Libby's Lit

2021 was the year of the vaccine, the year of the belated Olympics, the year of Olivia Rodrigo’s  driver’s license  and much more. But for me, it was the year of the gay historical romance novel. I read 20 (you heard me, 20!) books that fit that specific bill, 14 of which were by the illustrious Cat Sebastian. As her twitter bio states, she writes ”Marxist tracts with boning” and to that I said, “I’m sold.” She specializes in mutual pining, eating the rich, and utilizing genre tropes to their full potential. Her books are feel-good, character-driven, and unapologetically sexy. I could not get enough.    After spending the last six months reading everything of hers I could get my hands on, I wanted to reflect on what I’d read and perhaps provide a guide for entering the Sebastian-verse or historical romance in general. I’ve taken descriptions of each book from her website, which you can find here , and added my own where needed. Many of her books are part of a series,...

As quarantine rolls on, we all have to find things to occupy our time. I love to learn new, weird things, so given as excess of time, I will most assuredly develop a few new obsessions. One such new obsession is MBTI, or the Myers Briggs Type Indicator. The Myers Briggs test is a personality test that assigns you one of two letters for four different categories, making it possible to have sixteen unique “types.” The letter options are as follows: Extroverted vs Introverted, iNtuition vs Sensing, Thinking vs Feeling, and Judging vs Perceiving. Your type, or combination of these letters, is determined based on your answers to a number of questions that ask  for your level of agreement/disagreement with various statements. Since MBTI is the most accurate personality test I’ve ever taken (and I’ve taken a lot ), I thought it would be a useful tool for personalizing some book recommendations!             I am certainly not the fi...

Obvious spoilers for TMI but warnings are before any spoilers for other Cassie series I first picked up City of Bones by Cassandra Clare at the beach the summer before 7 th grade. I’d only recently made friends I actually liked at school and I hadn’t even had my first period. But my middle school self found comfort in the shadow world, a name that aptly described her level of self-proclaimed angst. She lost herself in Clary and Jace and Simon and Izzy and Alec and Magnus in a way she hadn’t since the days of reading Harry Potter and Percy Jackson for the first time. I just graduated high school, so that was over six years ago . Cassandra Clare’s books have meant a lot to me in all the years since, but I rarely found myself turning to The Mortal Instruments, the series that started it all. Reading The Dark Artifices as they came out filled my school breaks with laughter and tears, while rereading The Infernal Devices helped me get through periods of tears in my own ...