2022 has been another crazy and stressful year that has thankfully left us with a lot of good reads and hope for 2023. Despite all of the challenges 2022 brought us, it has been one heck of a year for amazing reads. This year, I read over 362 books, discovered lots of “new to me” authors, and trying to narrow that list down was tough. I have just read so many amazing, life-changing, blow-me-away, knock-my-socks-off books. Amazingly enough, this year, I was able to keep my list at 14. These 14 books have given me all the feels. They’ve made me laugh, cry, swoon, and taken me on some of the best journeys.
I hope you enjoy my top 14 and the quotes I’ve pulled….
“People say you fall in love, but fall is such a sad word when you think about it. Falls are never good. You fall on the ground, you fall behind, you fall to your death. Whoever was the first person to say they fell in love must have already fallen out of it. Otherwise, they’d have called it something much better.”
“He wanted to be around me as much as I wanted to be around him. No matter the time or distance between us, the want was always there. It had always been there. And being around him again in this city made me want him more than ever.”
“You know, sometimes I think we get caught up in the idea that our jobs make or break us as humans, when that’s not the case at all. A job is a means to make money and provide for yourself. I think it’s the relationships we cultivate, the energy we put out into the world, that define us. You could be a billionaire with all the riches in the world, but that wouldn’t mean your life was truly rich.”
2020 has been one crazy and stressful year, a year I think we’d all like to put behind us. That being said, 2020 has been one heck of a year for amazing reads. This year, I read over 450 books, discovered lots of “new to me” authors and trying to narrow that list down was tough. I have just read so many amazing, life changing, blow me away, knock my socks off books. Amazingly enough, this year, I was able to keep my list below 20. These 15 books have given me all the feels. They’ve made me laugh, cry, swoon and taken me on some of the best journeys I hope you enjoy my top 15 and the quotes I’ve pulled….
“I’d often wished we had a cool story about when our relationship transitioned from that of tolerating each other to discovering we were two halves of one soul. But the truth is Thea and I evolved much like the seasons: slow, steady, and unstoppable.”
“Love changes a man – even when he’s not yet a man at all. We were friends, but Thea was still quiet, stoic, borderline rude a lot of the time. However, in that tree, suffering alone and also together, I fell in love with her like the stars falling from the sky. Thea made me feel. It didn’t take long before I was utterly addicted.”
“I could love you one day, Zach,” I whisper against his mouth. “I think it’s too late for me, Delia.”
“It’s not over. It’s the beginning of a new adventure.”
“This kiss was sweet, short, nothing that would blow anyone’s socks off…besides mine. Because even though it only lasts a few seconds, it’s within those seconds that I get my first taste of her. It’s where I get to feel myself tip over the edge into falling for this girl. I’ve had many first kisses. Aggressive, passionate, consuming, but nothing like this. Nothing this sweet, this….understanding. Nothing that has ever made me want to drop all my defenses and expose my true self to a woman. And that’s scary. Terrifying actually. Because if a kiss this simple can turn my world upside down, what’s going to happen when I feel her tongue against mine, when she kisses me longer, when I get to feel her delectable body against mine? Was Roark right? Am I screwed?”
“I was born with a piece of your soul inside me and I want to claim it. Right here, right now.”
“It’s easier to show the world what they want to see, but it doesn’t change who we really are. And there will be people who come and go and never see past the veneer you wear. There will be people who try to see deeper but are easily convinced there is nothing but the shell.”
“I would have started a fucking war for you, Faith. I would have burned down the church, given my soul to the devil just to break in and stop your wedding, but I was put in jail a few months before.” He let out a weighty sigh, and my heart felt the heaviness in his unstable timbre. Tears stung my eyes, battering them for what I owed him. “You were mine, Faith. I was yours and you just walked away. You married someone else.”
“Do you know what the definition of hell is? Because I do. It’s getting the life you wanted only to fuck it up because you didn’t know how to embrace it and be happy.”
“Humans are gloriously flawed, and some types of love are never truly unconditional. A lot of my mistake was expecting our love to stay perfect, because a lot of the time, it was. It’s wanting our love even after we’ve seen the imperfections that makes or breaks us.”
“Touching Maren feels like that, like I’m defiling an angel, kissing my way straight to hell.”
“It’s a long story, but it means that you need to capture every moment when you get it, don’t waste life doing just one twirl when you can do two.” She stared straight ahead but slid her hand toward mine and gripped. “Life’s too short to worry about too many twirls, take as many as you want, and be thankful you have the opportunity to twirl in the first place.”
“My soul mate. My everything. The other half of my dark, twisted heart.”
