sunlit_stone

and you've read them all in july! thank you but honestly this is "not cute behaviour, Suns only do this when they're distressed" territory 😩 When I'm less stressed I tend to spend less time reading... by the time I am reading, god, fifteen romance + detective novels inside a month that's solidly "I was extremely stressed and dealing with it by avoiding everything and reading", lol.

Oh man Edna St Vincent Millay is so great!!! She's one of my favourite poets. I love "Inland"... I'm trying to resist linking every Millay poem but let me link you a few short ones anyway--okay, "I being born a woman and distressed" perhaps illuminates some of her gendered approach here 👀 "Oh, oh, you will be sorry for that word" is relevant to some of our discussion of feminism and relationships elsewhere. And if you want some xiyao vibes--"Time does not bring relief". And okay, one last one--this was one of the first poems I really loved: "What lips my lips have kissed".

KJ Charles!! I've read most of her stuff by this point... man it's definitely more #problematic than her earlier work, and less polished, but I really do enjoy Think of England, and the prequel, Proper English, is one of her rarer f/f works. Separately The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal I think benefits a lot from being differently structured than her other works, a series of cases more than a novel. But The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen!!! That one was great, I liked it too :D I like Gareth and Joss' disagreements and growing together. And I know you said aside from the sequel but hear me out--I liked it a lot, and I was describing the premise to a friend and midway through I started going OH NO, OH NO, because it's literally fanon Nieyao. Like actually, I swear to god. I mean there are a bunch of different flavours of fanon Nieyao but this is unironically one of them. And IIRC you like fanon nieyao, so you might like this too? :D

okay, when you first mentioned the age difference, i was NOT expecting it to be this large! If it were smaller I wouldn't mind so much! 😩 THIRTY-SEVEN YEARS. But no, I do have to say, I am convinced they love each other, and for features the other person does like actually have. Dag admires Fawn's cleverness, bravery, determination, and curiosity; Fawn loves Dag's bravery, capableness (in both physical and leadership forms), the way he treats her with respect, etc. And they both genuinely have a lot of values in common. And they're both definitely REALLY attracted to each other. (There's a hilarious incident in the first book where because she was recently injured he's literally carrying her while riding a horse... he's getting hard and trying to ignore it, and she accidentally brushes her hand down against his erection without realizing, and he STARTLES SO BAD THEY BOTH FALL OFF THE HORSE. It's hilarious.)

Oh no The Grand Sophy. yeahhhhhh 😬 Okay, one of the things about Heyer... she's a great writer, and she was deeply knowledgeable about the Regency period and basically invented the regency romance, but she was also very conservative and the books can reflect that and for the most part she interrogates basically none of it. Which obviously doesn't keep me from enjoying them!! But I wanted to give you a heads up. If you do want to start with Heyer I'd probably recommend Venetia, at first, it's one of my favourites and I think it has a bit more...space...? for the female protagonist to go off and do her own thing than many of the others.