Books like The Marriage Code — picked by fans

I’ve never been to the Galápagos Islands, but after reading Shipped, I wish I could afford to go! In this enemies-to-lovers romance, Henley and Graeme are office rivals who work for the same adventure travel company but have never met in person. When the opportunity for a promotion arises, their boss sends them both on a company cruise to the Galápagos archipelago, where they’ll have to come up with the best marketing pitch for the area. This book has so much going for it: hilarious travel hijinks, sizzling sexual tension, and detailed descriptions that bring the islands to life. By the end of the book, I was convinced I needed to add this destination to my travel bucket list!

This charming, deeply romantic tale about an editor whose big promotion is contingent on her helping a popular author overcome a terrible case of writer’s block reminded me of all the reasons I adore reading and writing love stories.

Working with this author leads Lanie to question her long-cherished beliefs about what she wants (and needs) in a romantic partner. She opens her heart to new ideas and experiences as well as to love, and her journey, both personally and professionally, culminates in such an epically swoon-inducing way that you will be hard-pressed not to shed happy tears (I did!).

Like the book’s heroine, Lauren Kate clearly reveres the written word, and this story is a beautifully composed valentine to all bibliophiles.

I can always count on Melanie Summers to make me laugh, and she did that repeatedly with this delightful story about a newly minted chef who gets stuck cooking for an author on a private Caribbean island.

There’s friction between Emma and Pierce from the get-go as he’s on a deadline and doesn’t appreciate her high-end cuisine. When he has a comical accident that renders his typing hand unusable, Emma steps in to help Pierce complete the final installment of his fantasy series (an affectionate spoof of Game of Thrones with expert world-building!).

I thoroughly enjoyed the organic development of Emma and Pierce’s relationship and was on the edge of my seat waiting to see how they’d overcome the obstacles in their path and achieve their happily ever after!

I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I crave drama. Like if my boss told me I’d be fired if I didn’t do a podcast with my work nemesis where we gave relationship advice while pretending to be exes? I wouldn’t even be mad about it (assuming that my coworker's nemesis is as hot as Dominic in this book)! 

This is a story that brilliantly combines the drama I crave with humor, tension, and romance, keeping me hooked from start to finish. Watching Shay and Dominic navigate their forced relationship was particularly nerve-wracking since they had to fake it in such a vulnerable manner: they were on air for thousands of fans to consume.

Though the drama initially hooked me, the depth of the character growth and the authenticity of Shay and Dominic’s interactions kept me invested. But please, someone call HR to investigate Kent, the boss who puts… show more.

Rule #1: Writers should write what they know. Many science fiction readers know Isaac Asimov as a prolific genre author. First and foremost, however, he is a scientist, a biochemist by training. In this book, Isaac and Janet Asimov share essays on diverse scientific subjects from life on earth to discoveries in space. For me, I searched the book for everything from the fate of the dinosaurs to the height of sea-level rise in case of a major melt-down of Antarctica and Greenland. 

In this book, imagination runs a parallel reality. It is a place where a writer or a reader will see a jumping-off place from the real world to dystopia. 

This is a breathtaking exploration of how ideas of time and space changed between the 1880s and World War I. Stephen Kern’s mastery of all genres of the arts and literature and throughout the Western world—Europe, Russia, and the US—is beyond belief. No matter who is your favorite intellectual of this era, s/he is right in the narrative. We learn of the massive changes in culture that we owe to this momentous period of time, changes that are still very much with us today.

So much of the public conversation around AI focuses on the extremes: "It's Going to Take Our Jobs And We'll Never Be Able To Work Ever Again!" or "It's Going To Create a Utopia And We'll Never Have To Work Ever Again!"

To be honest, I don't put a lot of credence into either of these perspectives. What I adore about this book is that it puts the technology in perspective in a concrete and laugh-out-loud funny way. Through detailed examples, it provides a glimpse into how the technology works, how it can be applied to real problems, and where it falls jaw-droppingly short. 

As it turns out, the Germans never got close to building an atomic bomb—largely because of some major mistakes at the outset (one of them made by their top nuclear chemist because of a crisis in his love life). Powers, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, created some controversy because of his portrayal of the man who didn’t build the German bomb. That controversy continues. 

I once had to physically separate the author from his critics and threaten to remove disruptive protesters from the audience when I moderated a session on the history of the German bomb at the Smithsonian.  

I am a huge fan of making complex things simple and understandable, Kevin does this superbly well with Futureproof. From putting the nine rules on the cover to explaining each in a way that makes you shun the Hollywood stereotypes that are burned into our brains, the book explores how AI and automation will change the way we do business and beyond. It’s a must-read. 

One of my areas of scholarly interest is Roman intellectual history; I am curious about how Romans thought about their world and how this thinking changed over time (often through the introduction of new concepts or terms).

This interest allows me to examine the ways in which the Romans, at a cognitive level, simply understood information differently from how we do today. Riggsby analyzes various forms of information technology (maps, lists, tables, etc.) that seem basic and obvious, yet he reveals how rare it was for the Romans to deploy them (and usually in quite context-specific ways, such as military duty rosters).

This book really helped me question my assumptions about information literacy and how minds organize data, so that I am more aware of the cultural factors at work.