“Love didn’t come easy to me at first.”
“Harry, since we met, we have been meteorites crashing together, knocking each other off course. I can’t imagine two more unlikely people trying to strike up a friendship.“
“I want to decompress with her after a long road trip. I want to feel her body pressed up against mine while we watch a movie, or share one of her weird vegan desserts that she claims will change my life but only makes me wonder if she was born without taste buds.“
“Scared in a good way or bad way? Because I’m scared too, babe. I’m terrified of the way I feel for you. It’s so strong. It feels like I can actually taste my need for you.”
“Whether you claim me or not, I am yours”
“Every new beat of my heart was a flash of memory, of a past life, searing through me like hot sparks as I gripped him tighter. I saw what once was, what maybe could have been, and more than anything, what never was.”
“I lost my heart the minute we connected on a molecular level. Somewhere between the games we played and the love I gave him, I lost a lot more.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have given him that trust. Maybe I shouldn’t have given him the chance to lie. Maybe I should have known I would regret it all over again when I saw the guilt flash across his stunning face. But I was finished running.”
“I might have been the one who’d backed her against a wall, but she was the one that had me chained.”
“I think you might be every line I’ve ever written. Interwoven in every song. There before I even knew you existed.”
“She was the forever that had been written on my heart.”
“I’ve always been an asshole. Selfish, careless, impetuous, you name it. But for her, I’ll be anything she needs. I’ll rip the world apart to keep her safe, and I’ll make damn sure I don’t give her anything to be embarrassed about when it comes to me.”
“it’s okay to fight for something you love, to dig it out and build it back up in hopes that this time the foundation will be strong enough to withstand the hurricane.”
“I’ll wait forever if it means I get the chance to kiss you again.”
“I’m going to love you so well that you’ll never doubt that I choose you. Every day. Every situation. I choose you.” I melted. I’d waited a lifetime for those very words. “I’m choosing you today by telling you that your well-being is more important than my ego or my need for reassurance. I’ll choose you every single day that I’m gone, every mission that I fly, every second that I breathe. You don’t have to be with me. I’ll be with you.”
“I am your queen. And you are my king. Your dark kingdom is now ours.”
“I loved him. I loved Arthur more than life itself. His darkness and his lifestyle meant nothing compared to that. I loved him despite the malice in his soul. I loved him because of it. Not everyone was meant for a life of roses and summer days, all pretty petals and fragrant perfumes. Some were meant for a life of winter and thorns. It didn’t mean they couldn’t have love.”
“You made me feel again. After so fucking long. After the blood and the death and all the dark thoughts …” I squeezed my eyes shut. “You made me fucking feel.”
“They’ve opened the gates of hell, and the fucking devil and his demons are now leading the charge.”
The moment my heart got involved…everything changed.
Vi Harris tests every bit of my strength.
She is my test.
My challenge.
At a time when I should be focusing entirely on myself, this radiant woman with a bright, cheeky smile and a cracked sense of humor waltzes in and spins everything on its axis.
Vi has the potential to make me weak at a time when I’m determined to show everyone just how bloody strong I am.
She’s everything I am not…yet somehow, she sees through my darkness.
My pain.
My despair.
She doesn’t see me as broken.
She sees me as the man I’m fighting so hard to be.
As the only survivor of a rare birth, Reyna Miracle has never felt like she belonged.When a horrible tragedy strikes during her graduate courses at Oxford, she spirals down a dark and sexy path with Hayden, her deceased best friend’s brother.But when Liam Darby, a mistake from her past reappears, Reyna’s world begins to crumble as the two men fight for a love that she can’t even accept for herself.
My Review
“I forgot about the pain. I forgot about the cause. I forgot about everything leading up to this one incredibly profound moment. This one moment that I chose was permanent. In that one moment….I had finally erased my life forever.”
“Hayden Clarke has just entrusted me with the deepest, darkest part of his soul. In that briefest flicker of time ticking away on the watch around his wrist, I do exactly what my soul is screaming in agony for me to do. What my heart is pounding beneath my chest in anticipation for. I kiss him. God do I kiss him.”
Some say that your life is defined by moments. By good moments and by bad moments. And for Hayden, his life has been comprised of many challenging and life altering moments. Ever since I finished Not The One, I have been dying. I mean dying to get my hands on Hayden’s story. His character just captivated and consumed me, begging me to find out more about this beautifully complicated man. And I gotta tell you, Hayden’s story does not disappoint. His story took my expectations and threw them out of the window. And what I was left with was an incredibly moving and powerful story….
