is, yes, it was horror. It was legitimately scary. It also was a love story. It was, I mean, you could argue this is a romance in a lot of ways and I really enjoyed that. One thing that I know you and I both enjoyed is the way that the author uses language and the author intersperses a lot of Spanish and also kind of addresses like indigenous culture in Mexico and language and really does a great job of kind of intertwining cultures and kind of showing how for a lot of people you can't
just cookie cutter. This is what they are that there's a lot of layers and overlap to people and So I think she did a really great job addressing that. But again, just really the selling point for me on this book, I liked a lot of aspects of it. But the selling point was atmosphere. I just really enjoyed the atmosphere that she set up. I think it really was advantageous. And I know this isn't the reason that it was set in Mexico, but with it being set in Mexico, there was a lot at play with
the Catholic church and also the religion of the indigenous people. And that really went to some really interesting storylines, some really interesting aspects to what was really happening there. And so I really enjoyed that. I know you read this as well. It was a fairly recent pick for book club. So still fairly fresh on the mind. We compared it a little bit to Mexican gothic, maybe for some obvious reasons, but also just I think both kind of have a gothic house theme to it.


It's probably Zillow trauma and rising prices that we're all about looking at houses, even if they are haunted, if we want to talk about reading pathways, you know, plot book setting, book, character, book, language book for me personally, language is my least favorite or the least hook for me. But when it's done well and it's done really well here. I think it elevates it to a different kind of a piece of work.


Oh, yes. Her prose is so not only does she seem to have an understanding of languages like English, Spanish, different languages, but her understanding of how to use words in such a poetic way is just incredible. I mean, I remember before I picked up the book officially, I just kind of read that introduction to the book and I just reading that little part, I just knew I was going to love this book because it was so beautifully written.
I'm surprised that it actually was this low on my list. you know, it kind of depends on the day you make the list that, you know, where it could end up. I think I could, I could probably make an argument for it to be higher on my list actually. What's your next book?


So the last, so you asked about like, how do I know which Sean I book to pick? So I usually have a rule when we do stuff like this to not include an author twice and you just couldn't help yourself. I could not help myself. So this is the one that may be a little difficult to talk about. So, an event happened to me this year. So I had some medical emergency and I had a surgery and was in recovery for a long time.
And during the recovery, I had a really, really hard time processing new information. And what I mean by that, like, I couldn't, I was out of work for two months. And part of me was like, sweet. Do you know how much books I'm going to read while I'm recovering? Turned out not the case. Couldn't watch it, couldn't watch TV, that I hadn't seen before.
I couldn't read something I could only like process things I had already done. So, man, I destroyed the Disney Plus catalog. Like went through so many of those watched Lord of the Rings a bunch of times, watched all the Marvel movies. Man. It was, it was a great time and, and we were, I was trying to read a book and it was just difficult to get through.
And finally when I got to these, so they're novellas, it's a series of novellas very short and I was finally able to kind of get through the story and process enough information to be like, oh I can now, you know, get new books in my body. It gets a lot of credit for that. And I've talked about Jack and Jill multiple times. My favorite character of that story, there's three books dedicated to them.
It's none of those work as much as, as much as I love those characters in those in those books. But the one I'm going to talk about is "In An Absent Dream" by Sean Maguire. It's not, I wouldn't even say it's the best one in the series, but, you know, I think books connect with us for a lot of reasons and sometimes it's the time the place where you are mentally.
And that's the reason I'm picking this one over the entire series. It's not my favorite book of the series, but I think it's the most appropriate. It's the one that lived rent free in my mind as the young kids love to say nowadays, this is the one that certainly did not let me go for a very long time because there's a concept in this book that just stuck with me.
And there's a lot of conversations about, about fair value in the Wayward Children series. It's a portal fantasy series. It's about these kids that go to these fantastical worlds and then they get kicked out and then they're struggling to process and trying to get back. And a lot of the novels are about their time in those different worlds.
So in this world, the the character Lundy, she encounters a gobin market and the gu the market's kind of a fancy trope you see in lots of stories. And so it's just kind of like a place where you can kind of, it's the farmers market to end all farmers markets because you can find whatever the heck you need to, right? It has its own rules and the rules are designed to make sure no one cheats anyone out of something because of this fair value concept.
If the market decides you're doing something unfairly, it's going to punish you physically in a weird way which I don't want to get into and you incur some debts that and you have to work these debts off because, because the market deemed like I think you took advantage of someone you did not give or receive fair value and you're gonna get punished for it.
And it's very reasonable as far as it talks about like when you're a young child, you can only provide so much fair value. And so it kind of scales like you, you know, this is your, this is all you're able to do this and this is, you know, it's fair, but the part that I was not prepared for, there's a, there's a two page or two or three page conversation about caregiving about what's fair there.
And so there's this conversation I'm like, well, can you get like medicine here? He was like, yeah, we can get you medicine. It's like, well, how does someone who's very sick, very ill get, you know, essentially lifesaver medication if they can't provide fair value. And there's a, she's like, well, what is fair value for a human life that's very difficult to, to determine.
And so, you know, someone's kind of sick, they can kind of do their best to get through that. But what if someone's health declines so rapidly in such a major way that he can give no value. How does that person do that? And in my situation, that's exactly what happened. It was a very rapid, very sudden kind of thing. It was in a deterioration. It was like nine day, like one day to the next, completely incapacitated and having to rely on people to take care of me and they go in and then it
kind of pivots the conversation about, you know, a mother about to give birth to a child. This is like, well, she can't do that much. She can't, she can't take herself, requires a lot of help. Is she give, you know, is she taking too much fair value? And the other person says like, well, you can make the argument that everyone helping her is not giving her enough fair value because she's bringing a life into the world.
And so it is long debate about fair value and, you know, the value of the caregiver or the person receiving care and all this and it's just at the time was like, I'm enjoying this series. This is the fourth book I've read in the series at this point and having a good time. And then just this part of it just is like a gut punch and spiraled from there just like what is happening and, and really sat in a lot of thought about it, obviously.
So it's just this, so that's just been a thing that's been in my mind for now. Jeez, 67 months. Yeah, it's only number six study in top five. I think if I picked one of the other books, it may have been a top five book, but I think it'd be a disservice to me personally, to not recognize this one in the series as the one to call out. It will probably stick with me for the rest of my life.


