Woohoo!!! 🎉🎉 30 books is an amazing achievement, congratulations!

If you have a library with access to Libby, I highly recommend it for exploring new books! I check out the “what’s new” books every three weeks or so and have picked up some great ones I’d normally never pick up off the shelf!

If that’s the case, you’re doing yourself a major disservice by having this one as your “romance” introduction. Personally I loved the book when I first read it, though it has been a long time.

A lot of romance readers would also argue with you that it’s not romance within the conventions of the genre, which sets you on the back foot immediately, because instead you’ve chosen a popular title that is more contemporary romantic fiction, not romance per say (though for me this is contentious, since I think romance = romance, and it’s the only genre that is so strict on its conventions). Despite its billion dollar empire, romance novels are often excluded from “best of” lists, or “true” romance novels are overlooked instead for books like TTW which are not conventional within the genre but instead are traditionally published for wider market appeal so people can be like, “it’s romance, but it’s not romance and not feel ashamed they’re reading something that is a “guilty pleasure” read.

Also in saying that, with a list so…long? You’re bound to encounter genres that you wouldn’t necessarily read and/or already have confirmation bias against, which I’m assuming from the sounds of this post, you already for anything that borders between romance and the dreaded term “women’s fiction” (which most would label TTW as). For reference, 2,093 true-to-genre romance books were traditionally published in 2003.. TTW wouldn’t even be included in that stat, since it was not published as a “romance” book.

I know this has turned into an extremely long…diatribe, but if you’re goal is to read from a list of what someone has considered best literature, maybe read more than the prologue before inadvertently disparaging the (not quite) genre the book is from.

If you’re setting your standards of romance (in 2003) by The Time Traveller’s Wife, one has to wonder why you even bother at all with the romance genre.

I originally hated the Storygraph, but I tried out a few other different trackers and ended up migrating back to the Storygraph and will now stay. I do think $50usd a year is a bit steep for a subscription to access “better” features, but from when I did my trial the only thing I used from it was the tags stats comparison. You also can’t contribute to their requests for features/roadmap unless you’re a subscriber, which I think sucks, but they’re pretty responsive on email to questions, and they genuinely do want to make it a better website, unlike GR who hasn’t done anything of note in the last ten years.

You’ll be excited to know then it’s being adapted for screen!