That One Moment is one of those stories that just grabs you instantly and will leave you utterly captivated. This story is not easy. In fact, it has some very dark and intense moments. But, I have to say, Amy Daws did an amazing and honest job in telling Hayden’s story. She answered all my questions and made me fall even more in love with this complicated man. There were so many moments where my heart just ached for everything that Hayden went through. It was truly incredible to see him rise up from rock bottom and become a stronger man. And I couldn’t have asked for a better match for Hayden than what he found in Vi. Vi was far from perfect as she had her own demons to battle, but the connection that these two shared was unlike any other. She knew that Hayden had a dark and complicated past, but she didn’t let that scare her away. However, what I really loved was the depth of Vi’s feelings for Hayden. Her feelings were genuine and she saw something in him that the other’s didn’t see. She saw the man and not the scars….And with lines like these: “She looks at me as if my scars allow her to love me even more.”& “Your forever is mine, Vi. Your forever belongs to me…whether you’re ready to accept it or not.”, it was impossible to not fall in love with these characters.
That One Moment is told from dual points of view and is incredibly well written. I loved everything about this story; from start to finish. It had the perfect mix of romance and angst. The angst….OMG, the angst….There were so many beautiful, gut-wrenching, heartbreaking moments. I could just feel my heart being tugged at and I loved every moment of it. That One Moment took me on such an incredible journey, that I’m still having a hard time trying to put all my thoughts into words that make sense. So, this is what I will leave you with. That One Moment will give you all the feels. It will make you laugh. It will make you cry. It will frustrate the hell out of you. It will break your heart. It will make you swoon—Oh, how it will make you swoon. But, most of all, you will fall in love. You will fall in love with these beautiful broken characters and I can only hope that their story will grab your heart, just as it did mine. This is definitely one of my favorite reads of 2016.
“You’re so confusing, Hayden,” I reply, my voice embarrassingly breathy as he stands only a foot away from me now. His eyes are glossy with obvious lust. Pure, undiluted lust. “You kiss me and run away, then kiss me and tell me I can do better. I don’t know what you’re even saying.”
He licks his lips thoughtfully. “I’m saying that tonight when you showed up looking the way you did…” he pauses as his eyes drift down my body. His heated expression makes me feel every drop of hot blood coursing through my veins. “I wanted to have you right then and there. But not in a club full of people. I wanted you in the privacy of your bedroom…where the curves of your hips, the rise of your chest, the moisture on your lips…are for me and me alone.”
I exhale at his guttural tone and am embarrassed when a throaty noise comes out of my mouth. He takes this noise as permission and moves in closer, his posture hunched as he looks down at me. “So, I’m sorry for some things, Vi. But I’m not sorry for interfering. To ask me to just walk away when a prat like Ethan Simmons worms himself within inches of your mouth…your fucking mouth that I’ve touched with my lips…lips that I have claimed as mine in a thousand different fantasies…No, Vi. No. I’m not going to be sorry for that.”
“But you said—”
“Stuff what I said. I can’t stay away from you.” The words rush out of his mouth as he harshly grabs me by the waist. His bruising, firm grip shoves up the stretchy fabric of my top as his lips find mine in a desperate, needy kiss. He greedily yanks the cups of my bra down and caresses my nipples in such a way that I rip my mouth away from his and let out a strangled cry. I’m not all together certain I’ve ever heard that sound come from my mouth before.
He releases my nipples to pull my top off over my head, revealing my lacey red bra tucked firmly beneath my breasts, pushing them up for his lustful perusal. He drops an open mouthed kiss on each of them before standing back up straight. Groaning in frustration, he pauses his assault and looks into my eyes. A warmth blossoms in his gaze as he wraps his arms around me, holding me close. “I’m terrified, Vi…of so much. But I don’t have the strength to walk away from you again. You make me weak.”
I exhale with relief and anxiety over his comment, feeling my emotions at odds. I’ve been wanting Hayden Clarke to let me in since he first kissed me outside my building. But what does it mean when he says he feels weak around me? Am I capable of hurting him? I lick my lips and guide him down to my level. “Maybe with time I can make you strong.”
Amy Daws is a commercial producer and lives in South Dakota with her husband and daughter. The long-awaited birth of Lorelei is what inspired her passion for writing. Amy is a lover of all things British and her award-nominated romantic comedy series, The London Lovers Series, is centered around Americans in London. It’s emotional and self-deprecating with lots of humor sprinkled in. On most nights, you can find Amy and her family dancing to Strawberry Shortcake’s theme song or stuffing themselves inside children’s-sized playhouses because there is nothing they wouldn’t do for their little miracle.
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