Last year, bored and having finished my five hundredth re-read of my favourite fanfic, I happened to pick up A Court of Thorns and Roses in Waterstones. I distinctly remember saying to the pal I was with at the time that I’d heard good things from BookTok and that I’d been meaning to pick it up for a while.
A few weeks later I opened it for the first time while travelling down to work for London and—I hated it.
Still, I kept hearing good things—and those BookTok posts kept haunting me. So from March into May, ACOTAR lived on the shelf above my bed, settling into that prized TBR position while I struggled to get through the first third of the book.
Then, finally, as warmer weather led me to spend my lunch breaks reading in the tiny plot of grass next to the bins I call my garden, I reached the point of no return.
“There you are. I’ve been looking for you.”
I ordered the rest of the books that same day. I finished them all in a week.
Then I moved onto Throne of Glass—which left me sobbing on multiple trains back and forth from London, and now I’ve finally reached Crescent City.
I think the older we get, the more pressure we’re under to conform to reading certain types of books, just as we try to conform to a certain style of writing.
The discovery of Sarah J Maas over the last year has introduced many great things in my life, A Court of Memes, lengthy debates with my pals over morally grey men and what makes a good book to mention a few, but chiefly, it brought me back to the kind of books I used to adore reading when I was younger.
I think the older we get, the more pressure we’re under to conform to reading certain types of books, just as we try to conform to a certain style of writing. I’ve always been very much been a romance writer, and I’ve always struggled to talk to other people about the kind of romance books I enjoy and the Fanfiction I’ve dedicated nearly a decade to writing, but if there’s something reading Sarah J Maas has taught me over the last year, it’s how much fun can be found in talking about the books you enjoy – even when others hate them.
It’s a huge part of why we decided to launch Glyph: that joy that is found in connecting over a book or a character or a specific writer or writing style, in sharing what interests you even if it doesn’t interest others. For me, Fantasy literature is less about discovering Faerie things and abs under shirts (although the endless abs under shirts certainly doesn’t hurt), but about immersing myself in stories that bring me joy—and then sharing that joy with others freely and unashamedly, just as I did as kid reading about the faeries who lived at the bottom of the garden.