Welcome to Dukes of Earl

I'm starting this blog because I like to read romances. I read a lot of romances. I read a lot of other kinds of books as well, but it's really easy to read too many romances because it's a genre where a good (or even middling) book will go fast, riding you to the climax as it were.

Last year I started keeping track of the books I read. This year I started reviewing them. And this blog is to share these reviews with the world at large, or, at least, the portion of it on the Internet that finds out about this blog.

There is a particular kind of romance I like to read. Just like some romance readers enjoy reading about Greek tycoons or vampires or Navy SEALs, I like reading romances set in 18th and early 19th century England. This encompasses the Regency and Georgian sub-genres. And in these books, there are a lot of dukes. And earls. Viscounts, barons, baronets, and marquesses, as well. There are, I say (fabricating wildy), more titled men and women in Romanceland than there ever were in real life! I don't, actually, have a particular fetish for dukes--I'm happy to read about a baronet or even just a plain mister! But Dukes of Earl seemed like a good title for a blog about this genre.

Along the way I will be exploring romance tropes (how did I get to read 2 books in a row about redheaded amnesiacs kept by the men who found them for fondling purposes? or 2 books in a row about the long-lost heir to a dukedom?), book titles that have nothing to do with the content of the book, back-of-the-book blurbs that get it wrong, the good and bad points of each book consumed and the tragic demise of Signet Regencies, as well as other topics as they occur to me.

I'll be trickling out some reviews from earlier this year and then catching up with more recent reads. Because I get many of my romances from the library (I buy a fair amount too, but the library provides me with a trial run for many authors), a recent read may not be a recent release.

I hope you enjoy this blog and I welcome you to comment about the book (if you've read it) or anything else in the post.