Lizzie the Librarian Reads Literature

One of my reading goals this year is to re-read some old favorites and see if they still hit the way they once did. I'm looking at the last twelve years and selecting my top book of the year for each, which means that I'll be re-reading one per month for all of 2025.  Starting with January, I got to revisit what used to be my favorite romance novel of all time and my top book of 2013. It still stands up, though maybe not to the extent that some of my new favorites do. I read Blackmoore by Julianne Donaldson for the first time when I was seventeen and at the time it changed me. I have written in a previous post about how I grew up incredibly conservative and I wasn't allowed to read romance novels that weren't Christian for my entire adolescence; trust me when I say, Christian romance is a genre to stay far away from. Now, that isn't to say that I never read books with romance in them, just never the classic romance novels you think of when it comes to the genre. Tha...

 It's no secret to anyone who knows me that my favorite genre is romance. It's something I talk about constantly, something I read constantly, and something I always come back to if I'm having a bad day. Last year alone I read 38 romance novels, but even more which had a romantic subplot in it somewhere. It's rare for me to read or enjoy a book that has absolutely no romance in it, and this has been true since a very young age. But before we get into that, lets look at the romance genre and how it's become what it is today.  If you look back in history, the term romance novel was very different to what we think of today. You have your Greek romances, Arthurian romances, and the novels of Sir Walter Scott. Romance could mean a tale of adventure with a brave hero on a quest; there might not necessarily be any love story involved. Think of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or the stories of Sir Lancelot. Sir Walter Scott was writing historical novels that were inspired b...