It's interesting how books come along at times in our lives. And I don't know if it's necessarily that it's like this book came along at this particular time or if it's that you read that particular book at a time that something was on your mind that was fresh on your mind. And so I think we talked a little bit about this before about specifically, we've talked about this with triggers that we maybe something that used to trigger us no longer triggers us or vice versa, something that
we used to be able to read about or hear about without any sort of negative connotation, something happens in our life and all of a sudden it just brings up all of these feelings for us. And so, first of all, thank you for sharing that and sharing the reason that that was in your top 10. And that was, that was a really wonderful and brave explanation of why it was in your top 10.
But I do think that's something that's very relatable for, for different people. It's going to be for different reasons, but something just comes along at a time that it really hits us a certain way. The books that we read are so meaningful to us as individuals because of the things that we are experiencing or have experienced. And I think that's a really important thing to bring up and especially if we're talking about a top 10.
It's like what makes a book make our top 10? It's sometimes it doesn't make a lot of sense to even us. Sometimes it's for very personal reasons. I know we've said this before just because we put a book on our Mount Rushmore or in our top 10. It doesn't mean we're necessarily recommending it. Although I think our top 10, we're probably recommending our top 10.
But, but sometimes it just means a little bit more than it was one of the 10 best books that I read this year. Sometimes it's, it just meant something to me before these personal reasons. So thank you so much for sharing that.


There's something to be said for catharsis. I would say that's, you know, I would say that there's probably a big reason why I can only watch Lord of the Rings and Marvel movies and Disney movies during that because that's what I was looking for a way to kind of express something I couldn't express any other way and anything new would be like, this is too complicated for me to like, I don't know if I'm going to get what I'm looking for and So, so watching the Rohirrim come over Pellanor Fields
our fields for the return of the king. Yes, this is what I'm looking for. This is what I'm here, baby. And so I think there's a catharsis I was looking for and I got some of that here.


Well, my next book feels wildly inappropriate after that, but we're just going to go with it. So we are down to number six, I believe. And I'm just going to go ahead and tell you that any top 10 list, any year is going to have a romance novel on it. Being someone that enjoys romance, I feel like it would be a disservice to not have a romance book in my top 10.
I usually only have one because again, they're not, I find them to be very enjoyable. I don't know that they're like the best books that I read in the year. They don't usually leave a huge lasting impact with me. But, but I do need to represent the genre. And so my favorite romance that I read this year, this book came out several years ago, but it is The Bride Test by Helen Wang.
So this is a book about a neurodivergent main character. He is on the spectrum and he basically his family brings a woman from Vietnam over to marry him because he also is Vietnamese in his family places a lot of importance on him having a wife and, and so kind of this arranged marriage between the two of them. She was living in poverty in Vietnam and had a very, very hard life in Vietnam.
And so both of these characters are really kind of struggling with their own thing. But something that I really liked about this book. Well, first of all, I liked the diversity. I liked the exploration of culture and how that plays a role in their love story. I really appreciated the main character being neurodivergent. Actually, this is a trilogy, this is the second book in a trilogy.
So, and I think the author herself is she, she says that she's on the spectrum as well. So she's not just talking out of her butt, she kind of knows what she's talking about and also feels like it's really important to have this representation on the page which I think we both agree with. And so yeah, it's really beautiful. It also really dives into this question about because the character himself, the male character in this book really almost questions if he has the ability to love,
like in a traditional, like a romantic love kind of way, like he just doesn't think he has the capacity for that. He just the way that he experiences emotions is very different than the way that the characters who are not neuro diversion are experiencing emotions. And so there's kind of this gap there, but it's really beautiful. How much the female main character in this book believes in him and how she's able to see how he loves her in his own way.
And it's not less than, and it's not a romantic in any way. It is a romantic love. maybe some of his behaviors look a little bit different. Maybe there's a few things that don't look the way that what we think of as a normal relationship would look, but what's normal anyway, right. So, yeah, I thought it was just really beautiful that it really asked this question of does love look the same on everybody?
Do we all express it and feel it the same way and it's like to some degree. Yeah, we do kind of all feel something similar and whether you're neurodivergent or not or whatever is going on with you, you know. I really, really enjoyed this book.


