Fable & The Verbivore

View Original

Episode 176: Romance Book Roundup

Bethany Stedman

Your browser doesn't support HTML5 audio

Ep 176: Romance Book Roundup Fable & The Verbivore

These notes include affiliate links.

In honor of Valentine’s Day, today on Fable and the Verbivore we’re talking about our favorite recent romance reads as well as some of our all-time favorites.

As we open this conversation, we touch on the diversity and wide range of the genre – as well as the array that our own list of favorites covers. There really is something in this genre for everyone and we encourage exploring what it has to offer in terms of books out there that we feel are ours.

But we also talk about how reading about experiences, perspectives, and lenses - including sexual ones - that are different from our own can teach us, grow our empathy, and widen our view of the world. We get to step into someone else’s shoes and cheer for them to get their happy ending – and we all deserve to see ourselves represented in stories with happy endings.  

In this episode, we share over 40 romance books and series that we’ve enjoyed reading and a little about what we liked about them. We cover a wide range of subgenres - including YA to Adult Contemporary to Romantic Comedy to Fantasy Romance to Historical Romance – as well as a variety of steam levels.

Towards the end of the conversation, we touch on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and how foundational that work is to the genre – as well as the debt that the enemies to lovers trope owes to it. We also share a few retellings of this book that have been entertaining to dig into.    

We hope you enjoy this episode. Keep reading, writing, and putting your voice out there!

Into the woods,

Fable & The Verbivore

Notes:

The Verbivore references a quote from romance author Chandra Blumberg (Digging Up Love, Stirring Up Love), who we interviewed back in 2021. That episode was “Episode 89: Interview with Chandra Blumberg”. Here is her full quote:

  • “There’s definitely a stigma about different levels of heat in romance. Some people aren’t comfortable with the high heat and they think it’s all the high heat. But there’s all sorts of romance for all different people. I was worried that if I write the sort of romance that I want to, will there be a place for it. And the answer is yes because there is. It’s the same thing with fantasy and so many other genres – they run the gamut. Just like there’s cozy mysteries or there’s dark, gritty mysteries.… There’s so much diversity in the genre and there’s really something for everyone.“

Towards the beginning of the conversation, we talk about the Romance genre being wide and growing, with characters that are starting to more accurately reflect the world around us - but there is still a long way to go. We strongly believe representation matters and that we all should be able to see ourselves reflected in stories with happy endings. If you’re curious to learn more about where the industry is at, here are a few articles on this topic:

Fable references the link between reading fictional stories, learning, and empathy. Here are a few articles that discuss this topic:

Here are a few articles and websites we referenced for this conversation:

Books and Films Mentioned:

We don’t mention them here by name, but we also have several bookclub episodes where we talk in-depth about books or series that have romantic pairings we enjoy. Here are those:

Music from: https://filmmusic.io
‘Friendly day’ by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
Licence: CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)