I find myself coming back to this quest everytime I sense a reading slump approaching and without fail, the books on this quest manage to pull me out of a slump. I am a romantic at heart so I love reading about charatcers falling in love. But I often find that Romantasy (and SFF that put too much emphasis on the romance), sometimes create plot points for the express purpose of causing angst for our love interests. While that's not necessarily a bad thing, I personally find subplot romance to feel a bit more natural and true to how people really fall in love and build connections through shared experiences and values.

So what draws you to books with romantic subplots? What about this genre appeals to you and how does it compare to SFF with more/less romance? What is the sweet spot for you?

(edit for typos)

Hi Boundlings! What are some questions or tools you use to think critically about what you're reading (whether that's fiction or non-fiction, short- or long-form texts)?

For example, I like to ask myself, "What's missing from this analysis?" or "Who benefits from telling this story?" I'm always on the lookout for ways I can engage more thoughtfully with what I read -- drop your tips below!

El-Mohtar leads with explaining how the anthology came to be, but my favourite part is her recognizing what I love most about her work. It potentially might interest you, if you haven't read her work before, what she has to say, and what's important to her in telling stories.

I wasn’t sure what argument, coherent or otherwise, would emerge from gathering my favourites, and I was curious to see if they’d make a pattern, surface something deep about myself. Mostly, what emerged is that I love women. I love women talking to each other. I love women reading each other, through letters and journals and flowers, offering up the stories of themselves to each other’s tender scrutiny. I love women being friends and being lovers, in all of their shapes, across the breadth and depth of their lives. Over and over, in these stories, I find myself returning to what Emily Yoshida called “the terrifying magic of two women in a room, talking,” and agreeing that “there’s still so much of it we haven’t explored yet.” This in and of itself doesn’t come as a surprise to me—several of these pieces emerged from conversations with dear friends, and were often the result of very deliberately wanting to centre and honour them, as an assertion of the truth of my own life against the narratives I most commonly received. But the sheer consistency of it, the insistence on it, was reassuring to encounter—to find myself, year on year, recommitting to my love for women even as every generation upcycles new, more fashionable ways to hate them.

What better way to battle misogyny, internal and otherwise, than writing, and reading, about celebrating and loving women?

Keep fighting, with love 🩷✌️

Does anyone know the cover artist please? I cant find this from a google search. Sadly this book wasn’t for me but i adore this cover so much!