Question. You said it's the second trilogy is the first book required reading to get to the second book.


It's not, but it's a fantastic book. So I would highly recommend the first one if you like romance and the same thing, it deals with the divergent character and kind of this question of like in a different way. It tackles it in a very different way. But kind of in her case, it was kind of like sexuality and what that looks like for her. And it was, it definitely explored some of those issues as well or some of those topics as well.
And I just really enjoyed the first one and I wasn't sure if I was going to like this one as much as the first one I read the first one a few years ago and have kind of put off reading the rest of the trilogy. But the second one definitely did not disappoint it, had everything that I want in a romance. You know, it did. It was spicy. It's not a closed door romance.
That was going to be my next question. Yeah, there's some spice to it. It's also got a lot of heart and there's a very real emotional connection between these two people which I really enjoyed. And both characters are really wonderful and I really loved the character growth from both of them. They both had a lot of room to grow and they got there so loved this book and I feel like it's like it's a great representation of what I love about romance.
And so it really, I read some other good romance this year, but I would say it wasn't hard to choose this one as my favorite romance that I read this year. All right, Jerry, what is your next book?


It is Empire of Wild by Cherie Dimaline. You and I had read one of her previous novels Marrow Thieves. So she is an indigenous author. Story is about Joan part of an indigenous community and she's looking for her husband, her husband's been missing for about a year. they had a fight over some property and some money and he walked out because he didn't want to be angry, in front of her and she has not seen them since and goes to a Walmart parking lot, goes to Walmart in the parking lot.
There's like this church revival thing and she sees someone walk in and I'm like, is that my husband walks in? And it's like, that's my husband approaches him and he's like, who are you? And then the reverend comes in and escrow is like, hey, please stop bothering people, like, please leave and then the place disappears and she's like, no, no, no, no.
That is my husband and convinces a couple of people to help look for it and, and track him down. all that being said, you would not believe that I'm going to tell you this is a supernatural story and it, and I wish there was a supernatural movie. It's about monsters, maybe modern day werewolves. What, you know, when we talk about all that going forward at the beginning and then it's like, oh, you know, it might be like this monster that ends like that's why your husband is like, where
does this come from? And I think that's where it leans a lot into the indigenous culture that, in their storytelling in that setting. And so that's where it, it adds this layer of beautiful storytelling and beautiful mystery to it. But it's a monster story. I wouldn't say horror, horrors, not the right word. I would say like, like mystery and this and this and this monster figure. And why doesn't her husband recognize her reading reviews about it?
Someone described it. It's a very small story. Like we're not saving the world, we're not saving all this. It's just a woman fighting for the love she has for her husband and, and, and like, and everyone around her has kind of stopped carrying except for a couple of people. And so it's a small story, but it's a story that still matters.


Yeah, I remember you reading this book, you had a lot of good things to say about it as you read it. So not surprised to see this on your top 10. So the book that we read by this author was more of a Y A, this sounds like it's more of an adult novel.


The characters are adult. There is a scene where like, I want to remind him that he's my husband and goes through a seduction route.

, 
And I was like, ok, there's references to Viagra.


So the passion she has for him and you know, that same passion is why they fought and like, you know, there's a whole thing about like you wouldn't think this couple would work, but they made it work, you know, you know, you could tell these people fought to be together just because of their personalities and their
clashes and their pride and all this fun stuff. Joan is, is not here to mess around. She wants something, she's gonna get it. So she sounds like a fun. She's a great character.


Yeah. And it sounds like a plot driven but with great characters, which is actually how I describe her book that we both read the Y A novel.


The Y is also has a fantasy element to it. The concept where everyone loses the ability to dream except for the indigenous population and by a horrible twist of fate, it's discovered that if you consume their bone marrow, you can, you can, you can regain the ability to dream so that essentially they're hunted just because people need to keep creaming.


Very interesting author. I'm happy to see this on your top 10.


We're now to our top five. I am very curious to hear your top five.


I'm curious to hear your top five and I hope that our listeners are curious to hear our top five.


I hope so too. But sadly, you're going to have to wait. We want to go ahead and break this episode into two parts. So stick around, listen to this episode obsessively.

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Well, all the books we've mentioned in the show notes, I read all 10 of them before you listen to our top five.


It is required reading to get to the, it won't unlock if you don't, I'm, you'll get it. But we will make you wait just a little bit for it. So, but this was, this was already fun. Yes, it was. And I can only imagine getting more fun in our top five.


Absolutely. And we will have some special categories that you will have to wait to hear about.


Absolutely. All right. Sing us out, Liz.


Come now to the end. Thank you, our dear friends. We hope you'll hurry back to our show. I'd Read That!